The North Clackamas School District will lock up students’ cellphones for the entire school day at all its middle and high schools, starting next fall.

School board members said they expect the move will improve the educational climate for both students and teachers.

“This is about caring for kids and their emotional and mental stability and their education,” said board chair Jena Benologa. “We all know, from hearing from their teachers, how much time is taken out of their day to simply wrangle the phones. So I think we are headed in the right direction.”

The suburban school district is the fourth-largest in the Portland area, with nearly 17,000 students. Its school board voted unanimously to spend $300,000 to purchase cellphone disabling pouches last week.

The magnetically sealed pouches are made by California-based start-up Yondr, which is rapidly emerging as a market leader as schools and governments worldwide try to crack down on cyberbullying and reduce distracted, disengaged behavior during school hours. Yondr’s founder is a Portland native who graduated from Jesuit High and played for the Portland Timbers’ development league.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said earlier this month that social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram should bear warning labels, akin to those on cigarette packs and cans of beer, that they could damage adolescents’ mental health.

Florida and Indiana have banned device use during instructional time — except for educational purposes with a teacher’s permission or in case of medical need — and Kansas, California, Oklahoma and Vermont are considering similar bans.

Locally, North Clackamas is the first district in the Portland area, and among the first statewide, to implement the policy across all its middle and high schools. A representative for Yondr said that the coastal Seaside School District is also purchasing the pouches for all of its middle and high school students this fall and that additional Oregon districts are expected to sign contracts with the company in the coming weeks.

Almost every Oregon public school district currently has an “off and away” policy which — at least in theory — requires students to keep their phones zipped away in backpacks or shut away in lockers during school hours. But classroom-level enforcement has largely been left up to increasingly frustrated teachers, with varying results.

Some parents have offered full-throated support for cellphone locking devices, while others have been more publicly skeptical, concerned about losing the ability to coordinate daily logistics with their children or to reach them in the event of an emergency.

In North Clackamas, ”I think we have a chance to vote tonight on something that will be a tremendous gift to our students,” board member Glenn Wachter said before last Thursday’s vote. He added that he thought the move would especially benefit incoming sixth graders, who would start off their middle school experience in a relatively phone-free environment.

At least two Portland Public Schools high schools — Grant in Northeast Portland and Cleveland in Southeast Portland — plan to purchase Yondr pouches for their students next fall, their principals told families earlier this year.

Sarah Horobin is a high school special education teacher at Taft 7-12 Middle and High School in Lincoln City, which just finished its first year with Yondr pouches in place. The difference was “night and day,” Horobin said.

“Yondr bag or not, what worked was the administration saying, ‘We said no phones,’ and then backing up teachers when kids were sent to the office,” she said. “It wasn’t an argument. Everyone knew that you couldn’t have your phone, so no one did.”

She wasn’t just seeing the pouches through rose-colored glasses, Horobin added. It was still difficult to police use of technology via earbuds, laptops and watches, and there was some pushback from parents worried about being out of contact with their children. Limited medical exceptions were available, she said, for students whose phones were needed to alert them to a time to take medication or monitor insulin levels, for example.

To mitigate parental concerns, office staff set aside a phone in a small conference room that students could use to reach their parents when necessary, she said. Students caught using their mobile phones had them confiscated until the end of the day for a first offense or until a parent could retrieve the device after repeated offenses, Horobin added.

Annie Bamberger, whose daughter attends a North Clackamas middle school, said she had concerns about the cost of the Yondr pouches and the chance that students would lose them or simply figure out how to get around the locking mechanism.

“We should trust the kids to learn to monitor themselves a little more,” Bamberger said. “No one is learning by locking a phone in a pouch. Kids have to learn to manage their impulse control during the day and if they don’t, some kind of discipline is more effective than just putting them in a pouch.”

She’d rather see the money spent on “hiring humans to help guide kids with emotional development,” Bamberger added.

North Clackamas did two separate surveys, including one to which 805 high schoolers responded, before deciding to buy the Yondr pouches. Eighty-six percent of the high schoolers surveyed said they used their phones for non-instructional purposes during the school day, with 49% and 47%, respectively, saying they thought their phone use had negatively impacted their grades and their mental health.

In Portland Public Schools, where a school board subcommittee is also discussing potential districtwide action on device usage, 100% of the 43 staff members at Benson High School who responded to a survey on student cellphone use said they had concerns about the impacts on students’ mental and physical health, including anxiety, depression and lack of sleep. Eighty percent said they felt unsupported by the school’s administration when trying to enforce the current “off and away” policy.

Some students may be less enthusiastic. A student-backed petition opposing Grant High’s move to purchase Yondr pouches has gathered over 1,000 signatures.

— Julia Silverman covers education policy and K-12 schools for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She can be reached via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com. Follow her on x.com at @jrlsilverman.