In phone-free schools, analog entertainment brings lunchrooms to life
- GAB NEWS
- Sep 6
- 5 min read
“Our cafeteria is loud again,” said one social studies teacher whose school offers foosball, ping-pong and more.
When Bethlehem High School in Upstate New York banned students’cellphones and started offering analog entertainment, it sparked a culture change — one you could notice even with your eyes closed.
“Our cafeteria is loud again,” social studies teacher David Rounds said. “And I say that in the most positive way possible.”
As a growing number of states ban cellphones in public schools, some schools — such as Bethlehem High in Delmar — are experimenting with offering students old-school games and puzzles for their lunch periods. Educators say the options have helped smooth the transition to phone-free environments.
At public schools in Dayton, Ohio, lunchtime features cards, chess, checkers and classic board games, such as Pay Day. In New York, Poughkeepsie High School decked out its cafeteria with a jumbo-size Connect Four, air hockey and old-school arcade games, such as “Pac-Man” and “NBA Jam.” And at Bethlehem, the lunchroom has a whole cabinet full of puzzles and board games — plus foosball and ping-pong tables.
“For a long time, you’d walk past the cafeteria and it was almost silent because the kids are all staring at their devices,” said Rounds, who has taught for 30 years.
In recent years, 34 states and D.C. have restricted cellphones in public schools amid rising worries about the impact of screen time on students’ mental health and attention spans, a count by The Washington Post found. Most of these policies take effect in 2025. D.C. and 17 states have a version of a bell-to-bell ban — with exceptions for health reasons, educational use or other circumstances — that prohibits students from using their phones from the start of the school day through the end.
An academic working paper published online last month found that students randomly assigned to hand over their cellphones while in class performed better academically than those who kept theirs. The impact of a phone ban on students’ grades, while not massive, can roughly approach that of “having a very good teacher versus having a mediocre teacher for about a semester,” said Alp Sungu, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the lead author of the paper, which has been submitted for publication.
Many states are adopting school cellphone bans. Some are "bell-to-bell."
Classifications of a "bell-to-bell" ban vary and each state's policy language and carve-outs differ. The identification of "bell-to-bell" policies is based in part on classifications by Smartphone Free Childhood US and the Becca Schmill Foundation, advocacy groups that track local legislation on phone use.
At Bethlehem High, a few months after the cellphone ban took effect and the school’s culture started to change, administrators were looking for ways to build on the momentum, said Dave Doemel, the school’s principal. The “throwback” activities — such as cornhole outside the lunchroom, a 500-piece puzzle in the hallway and revamped casual seating options throughout the school — have helped create buy-in for the ban among students, he said.
“Everybody’s different — not everybody obviously wants to play foosball,” Doemel said. But providing those options signaled that the school was trying to give students alternative entertainment and that administrators’ end goal was not punitive enforcement, he said.
When the ban first took effect, it seemed like students who were used to texting during free periods in the library no longer knew what to do with themselves, said Kristy Eldeen, the school librarian.
“I really had to pivot what I was providing for them and give them stuff that would make them interact, so I started buying all sorts of old-school things,” she said.
The “old-school things” ballooned from puzzles and chess boards to a rotating craft of the month: a sewing machine, a laser engraver, a heat press, bedazzling materials and calligraphy pens. Caught in the whirlwind of crafts, “they don’t even realize that they’re sitting and just talking to each other,” Eldeen said.
Classmates would pull up chairs to join and learn from a soft-spoken student who had fallen in love with mah-jongg. At one point last school year, Eldeen spotted 10 kids crowded around a table and walked over to check that everything was all right: They were watching two classmates play chess, she said.
Although many students don’t like giving up their phones, the games that Poughkeepsie High started offering “kind of gave them other outlets” as they navigated that shift, said Kim Popken, a French teacher there. The analog entertainment felt to her like a way of letting her students “continue to be kids.” Plus, without it, “the kids are going to get into mischief,” said Phee Simpson, the school’s principal.
The bell-to-bell bans remain an issue for American parents, many of whom worry about not being able to reach their child during school hours. A June Pew Research Center survey found that while 74 percent of U.S. adults support restricting phone use during class, only 44 percent back all-day bans.
“Parents deeply understand and respect the fact that these devices can be distracting,” said Keri Rodrigues, a mother of five teenage boys and the president of the National Parents Union, a parent advocacy group. But bans also raise concerns for parents about “the lack of communication that we get from schools during times of an emergency,” she added.
The games, in her view, amount to little more than giving students “a pacifier,” without addressing what she sees as the core issue — teenagers’ behavioral relationships with technology, especially their social media use, outside school.
At least some students don’t seem to miss their phones. Madeline Ward, one of Rounds’s former students at Bethlehem, experienced her first two years of high school with phones banned only in classes.
“In classes we didn’t have our phones — people talked, obviously — but as soon as you stepped in the hallway, you saw everyone look down because they had gotten their phone back and they wanted to see what was going on,” said Ward, 18.
After the phone ban at her school extended to bell-to-bell, “you just saw a lot more people being outgoing and finding people to talk to when they might not have in the past,” Ward said.
The school offering other entertainment options was a significant part of that transformation, she said.
“Traditionally, like, lunch time is your phone time,” said Nevaeh Woods, 17, a senior at David H. Ponitz Career Technology Center in Dayton, Ohio, where phones are locked away for the whole school day and signing out games from a board-game cart is the new version of “phone time.”
“The games have caused me to actually interact with people and caused people to interact with me,” Woods said. “The games are like a shell-breaker.”
Even so, if she could wave a magic wand and have her phone back during lunch? She smiled wide — and hesitated.
“Honestly, yes,” Woods said. “I want my phone, I want to get on TikTok, I want to see what’s going on on Instagram.” At the same time, she added, “I also don’t want my phone. … Me having my phone, I’ll be distracted.”
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