Mark Roman & Izzy Marinelli | GNP contributors
For Pitt County Schools, students using their phones in class is a horse too far out of the barn to regulate.
That’s because phones and social media have been integrated into society. Students “as young as first and second grade … are bringing cellphones to school, and they have TikTok accounts,” says Sara English, the executive director of Student Services at PCS.
That’s because social media is addictive. Academic research and advocacy groups say almost everything about it makes it hard for children to unplug from it.
That’s because PCS has no districtwide policy to keep students’ phones out of the classroom but leaves the policymaking up to individual schools. One of its 39 schools has chosen to enact a formal policy against phones in the classroom, and another has made an informal policy about it.
The Greenville News Project spent three months looking into the issues surrounding phone use by teens and preteens in Pitt County’s public schools. There’s a wide acknowledgement that there are problems regarding social media, but general despair about how to solve them.
Problem with phones in school
Kids can’t help themselves. They are always on their phones, giving into their social media addiction, and teachers only have so much power to do anything about it, short of infringing on students’ privacy.
“The most damaging part is just that they can never put it down, you can’t get a break from it,” English says.
Students even have found ways to bypass their school’s wi-fi filters that block access to online material deemed inappropriate. They simply use their mobile data or virtual private networks known as VPNs.
What they do makes it a challenge for teachers to constantly enforce safe social media practices for students, English says. It also violates the school district’s “Technology Responsible Use” policy.
Phone use creates an environment where kids feel comfortable being heartless to one another over their screens, English says. This disconnect from empathy for classmates is one of the driving causes for increases in cyber-bullying in and outside of school.
School counselor Destiny Wharton has lots of examples. One incident she recalls from North Pitt High School was when a student was using their phone to publicly shame another student on social media.
The phone is “always being used,” says Wharton, “whether it’s (to post) text messages [or] audio messages” to social media.
When cyberbullying is running rampant, anyone can be the bully or the victim. It creates a back-and-forth digital conflict that is difficult to resolve, says Brandon Schultz, an associate professor in ECU’s Department of Psychology. “But while the physical face-to-face bullying has gone down, cyber bullying has just taken off,” he says.
Schultz researches the rates of anxiety and depression in fourth and fifth grade students in Pitt County and the effects technology has on them.
He says that the reason social media is affecting children in general is because of its overuse. In studies looking at the amount of time spent on social media and overall happiness, “as the number of hours go up, the rates of self-reported depression go up,” says Schultz.
With cyberbullying, it sets up a vicious cycle, he says. One child will get bullied and in turn will bully another, and on and on. Before social media, if bullying occurred in school, that's where it stayed. Now, children can’t escape it.
Along with its two policies, the school district’s goal is to build more awareness among parents. Basically, “don't just hand your eight-year-old a cell phone and let them have free rein on YouTube or Roblox [a popular gaming website],” Wharton says.
Still, there’s good in social media. “It can increase positive interactions between children and help them with making connections with other people,” says Ashley Johnson, an assistant clinic director at the Family Therapy Clinic in ECU’s College of Health and Human Performance.
She says that ever since social media started, there also has been a rise in the recognition of its mental health effects, specifically on children and teens. That recognition allows them to feel comfortable coming to her about bullying that happens online.
“I'm seeing that[the] stigma is not as large or is not as prevalent. I think that kids are more open about their mental health now,” she says.
Solving the problem
PCS has two districtwide policies aimed at protecting students by preventing them from accessing and sending inappropriate material while they are in school.
One is titled “Internet Safety,” and the other is the responsible use policy. Both define “inappropriate material” as a anything that is “obscene, defamatory, profane, pornographic, harassing, abusive, or considered to be harmful to minors.”
The responsible use policy says that before students can use their school’s internet service for classwork, they “must be trained about appropriate online behavior.”
Also, there’s the “requirement is that your cell phones are not out during class, so that it’s not interfering with your academics” says English.
One PCS high school has gone further by requiring students to put their phones in a lock box before class, English said. At another school, administrators go into classrooms to monitor students’ phone use.
Along with these policies, PCS would rather have a teaching environment where its teachers can teach students about digital literacy instead of banning cell phones altogether.
This is why PCS has begun looking into a social media literacy program that would help teach children about how to safely exist online. English says it would benefit students, but the program is pricey and not guaranteed to have an effect.
“We can throw a Band-Aid at it for one year and say, yeah, we spent $200,000 on this,” she says. “But what's going to happen the next year when the money's not there?”
English says PCS would rather focus on building healthy online habits for the students, using teachers, counselors, and other school staff as role models.
Last year PCS also joined 11 other North Carolina school districts and over 200 others across the country in a product liability lawsuit against four major social media companies.
The suit is ongoing in a California federal court. It names Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram; Google, which owns YouTube; and ByteDance’s TikTok and the company that owns Snapchat. It accuses them of exploiting children.
The North Carolina House of Representatives also tried to address the issue in 2023 with two bills. Neither made it far in the process, and no action has been taken on them since they were introduced.
One bill would have regulated social media algorithms that target minors, whether it be for advertising or recommended content. The other would have given parents in the state the choice to allow third party platforms to regulate their children's social media.
And North Carolina and dozens of other states are suing Meta and Instagram. That suit alleges the companies' products have negative mental health effects on children. It too is ongoing.
Nationally, this year bills to regulate social media use by children and teens were pending in 40 states and “at least” 50 other bills passed to become law, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures. In 2023 such laws were enacted by 12 states. The laws address age verification, content monitoring for adolescence and transparency from social media companies.
Roman and Marinelli produced this story for the Fall 2024 course In-depth Reporting at the School of Communication, East Carolina University.
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