Away For The Day | Latest News - ‘Off and away’: phone ban enhances social and academic learning in Catalina Foothills classrooms

In schools across Arizona, students are prohibited from maintaining their Snapchat streaks, making TikToks with friends and texting their crushes during class time.

While that’s been the case for a long time in the Catalina Foothills School District, a stricter policy on personal devices has proven to be most effective in middle schools.

Mark Rubin-Toles has been the principal at Orange Grove Middle School since 2017. Since then, he’s seen tween phone use grow, especially post-pandemic as “new wonderful, addictive” apps came into play.

“Developmentally, middle schoolers are really starting to turn away from adult attention and toward peer attention as the priority. And so because phones transmit such critical social information, it is — I would think — really really difficult to avoid looking and seeing what’s going on,” he says.

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