Boston.com Today
Sign up to receive the latest headlines in your inbox each morning.
Boston, MA
Cell phones have been taking over classrooms. These Boston-area schools are making a stand.
Local News
The move comes after students struggled to pay attention in class following remote learning during the pandemic.
Schools across the state reported that following the pandemic — when kids were often glued to their screens for seven hours a day, if not more — students had issues letting go of their devices when they returned to in-person classes.
Teachers told principals that their students struggled to pay attention in class, were constantly distracted by their phones, and didn’t socially engage with one another in person.
Now, close to five years after the pandemic began, schools are considering what to do about their cellphone policies.
Some are beginning to use magnetic locking pouches to prevent students from accessing cell phones during the day, and others are enforcing stronger punishments if a student is found using a cell phone in class, or are even awarding those who voluntarily turn in their phones.
In the Boston Public Schools system, many schools are turning to pouches after the district awarded $842,520 to Yondr, a California-based company that makes cellphone pouches with magnetic locks. The funding covers the cost of the pouches for schools with grades 5-12 that want to use them.
As of September 2024, 31 of Boston’s public schools are either using Yondr or gearing up to implement the pouches. BPS has 125 schools in total.
Each school in the system has the autonomy to create cell phone policies and is not required to participate in the Yondr program.
The Eliot K-8 Innovation School in the North End began using the Yondr pouches in 2021 for grades 5 through 8, with nearly 350 students.
“I think the impact is what we recognized right away,” said Traci Griffith, the school’s executive director, on a call with Boston.com.
“Being a young person in America right now is really challenging with all the social pressures,” Griffith continued. “Let’s, for the seven hours, let’s support them academically, socially and emotionally and make sure families felt engaged.”
Even though parents initially expressed concerns about being unable to communicate with their children, Griffith said they reminded them they could always call the school directly to get a message though. And if an emergency happens, she emphasized the school will contact them.
Plus if something happens, each teacher has a key to open the magnetic locks of the pouches, which the students keep with them.
Griffith said that the pouches give the students the responsibility of bringing them to school and unlocking them at the end of the day. If a student forgets their pouch, they have to turn their phone in for the day.
Griffith, who plans to continue this program, said the pouches have become so ubiquitous that they have become a part of the school’s “fabric.”
“Seeing the result of our children continuing to lean into being joyful learners — that’s what we want,” said Griffith.
What schools across the state are doing
Across the state, the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money also provided a one-year program that awarded 77 grants to schools to revise their mobile device policies and purchase equipment such as pouches, lockers, and charging stations.
Some school districts not in the grant program, such as Chicopee and Brockton, are also changing their cellphone policies. The state has 1,751 schools.
Springfield Central High School, which has about 2,000 students, was the first school in the district to use the Yondr pouches beginning in 2022.
“Coming back from COVID, we realized that the students’ dependency exponentially grew,” said Thaddeus Tokarz, principal of Central High School.
To be fair, Tokarz said, it “was the only way to communicate for about two years.”
Before the program, students charged their phones, sent text messages, and had them out on their desks during class.
So the school realized that the cellphone policy had to be addressed, and decided to use pouches to keep students off their phones while at school. Although there are always ways around it, he has found that it generally prevents cell phone use.
“It’s an imperfect science that’s been relatively effective,” Tokarz said.
Tokarz said even the cafeteria has become louder as students returned to having conversations rather than being glued to their phones.
The students “have four years to create a resume to determine the rest of their life,” said Tokarz. If they are “distracted by their phones, their resume wouldn’t be as impressive as it could have been.”
Some opt to not use pouches
Lowell High School decided to go a different direction than the pouches. Michael Fiato, the head of school, said they have elected to use cell phone boxes, where students put their phones at the start of every class period.
The 3,400 students continue to have access to their phones during passing times, advisory periods, and lunch.
“Our main priority was to take away the distraction in the classroom, to try to improve academic outcomes, engagement, improve community building, and take the phone out of the element of the classroom so students and teachers can focus on teaching and learning,” said Fiato.
The program went into effect in January of last year, and after surveying the teachers, Fiato said, “it was an overwhelming feeling” that there was “more engagement, less distractions.”
Fiato said the aim was to find a compromise with the students. Students can still connect with their families or other responsibilities, such as outside-school jobs, by allowing some periods when they use their phones.
Similarly, Sutton High School, which has around 385 students, began considering ways to get students off their phones without investing in pouches.
At one point, the school even tried giving out raffle tickets for a chance to win a gift card for any student — or teacher — who voluntarily turned in their phones at the office.
After a committee was formed with students, teachers and administrators, it was decided that the new policy would allow them to be on their phones during flex periods and lunch, but they were not allowed to be seen during class.
If a teacher sees a student’s cell phone in class, they are asked to turn it in. The first time, they can pick it up at the end of the school day. Subsequent times, their parents have to come pick up the phone. Then, the student must turn in their phone daily for the next month.
