As vice principal of Pennsville Middle School in New Jersey, Adam J. Slusher knows he’s not always going to be Mr. Popularity.
Part of a vice principal’s job includes scheduling, enforcing policy, and discipline, so Dr. Slusher – who holds a doctorate in education from Wilmington University in Delaware – sometimes has to send emails or make phone calls that address unpleasant topics or unpopular new policies.
Or punishments.
But there was a much different reaction this past July, after he sent a message to the homes of Pennsville’s 450 students spanning grades 6 to 8. The email blast announced a new cellphone policy for the school. Starting in September, as he explained in the message – which also went out to the school’s 60 faculty and staff members – the use of cellphones by Pennsville students would be prohibited during school hours for any reason.
Phones, he emphasized, “are to be turned OFF” and stowed away in backpacks or handbags, not carried or tucked into back pockets.
The announcement of the new Away for the Day policy, which was decided upon by Dr. Slusher and Pennsville Principal Carolyn Carels, provoked a response different from those to his announcements on, say, test dates, emergency procedures, or new detention policies.
“It was one of the most popular emails I’ve ever sent,” chuckled Dr. Slusher, who has been an educator for 17 years. “We’ve gotten so many thanks from teachers for this.”
Ditto with the staff, who in conversations with Dr. Slusher and Ms. Carels, had reported on the rampant use of phones in the cafeteria and hallways – confirming what both of them had seen.
“They were telling us, ‘You’ve got to do something about the phones’ ” he recalled. “They were delighted that a clear policy was now going to be in place.”
The overwhelming majority of Pennsville parents have also supported the new policy, especially when presented with some of the sobering evidence about the extent of phone use among this population. One study Dr. Slusher cited in his email showed that the average middle school child is spending between 6 and 9 hours a day on screens.
“That’s like a full-time job,” he said.
The heavy cellphone use by kids – in school, out of school, anywhere and everywhere – was part of what prompted internal medicine doctor and filmmaker Delaney Ruston, MD, to create the “Away for the Day” initiative, which Pennsville has adopted.
She and collaborator Lisa Tabb were driven to do “Away for the Day” while working on Screenagers, their award-winning 2016 film examining the impact of social media, videos, and screen time on youngsters and their families that also offered tips for better navigating the digital world.
“Over 3 years of making the film, I was visiting schools all over the country,” Dr. Ruston said. “By the end, I was seeing devices all over the place, even in elementary schools. When I’d ask a student in the hall, ‘What’s the policy?’ they would shrug and say ‘I don’t know.’ When I got the same reaction from teachers – who in many cases were left to decide on their own, so that they had to be the bad guys – I realized there was a problem here.”
The result was what Dr. Ruston and Ms. Tabb describe on their website as a “movement,” designed to provide tools to parents, teachers, and administrators to help them make policies that put phones away during the school day.