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Wyoming advisory committee urges 'move toward phone‑free' schools after parent survey and literature review
Summary
A Citizen Advisory Committee (CAC) told the Wyoming Board of Education that social media and smartphone use are correlated with higher anxiety, sleep loss and attention fragmentation in students and recommended policies ranging from delaying smartphones to a school‑day phone‑free approach, starting with high school.
At its April meeting the Wyoming Board of Education heard a report from the district’s Citizen Advisory Committee on social media’s effects on students and families. The committee summarized a literature review and a parent survey and offered a set of recommendations the district could consider.
The CAC’s presenter told the board, “we were tasked to examine the impact of social media on students and families,” and said the group studied two media sources in particular — the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma and Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation — alongside published research and a parent survey that yielded 283 responses.
The nut graf: Committee members said their findings link increased smartphone and social‑media use to four recurring harms for young people — social deprivation, sleep disruption, attention fragmentation and addictive use patterns — and argued those harms help explain rising reports of anxiety and depression among adolescents. The CAC recommended policy and program changes the board could pursue with parents, students and staff.
Most parents who responded to the committee’s survey reported both concerns and benefits: they noted the value of phones for family communication and emergencies, but said their top concerns were sleep loss, distraction/attention and exposure to inappropriate content. The committee reported that parents of high‑school students showed significantly lower satisfaction with current school phone policies than parents of younger students.
Recommendations presented to the board included: move toward a phone‑free school day where practical; prioritize high school policy revision first; expand unstructured, supervised real‑world time (more recess, vocational/shop experiences and supervised independent tasks); discourage giving a smartphone as a child’s first phone; and press for stronger age verification on social platforms. The presenter summed the policy direction succinctly: “Let’s move towards phone free to the extent that we can.”
Committee members also highlighted implementation detail needs the board should consider: how parents would communicate with students during the school day without creating a burden on school offices, how to engage students so a phone ban is not only punitive but replaced by richer in‑person options, and how to align any district policy with state or federal developments. The CAC said a focused start at the high‑school level would address the area of greatest parental dissatisfaction.
Board members asked how a ban would interact with district‑issued laptops. The CAC responded that district devices are typically locked for school‑appropriate uses, and that removing personal phones reduces uncontrolled outside access during the school day but will not eliminate all behavior driven by habitual device use.
The CAC said the report is not a final recipe; presenters recommended more community engagement — including student participation on task forces — and pilot testing school‑level changes. The committee made its materials and survey results available to the board and asked the district to consider the findings in forthcoming policy work.
Ending: Board members praised the CAC’s work and agreed further study and community engagement were warranted. No formal district policy change was approved at the meeting; the presentation was informational and flagged as material for future planning.
