No Cell Phones Bell-to-Bell in Schools

We have the best network. Everyday I get articles, posts and alerts about news and progress for our movement. I read them all. Today, one of our independent-thinking, Substack-writing supporters, Lauren Ayers, sent out a email asking:

Lauren shared:

Here, below, is Olivia Reingold’s Free Press article about the ground swell of awareness that wireless tech messes with kids’ mental health and academic success, which deepened their woes during and after the isolation of distance learning during the (needless) pandemic shutdown year.

She also summarizes an excellent new book, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, that is strongly influencing schools to ban phones in school. Jessica Seinfeld (yes, Jerry’s wife) tells Olivia, “Many parents feel less alone in this fight for their kids’ mental health, thanks to Jon.”

I only wish the article had also included the multiple physical problems, along with a very common mental health issue of depression, that arise from the constant immersion in microwave electromagnetic fields (EMFs) that Dr. Olle Johansson says are a billion times greater than the background level we had before cell phones engulfed us.

Are these little known hazards the reason why so many Wireless Tech CEOs send their children to private schools that ban phones on campus? What do they know about cell phones that they don’t want us to know?

Might the mainstream media’s pathetic lack of coverage of wireless tech hazards result from self censorship because of the high advertising revenue from Silicon Valley products and services?

Looking back, don’t we marvel that it took such a loooong time to get the lead out of paint and gasoline? Maybe we can learn from history and encourage this new trend of caution for kids' access to the internet, at least during the school day!

P.S.
Getting the other major source of EMFs out of daily life— school-wide WiFi for all kids’ tablets and laptops— would be a logical next step.

Here’s more research on WiFi that miraculously managed to get published in journals that most people never heard of:
• Wi-Fi is an important threat to human health, Martin L. Pall, (2018)
• Children and Wireless Technology in Current Problems in Pediatric & Adolescent Health Care (2023)
• Ramazzini Institute: Corroborated the NTP findings and reported increased incidence of tumors in rats exposed to radiofrequency radiation (2023)
• “Exposure Limits: The Underestimation of Absorbed Cell Phone Radiation, Especially in Children,” Om P. Gandhi et al. (2012
• Wi-Fi Effects on Human Health: Review, Journal of Critical Reviews (2020)
• NY Times smartphone radiation article downplays risks (2023)

How Jonathan Haidt Won the Fight Against Smartphones in Schools

His book has gained bipartisan fans from Barack Obama to Bill Gates to Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Olivia Reingold, The Free Press, 12-30-24

This fall, when Suzanna Kruger walked into her biology classroom, she noticed something strange: Two dozen students were staring back at her.

“They were willing to make eye contact,” Kruger, a 55-year-old high school teacher in Seaside, Oregon, told me. “They even said hello.”

It was something she hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. “If a kid had their phone in class, I could just simply walk up to them, and they would hand it over,” Kruger said. But by the fall of 2021, when students returned from a year of distance learning, she said she had started feeling like the teacher from Charlie Brown.

“They looked at me like I was just going ‘wah, wah, wah,’ ” Kruger said, adding that most kids in her class were either asleep with their heads on their desks, wearing headphones, or doing a “dead-eyed scroll” through TikTok. And when she asked them to turn over their device, she said most students just “refused.”

“I’m 55, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do another 10 years of this.’ ”

This past fall, the Seaside School District became one of the first in Oregon to ban cell phones for both middle and high schoolers, forcing kids to lock their devices in pouches near the school entrance until the end of the day. Seaside has joined thousands of schools nationwide in recently banning smartphones, as a growing body of evidence shows they’re linked to falling test scores and rising rates of teen mental illness. This January, just over two million students will return to phone-free schools as statewide bans go into effect in Virginia and South Carolina. The following month, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the nation, will join them.

Olivia Reingold goes on to report that there was a remarkable 30% drop in failure rates at the schools when cell phones were banned bell-to-bell and shocking! - LAUGHTER and EYE CONTACT was heard and seen in schools. Many schools have done this; yours can, too!

Read the full article here.

Please share this article with your teachers, school principals, and school boards.

Now is the time to recapture our children's attention, focus, mental health, and joy at school and in life.