“In my view, cell phones are ubiquitous,” said Ted McCarthy, the principal. “Now, everyone has them, and often, you need to have one. But we’ve all been in a meeting with a guy who keeps checking his phone when he should be talking to you, and that’s not a productive skill.”
“But you know what?” McCarthy continued. “You’re expected to have your cell phone on and not be distracted by it.”
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Readers Say
Karen Read, campus protests, the Celtics and several other stories bubbled to the top this year.
The people — or at least the people who make up Boston.com’s readership — have spoken. A lot of news happened in 2024, but these are the stories that readers cited as the ones that most intrigued them over the course of the last 12 months.
In total readers sent more than 500 responses to our survey, and below you’ll find a countdown of the five they mentioned most often, followed by six more that bubbled up just underneath. (And how much do you want to bet at least a few of these turn up on the list again next year?)
5. Massachusetts gets (part of) the eclipse (7%)
OK, so Boston wasn’t in the “path of totality.” We’ll get our own total solar eclipse on May 1, 2079 (turns out the waiting is the hardest part), but in the meantime Boston.com readers seemed plenty content with getting our own little slice of the natural phenomenon here last April. Silly glasses were de rigueur, schools and businesses stopped everything to check it out, and plenty of people actually headed north to New Hampshire and Vermont to see the thing in toto. (Although a lot of them seemed to run into a few problems getting back home.)
4. Pro-Palestinian protests on campus (11%)
Greater Boston has a lot of colleges, and a lot of students who aren’t particularly shy about speaking up at them. So it probably made sense that when students started protesting over the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, our schools would be a hotbed of such activity. And sure enough, MIT, Tufts, and Emerson led the way, followed by Harvard, Northeastern, UMass Amherst, Dartmouth, and UNH, among others. Even the Rhode Island School of Design got into the act, occupying part of an administrative building. Protests, encampments, arrests, and resignations seemed to arise basically every day last spring, and readers followed live updates with interest (and probably no small amount of trepidation).
3. Bill Belichick says bye-bye (13%)
One of two sports stories to make our top five, a sizable number of readers pointed to the departure of Bill Belichick from the Patriots team he had led to six Super Bowl championships. Even though it happened way back in early January, readers reported his leaving as having taken up big chunks of their sports headspace throughout 2024 — maybe because he kept making headlines, whether it was his opinions about the team he left behind, reports about his love life (couples Halloween costume, anyone?), or his eventual landing as coach at North Carolina.
2. Celtics are national champs (19%)
While they might not have had the juice of our omnipresent No. 1 story mentioned below, readers named our Boston Celtics the second most intriguing story of the year, with their decisive championship victory over the Dallas Mavericks in June dispelling any doubt that this was — arguably by far — the best team in the NBA. It almost makes you feel bad for all those other teams that didn’t have Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, a roster of stellar complementary players, and Coach Joe Mazzulla churning out quotes-of-the-day like an Internet-era Yogi Berra. Oh, and their parade was pretty good too.
1. The Karen Read saga (28%)
In a year that saw the continuation of more than a few disturbing ongoing murder stories — the Brian Walshe and Lindsay Clancy cases come to mind — one captured people’s attention the most, by far. The trial of Karen Read made headlines and spurred water-cooler talk far beyond Boston, leading to the logical assumption among basically everybody that it would eventually be a Netflix documentary. Which of course it will be.
As you’ll probably recall, prosecutors allege that Read was driving drunk and deliberately backed her SUV into her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, while dropping him off at a house party in January of 2022. And Read’s lawyers allege that O’Keefe was actually beaten by people inside the house (and attacked by the family dog). It’s a case that has everything, including a Turtleboy. And since her first trial ended in a mistrial, we get to do it all again next April.
Honorable mentions:
Trump makes headway in Mass: People of the MAGA persuasion probably shouldn’t get too excited — Massachusetts remained solidly blue in November’s presidential election, with Kamala Harris earning about 61% of the vote. But Donald Trump took the whole shebang, and readers (well, about half of them) pointed to his gains even in liberal Mass. as part and parcel of his booming comeback — he flipped 10 Massachusetts towns that had voted for Biden in 2020 and shrunk the gap in a lot of others. Meanwhile, the anti-Trump contigent immediately began hand-wringing over how his policies might affect things in the Bay State.
The Mass. migrant crisis: Thanks to the state’s “right to shelter” law, migrants were everywhere — at Logan Airport, in repurposed community centers, at hotels and in a shuttered prison. And despite Gov. Maura Healey’s ever-tightening guidelines for shelter stays, the issue remains a thorn in her political side.
Crime in Downtown Boston: A shoplifting surge and violence on the Common — which many blamed on problems that spread from the former encampments of homeless and addicted individuals at Mass. & Cass — meant much consternation among the city crowd. Mayor Michelle Wu, though, assures us Boston remains the safest big city in America.
