By Maya Bourne
Students across the country trudge through their school gates to start yet another year of monotonous learning. They are surprised, however, when their teachers call them up during class and slip their cell phones into unassuming gray pouches. This is the Yondr Pouch, a tool schools across America have been instating to limit the screen time of their students. The pouch utilizes a magnet to seal students’ phones in a fabric capsule during the school day and only releases them after the last school bell rings. However helpful educators have hoped these pouches will be, they have only created a multitude of problems for students and staff alike.
The Yondr Pouch company was first pitched in 2014, and founded by Graham Dugoni. He theorized that the best way to combat the new technology being introduced at the time was to create spaces devoid of screens. To do this, he made a hand-sewn pouch, in which phones and other devices would be sealed away, opened only with a specialized magnet. Yondr has especially taken off in schools in recent years, as students have started retreating to their phones more following the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram give students a brief respite from chaotic school schedules, homework, and friendships. Some administrators and staff, however, find the very presence of phones vile and seek to disband them completely. The first step of this process is the Yondr Pouch and those solutions like it. Many schools have some sort of cell phone policy, whether it is a caddy hung on the wall with slots for each phone, or a more drastic solution, fully locking the phones away, and the students’ dignity and desire with them.
Smartphones were first designed to have vast amounts of information at one’s fingertips instantly and hold full conversations with others from long distances. According to a study, around 90% of the world’s population owns a cell phone, including about 10 billion connected mobile devices, contributing to people’s ever-growing reliance on them. They have become widely and regularly used in school environments: while eating lunch, decompressing before a big test, planning upcoming hang-outs, and staying connected with current issues outside the classroom. Phones have become an integral part of modern society, used for commerce, meetings, and communication.
Modern society conveys the necessity of cell phones, creating an even more jarring change when students’ phones are taken completely at school. The sudden absence of people’s form of escape from their studies can make even more distractions than their presence and students merely find loopholes in the new rules. Many students place fake phones in their Yondr pouches, or leave them empty, defeating the purpose of having them at all. These stunts are fairly easy to pull off, as the pouch has an opaque gray exterior, blocking all sight in to see whether or not a phone is there. These incidents create large problems for administrators, as each pouch costs about $30, culminating in a lot of money spent on a device most students never even use. Another problem arising in schools that have instated Yondr Pouches is the inaccessibility of phones in emergencies. The pouches open with a specialized magnet, usually given out to teachers at the end of each day, unlocking all their students’ phones. Because of this, students cannot open their pouches themselves, which is in theory Yondr’s main philosophy. However, in the world people live in today, many emergencies could occur during the school day. In these scenarios, parents may attempt to contact their children in a panic, only to be sent to voicemail, their kid’s only lifeline to the outside world sitting locked in its fabric prison. On the flip side, children may be attempting to reach their parents or call the police from their phones, only to be barred from all communication, and start to panic. Student and staff safety during emergencies relies on communication with parents and police forces, and a lack of it can create catastrophic consequences.
The concept of the Yondr Pouch– a way to encourage students to engage in their learning more and spend less time on their phones– is generally good. However, the unconsidered consequences greatly outweigh these policies. The general lack of usage and expensive hassle these pouches cause in no way makes up for the positives. Perhaps the greatest flaw in the Yondr Pouch, the inability to unlock phones in an emergency, creates a decidedly unsafe school environment and a feeling of impending disaster for students and staff alike. Maybe it’s time to send Yondr Pouches over yonder and back-track to regularly assigned phone slots on the wall.