Mental health in children has been in a downward spiral since the early 2010s, with young people more lonely, anxious and depressed than ever before. Academic performance has suffered amid outbreaks of cyberbullying.
The phenomenon has exhausted teachers, parents and students — physically, emotionally and mentally. But I don’t have to tell you that. Odds are you are seeing it with your own children, grandkids, friends and neighbors.
This decline in children’s mental health, social skills and academic performance correlates to the rise of smartphones and social media apps. Because they see the devastating impact these devices are having on children, many parents and teachers are asking for help.
For the last year, I have worked to bring awareness to this growing problem and provide schools with the support to address it. Initially, I proposed state Senate Bill 1207, which would have created a pilot program for schools to voluntarily institute the use of secure, lockable smartphone bags and have certain data tracked to measure the impact on academics, incidents of violence and social development.
After receiving substantial — and overwhelmingly positive — feedback, I instead pushed for these lockable bags to be an eligible use of School Safety and Mental Health grants. It would give every single school in the commonwealth the ability to purchase them voluntarily.
This effort received strong bipartisan support.
Schools need flexibility in addressing this issue, and having this option empowers schools with a useful tool to free students of the constant distraction in their pocket while they are trying to learn. But we know these phones are not just affecting grades. They are pulling kids away from in-person interaction and into an online world where they are exposed to fake realities as well as inappropriate and extreme content that, for many kids, can lead to depression, anxiety and violence.
In a Sept. 15 editorial (“Make schools safer”), the LNP | LancasterOnline Editorial Board agreed that there is a mental health crisis in our country and agreed that social media and widespread smartphone use among children are at least a contributing cause of this crisis.
But instead of championing a smartphone policy that could address one of the root causes of the youth mental health crisis that’s fueling violence in our nation’s schools, the editorial board used a tragic school shooting as a moment to advocate for gun regulation.
Let me be clear: There are no mentally stable school shooters. If a student is at a point where he thinks the answer is to kill his classmates, the system has already had a fantastic failure. And that failure, in my view, has absolutely nothing to do with guns.
A firearm is merely a tool that a mentally unstable person uses to perpetrate violence. That tool is interchangeable — if not a firearm, then a bomb threat, a knife attack or any number of other horrible acts of violence.
In fact, one of the most recent attacks on a school in Pennsylvania was a knife rampage at Franklin Regional High School in Westmoreland County that injured 24 people in 2014.
So instead of focusing on the weapon of choice, we should do all we can to ensure our kids are healthy, happy and mentally well if we truly want to stem the tide of violence in our schools.
The General Assembly is already doing this by working to get schools additional mental health and school safety resources. Since 2020, more than $600 million has been allocated to schools in the form of grants for school safety and mental health. Just this year, $100 million was sent to schools, with every single public school district in the state receiving at least $100,000 to address security, safety and mental health needs on their campuses.
We also passed a resolution to initiate a comprehensive study of Pennsylvania’s approach to school safety to build on recent successes to keep kids safer in the classroom. The final report is due by the end of November.
The LNP | LancasterOnline Editorial Board also noted that opponents of cellphone bans in schools say those bans cut off “a lifeline parents have to make sure their children are safe during school shootings or other emergencies.”
As a father, I am very sensitive to the concerns parents have regarding the ability to contact their child in the event of an emergency. That is precisely why I support the use of the secure, lockable smartphone bags, in which students deposit their phone and maintain possession.
In the event of an emergency, students will either be able to cut them open with a basic pair of scissors or the teacher in their classroom can have an unlocking device, giving the kids immediate access to their smartphones to contact parents.
School safety experts and mental health professionals alike agree — smartphone-free schools are safer schools.
If you’d like to discuss smartphone use in schools with a panel of experts, I am hosting a Back-to-School Night from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 15, at Centerville Middle School. RSVP by calling my office at 717-627-0036 or by visiting my website at senatoraument.com.