Ballot questions: There were five of them! And three — approval of a legislative audit, the elimination of the MCAS as a graduation requirement, and allowing rideshare drivers to unionize — actually passed. Sorry, psychedelics and increased tipped minimum wage.
The arrest of Tania Fernandes Anderson: It just happened a few weeks ago, but Boston City Councilor Fernandes Anderson’s federal public corruption arrest — charges involved a $7,000 cash payment in a City Hall bathroom — immediately caused a stir on Boston’s political scene. (One reader even suggested that outgoing President Joe Biden should pardon her.)
State police troubles: As if the classless texts from State Trooper Michael Proctor revealed during the Read trial weren’t enough, the mysterious training death of recruit Enrique Delgado Garcia cast a further pall over the organization. Plus all the fraud. (Not that your run-of-the-mill municipal police departments got off easy either. Case in point: the Sara Birchmore case in Stoughton.)
Stay tuned for a full list of the most-read stories on Boston.com in 2024 next week.
Boston.com Today
Sign up to receive the latest headlines in your inbox each morning.
Boston, MA
Archbishop Richard Henning leads first Christmas Mass in Boston – Boston News, Weather, Sports | WHDH 7News
BOSTON (WHDH) – Boston Archbishop Richard Henning led his first Christmas Mass in the city on Wednesday, drawing a crowd of followers from across the country who wanted to be on hand for the historic occasion.
The Mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross was a lot to take in for the archdiocese’s new leader.
“I’m just feeling a little overwhelmed, it’s my first Christmas in Boston, so that makes it extra special,” he said.
“My mission in life is not to bring people to me but to point them to the heart of Jesus,” Henning added.
The message he delivered, parishioners said, resonated with those on hand.
“It was really profound, I really enjoyed his homily and the way the Mass was celebrated and I really enjoy the spirit of Christmas and the message that he taught us today,” one woman said.
Henning went on to meet with children at Boston’s Children’s Hospital to spread holiday cheer.
(Copyright (c) 2024 Sunbeam Television. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24182143/226402_Android_Smartwatch_Buyers_Guide_WJoel.jpg "The best smartwatches for Android right now")
Technology5 minutes ago
The best smartwatches for Android right now
World8 minutes ago
Israel launches strikes in Yemen on Houthi military targets, IDF says
Politics14 minutes ago
'Absolute necessity': Trump sparks concerns after floating desire to control Panama Canal, Greenland
Health17 minutes ago
Dance eases depression symptoms in Parkinson's patients, new study suggests
Sports20 minutes ago
NFL Hall of Famer calls out George Pickens amid Steelers three-game slide
Colorado2 years ago
Colorado Rockies game no. 116 thread: Zac Gallen vs José Ureña
Videos1 year ago
Why Marjorie Taylor Greene was ‘kicked out’ of the Freedom Caucus according to Rep. Buck
Midwest3 years ago
See it: Tesla crashes into Columbus convention center at 70 mph
South2 years ago
Fox News Politics: Georgia the whole day through
South3 years ago
Death of missing Oregon girl found in stream ruled homicide
Politics14 minutes ago
'Absolute necessity': Trump sparks concerns after floating desire to control Panama Canal, Greenland
World1 hour ago
Retraction of US-backed Gaza famine report draws anger, scrutiny
News1 hour ago
Border czar Tom Homan says children of illegal immigrants could be put in halfway homes
Politics9 hours ago
Trump has Christmas message to 'Radical Left Lunatics,' tells inmates Biden granted clemency to 'GO TO HELL!'
World9 hours ago
2024: Top 10 defining moments in the European Parliament
-
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24924653/236780_Google_AntiTrust_Trial_Custom_Art_CVirginia__0003_1.png "Google’s counteroffer to the government trying to break it up is unbundling Android apps")
Technology5 days agoGoogle’s counteroffer to the government trying to break it up is unbundling Android apps
-
News6 days agoNovo Nordisk shares tumble as weight-loss drug trial data disappoints
-
Politics6 days agoIllegal immigrant sexually abused child in the U.S. after being removed from the country five times
-
Entertainment1 week ago'It's a little holiday gift': Inside the Weeknd's free Santa Monica show for his biggest fans
-
Lifestyle7 days agoThink you can't dance? Get up and try these tips in our comic. We dare you!
-
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25672934/Metaphor_Key_Art_Horizontal.png "There’s a reason Metaphor: ReFantanzio’s battle music sounds as cool as it does")
Technology2 days agoThere’s a reason Metaphor: ReFantanzio’s battle music sounds as cool as it does
-
Technology1 week agoFox News AI Newsletter: OpenAI responds to Elon Musk's lawsuit
-
News3 days agoFrance’s new premier selects Eric Lombard as finance minister