WEST LEBANON — Lebanon High School has three blocks for lunch, the first of which starts a little after 11 and is the busiest. On the second day of classes, Nehemiah Billings sat at one of the cafeteria’s round tables with a group of friends to eat and socialize, but after his friends got up to leave, he sat and worked on an assignment for his Shakespeare class, an introductory letter to his teacher.
Last year during such a free moment, Billings likely would have taken his cellphone out and checked his messages or caught up with friends. This year, however, a statewide ban on phone use during the school day means that his phone is turned off and in his book bag.
“This is forcing me to do work,” Billings, 17, said during a conversation in the cafeteria. “This is a time when I’d take out my phone and get sucked in.”
A week into the academic year, he’s pretty happy about the new law and its effect on his school, but it still takes some getting used to. If he forgets something at home, or if his plans change, he can’t immediately text a parent.
“Phones have become such a big part of our lives,” he said. They’re the primary mode of communication, for good and for ill, he said.
A decade from now, the Twin States might look back on this fall as the turn of the digital tide, when drawing boundaries around smartphone use transformed from a piecemeal effort, enacted one family and one classroom at a time, into a social movement that changes how we use a technology that has come to dominate everyday life.
Both New Hampshire and Vermont enacted public school cellphone bans this year. Vermont’s takes effect in the 2026-27 school year, but New Hampshire’s started this year. They joined more than half of the states in banning phone use during the school day. The force of law has led to a reckoning for schools, students and parents.
Upper Valley schools have been working for years to address the constant distraction phones can produce. Many middle schools require phones to be kept out of sight. High school is the final frontier, where students walk toward the threshold of adulthood, often while texting or scrolling.
Parents and children have grown accustomed to being able to reach each other, even during the school day, but if teens are learning to become adults, shouldn’t they have to cope on their own? The forces high schoolers face — academic, social, familial — can seem magnified on a little rectangular screen.
On the surface, the overall view from high school students of banning phones during the school day seems to be that it’s not a big deal, but under questioning, feelings about it clearly run deep.
Not waiting for new law
Thetford Academy banned cellphones last year. Every morning, students put their phones in locked pouches made by a company called Yondr. At the end of the day, or when they leave campus, they go to the office or find an administrator to unlock the pouch.
“Really, the main impetus for us came from a community advocacy group,” Carrie Brennan, head of the 7-12 private school, which acts as the public school for Thetford and students from surrounding towns.
After the group approached the school early in 2024, Brennan, other administrators and the school’s board considered it and put it in place last fall.
Up until then, classroom teachers created their own plans to manage phone use, but students could still access their phones at lunch or between classes.
Having a phone on their person gave a student an incentive to duck out of class to look at it, Brennan said.
“If we’re going to look back on this one day and think of it like seat belts and smoking on campus, we needed to move forward,” Brennan said.
Volunteers raised the money to pay for the Yondr pouches, which cost $25 to $30 apiece.
In a survey in February both students and teachers reported that the effect of the phone ban on the school climate and student learning was overwhelmingly positive.
Before the ban, middle school students would walk between classes glued to their phones, Brennan said. Contrast that with the view from her office window on Tuesday, when she looked out on the quad as a clutch of eighth grade boys sat under a shade tree to eat lunch, talking and laughing.
“This, to me, is just the proof, as much as anything,” she said.
During the second lunch period, students gathered on Thetford Academy’s “senior hill” expressed a more nuanced views.
“My least favorite part is not being able to take photos,” Twyla Weinstein, 17, of Norwich, said. She has compensated by carrying a small digital camera. Otherwise, “I don’t mind not having it in class.”
Natalie Perry, 17, lives 40 minutes away from school, in Topsham, Vt., and sometimes has to coordinate rides for herself and her younger brother. Not having a phone at the ready can make that difficult, she said.
None of the senior girls eating lunch likes the scrum at the end of the day to get phones unlocked while students are rushing to catch a bus or get to practice or a job.
Senior boys seemed even more easygoing.
“I don’t think it really affects me that much,” David Thaxton, 17, of Thetford, said.
“I didn’t use my phone all that much before,” Tommy Amber, 17, of Chelsea, said.
Phones have become pervasive though, and are used for reasons more personal than making and keeping appointments. They monitor glucose levels via Bluetooth-enabled devices, and for students with mental health challenges, they can provide a sense of security, either through music or through contact with a parent during challenging times.
