What I learned from Time Travel:
Imagine with me for a few minutes if you could go back in time to a job you had 27 years ago knowing everything you know now and having all of your 21st century skills. What would you do different? How would you spend your time? What would the outcome be? That’s what happened to me.
Twenty-seven years ago, I got my first administrative job as an assistant principal in a large comprehensive high school. I previously taught at the school, and now as a freshly minted administrator, my eyes were wide open to the underbelly of the work. Instead of inspiring students to learn how to read and write well and get to college, I found myself trying to convince students to go to class, not be tardy, and stop smoking behind the auto shop. I was writing referrals by the hundreds, issuing detentions, in-school suspension, and Saturday school. It was a brave new world—one without cell phones, tablets, and laptop computers—and one that hadn’t changed too much since I graduated high school in 1981.
Enter 2025. My 37 year public education tour has taken me to many stops. I have been a teacher, superintendent, consultant, building principal, school improvement specialist, and served in many other roles. I have been a part of some historic achievements, struggled through tough budget times, and survived COVID. I have seen a lot. This year while serving as an administrator on special assignment with a district, I was asked to step in as an assistant principal at a struggling high school. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It had been twenty years since I reported to a school every day for work, and I immediately found being with students every day to be exciting, exhilarating, and exhausting all at the same time. I loved it.
One of the most fascinating and unexpected things of all for me was being flooded with memories of that first administrative job. There I was bustling around in a large comprehensive high school again monitoring hallways during passing time, supervising students in the cafeteria, and logging thousands of steps everyday. I didn’t have an easy way to track steps in my first tour, but I suddenly found myself trying to convince students to go to class, not be tardy, and trying to prevent vaping in the bathroom. Some things didn’t change at all in 27 years. I had travelled back in time. It was thrilling. Everything seemed to slow down. Like a nice game of slow pitch softball, I could see the pitches coming and had time to think about where to hit them, but there was one thing I didn’t expect. The devastating impact of cell phones.
It was immediately apparent to me that access to cell phones was a real threat not only to the mental health of students but also the ability of teachers to teach and stay in the profession. I had no idea until I started living it. The addiction of students to their cell phones was astounding. I immediately understood the importance of a complete cell phone ban—that under no circumstances should cell phones be seen in a classroom.
I get it. We live in a digital world. Devices are here to stay, but if we are going to talk about what should happen during the 18% of waking hours a child is at school during the course of a year, we need to be intentional about how students spend their time—especially if we want them to learn and achieve at high levels, and cell phones are not part of that equation.
Most schools have cell phone policies like “off and away,” “not while I am talking,” etc, but a quick tour through any school will tell you if that policy is actually enforced, and if it is not, the learning of students will plummet.
Don’t get me wrong, I am using all of my 21st century tools in my time travel experience. I never had early warning systems or the ability to know what class a student was supposed to be in without calling the office. Those tools are great—just like the tools teachers can use to put lessons online and flip the classroom but cell phones are different. They grab attention and re-wire the brain. Social media creates massive anxiety in young people. I don’t think we are far from a time when science will let us know that providing children the unfiltered internet in their pocket 24/7 is causing real harm. Remember those Camel commercials that encouraged children to smoke? Yeah, kind of like that.
I am convinced that the mental health crisis young people are experiencing didn’t happen because of COVID, and it is not going away anytime soon. It certainly didn’t help to lock our kids in houses for a year without social interaction and unlimited access to devices, but COVID is over, and the problems haven’t gone away.
If we want our schools to be places of learning, exploration, and positive social interaction, we need to come up with ways to keep our kids off cell phones during the school day. This is not a hard problem to solve, but it is imperative and it will take the collective effort of everyone. Many schools are already doing it. When we take this action, students, parents, and teachers will all thank us.
I think the future might thank us as well.
– Superintendent Rob Hess