To: Kootenay Lake School District 8, BC
Attention: Superintendent Trish Smillie
From: Kaslo & Area Parents for Phone Free Schools

What we are seeking: A clear and consistent policy against the use of smart phones by students in SD8 schools; before, during & after instructional time; including classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards; except in rare instances where they are required for medical purposes.

The use of smart phones has been implicated in steadily rising rates of mental illness among children & youth, through decreased physical activity, poor sleep, anxiety & depression, suicidal ideation, eating disorders, etc. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt also describes how smart phones have “pulled young people out of real-world communities, including their own families, and created a new kind of childhood lived in multiple shifting networks. One inevitable result is normlessness, because stable and binding moralities cannot form when everything is in flux.” (“The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”, 2024).

The presence of smart phones in schools has become an important issue worldwide, as educators grapple with a variety of disturbances they bring to the learning environment—which includes the classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards. The irresistible pull of smart phones distracts students, takes time away from studies & face-to-face socialization, and spirals into addiction. Social media normalizes antisocial behaviour such as pornography, violence, and substance use, and is also used as a platform for trafficking drugs & weapons. Additionally, the potential for cyberbullying, sexual exploitation, and online criminal behaviour is magnified when students have easy access to smart phones. All of these have detrimental effects on the ability of students to learn & develop in a healthy way. The risks far outweigh the benefits.

While SD8 has stated that all district schools now have policies in place to restrict cellphone use at school as of the 2024-25 school year, there are no clear guidelines, and individual schools are responsible for creating and enforcing their own policies.

It is not enough for individual parents to try to limit our children’s access to smart phones—When any child has a smart phone at school, all students are distracted and affected by it. While removing smart phones from schools may not be enough to reverse all of these problems, they allow schools to be safe zones where kids can interact & learn without the interfering presence of an increasingly pathological online world. Schools that have implemented such policies have found improvements in mental health, learning, and school culture.

With the removal of smart phones from SD8 schools, teachers can focus on the primary function of education: to equip students with knowledge & skills—including and especially social skills—to become healthy, independent, and productive adults.

For more information, see Mothers Against Media Addiction: https://wearemama.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/MAMA-Smartphones-Out-of-Schools-One-Pager.pdf