One TA senior, Layliana Benjamin, said the phone ban makes her feel she’s being treated like a child.
“We’re applying to colleges. I bought my own car,” she said. She has a job as a health care assistant at Margaret Pratt Community, an assisted living facility in Bradford, Vt.
The school is all about teaching her to be a responsible adult, she said, except for this one detail.
But Sam Parkman, a senior from Chelsea who’s a member of the TA board, said the phone policy has helped him draw a line on his phone use.
“I definitely see an increase in homework productivity,” both during free periods at school and at home, he said.
Communities asking for change
Improved academic outcomes really is the point of cellphone bans, Aaron Cinquemani, principal of Woodstock Union Middle and High School, said in an interview. After more than a decade of inconsistent enforcement of phone use, the school deployed Yondr pouches this year after talking it over in the community last year.
“I would say that this is a community endeavor,” said Cinquemani, who’s been principal at Woodstock for two years and an administrator in the district for five years. Students and teachers alike called for a stricter policy, and community members delivered a petition to the district, he said.
“The vast majority of students want to engage in a cellphone-free or distraction-free learning environment,” he said.
It’s become increasingly clear that phones have been designed to capture attention in a way that does real harm to a person’s ability to concentrate and to engage with their immediate surroundings, he said. Silicon Valley leaders send their children to private schools that forbid mobile phones, he added.
The district also contacted RandTel, which repurposes old payphones to provide a free phone for community use, and had a “payless phone” installed at the school for student and community use.
At schools that are banning cellphone use, students will have to get used to going to the office to make a phone call to a parent, or receive one.
Communication with parents is a main sticking point for some students. Cinquemani pointed out that it’s more accurate to call them “parents’ cellphones,” since that’s who’s paying for them and putting them in their children’s hands.
Laila Benson, a 15-year-old sophomore at Lebanon High School said many teachers were “lenient” about phone use before this year.
“As long as you didn’t use it while they’re talking to you, they don’t care,” she said.
Even so, the ban is not earthshaking.
The one thing that gives her pause is being able to reach her mom in an emergency. Lebanon’s schools were locked down in March 2024 while police negotiated with an armed man near the high school and Hanover Street School.
In a similar situation, “I’m not waiting for the office” to reach out to her mother, Laila said. “I’m calling her directly.”
Laila’s mother, Emily Benson, has mixed feelings about the phone ban.
“I’m not really in favor of it,” she said in a phone interview. It “doesn’t have to be as strict” for high school students. But, “I do like that they aren’t able to use it in class.”
As for an emergency, she said, “Unfortunately, that’s something I do think about. I would want to be able to reach my child.”
Lebanon’s policy requires students’ phones to be “off and away,” in a bag or locker from the opening bell to the end of school at 2:30, or left at home.
Ian Smith, Lebanon High School’s longtime principal, said the school has expected students to keep their cellphones out of sight during class in years past.
“It’s always been more or less the case that their phones should be off and away,” he said in an interview. If a teacher had to tell a student twice to put a device away, it would be sent to the office, he said. “This hasn’t been a huge transition for us,” Smith said.
A group of 15-year-old sophomore boys sitting together in the lunchroom echoed Smith.
“It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be,” Colby Lindquist, of West Lebanon, said.
Though it is a bit harder to check Google Classroom, and without a phone he can’t take photographs of what’s on the board in class, he said.
“We’re not as distracted and people are, like, talking to each other,” Matt Thompson, of Lebanon, said. He allowed as how last year it would have been the same, “but you’d have your phone out and look at it now and then.”
Overall, the chorus of boys offered a grumbling acknowledgment that the world was going on much as before, with mild inconvenience and grievance. Parents see it a bit differently.
The new law is “forcing our teenagers to be more present, to put their phones down and realize there’s a world around them,” Jennifer Lindquist, Colby’s mother and a data analyst at Dartmouth Health, said in a phone interview. It also cuts down on cyberbullying, she said. The only cost is that she had to go buy a calculator, to replace the use of a phone during math class.
Jody Thompson, Matt’s mom, said she supports the new policy, on both educational and social grounds. “I think kids, and even adults are really addicted to their phones, and lose a lot of opportunities for face-to-face communication,” she said.
“The benefits,” she added, “far outweigh the minor inconvenience.”
