Starting this 2024-2025 school year, there will be a new phone policy for the whole Bellevue Public Schools district to help reduce distractions for students.

According to the Student & Family Handbook, this was implemented “to ensure a positive, supportive and disruption-free learning environment. With the new policy, there is a certain procedure when it comes to students who break it.”

“The first step is that the staff will remind the students to put phones away if it’s seen out in class,” Dean Taylor Schultz said. “Then, the teacher will confiscate it through the end of the period. If the student does not turn it into the teacher, they come down to the deans office and if it is turned into the teacher in that class period, the consequences stop. It is just confiscated until the end of the period. If they are unable to follow that request, then they do come down to the deans office.”

The phone policy has not been affecting the deans office as much. It has been a surprise to Schultz at how well it is working.

“I kind of think we were kind of anticipating a little bit more of [students] being down to the deans office. We’ve had a handful and we handle the situations as they arise,” Schultz said. “We are also tracking students when they come down the first, second, third, fourth offense, and so forth. It’s not been as busy as we had anticipated to start with.”

The phone policy has been helpful for instructor Carla Palo. She has seen firsthand how the policy is changing how students interact with each other.

“I have noticed more interaction between students in classes,” Palo said. “Whereas before a student would just take out their phone and you might have a table of students sitting together all looking at their phones, but now they maybe a little more likely to actually be talking to each other and interacting with other classmates.”

It’s not just Bellevue East students dealing with the policy because it is a district-wide policy. This has seemed to help enforce it.

“I do think it’s helping; I think it’s creating a better learning environment for students and teachers both,” Palo said. “The nice thing about having a school-wide policy is that students know that’s the expectation everywhere.”

For students, the phone policy forces them to change habits that they have made over the years. It makes them adjust to not reaching for their phone when bored.

“When I need a distraction in class, I normally use my phone, but since the phone policy has banned phones, I have to use my iPad to do certain things like YouTube and Papa’s games,” senior Suzette Bennett said. “It’s quite hard to get tasks done without something you use in your day-to-day life. I use my phone to get away from people, a distraction, another world.”

Even with how the phone policy has affected teachers and students, many say that it has proven to be helpful. It has worked even if it seemed like it was going to be hard at first.

“I think it’s gone better than we all anticipated,” Schultz said. “Students and staff wise, I think a lot of people think they can’t be without their phone for 85 minutes and teachers were wondering how it would go in classrooms, but I think overall it’s been pretty successful.”