With two weeks to go before the start of the 2025-26 school year, the Chehalis School District Board of Directors met for a special meeting Aug. 19 to discuss a number of items, perhaps none more important to parents, teachers and administrators than the district’s cellphone policy.
The meeting followed a morning work session where the board listened to — and discussed — insights gained by the Chehalis School District Student Cell Phone Use Advisory Committee.
The committee, made up primarily of parents, teachers, staff and administrators, met throughout June and July with the expressed intent of examining the district’s current cellphone policy and its use.
Within the committee, four subcommittees were established: Policy and Research; Stakeholder Engagement; Student Impact and Learning Environment; and Equity and Implementation.
Chehalis School Board President J. Vander Stoep called Tuesday’s work session the “next step in an inclusive process that the district has been going through to look at our cellphone policies.”
Vander Stoep added that this work applies beyond just cellphones, and includes all communication technology available to students. Though the school district has an existing policy, the board president said, what it has lacked is uniform application and procedures.
The current policy, adopted Sept. 20, 2022, states that “telecommunication devices may be turned on and operated only before and after the regular school day, during passing periods, and during the student’s lunch break, unless an emergency situation exists that involves imminent physical danger or a school administrator authorizes the student to use the device.”
The policy acknowledges the possible need for medical and special education exemptions. It prohibits use that disrupts the learning environment, violates privacy, threatens academic integrity or contains any sexually explicit conduct.
In their final report, the cellphone advisory committee stated that “research and district-level findings overwhelmingly indicate that cellphone use in schools disrupts learning and contributes to negative student behaviors.”
The committee further noted that the challenge is not determining why cellphone use should be limited in schools, but rather how it should be limited.
“Districts often struggle to keep up with rapidly evolving technology, long-term research on effective implementation is limited, and outcomes vary depending on local context and execution,” the report stated.
Nevertheless, the committee listed three commonalities shared by successful districts: clarity, consistency, and communication, which they termed the “Three C’s.”
The committee's recommendations include adding an accompanying procedure to the policy, which would provide clear guidance for different grade levels and clear exemption protocols for certain students and learners, along with expanded policy language that includes “smartwatches, earbuds and wearables.”
The committee also recommended the district implement a “phone storage system” in classrooms to remove immediate access to phones and “clear progressive discipline procedures,” as well as training for the staff on enforcement and how to handle exceptions.
According to Vander Stoep, the early findings from the committee are clear.
“Cellphones in the classroom, again, when I say cellphones, I'm talking about communication devices, are distracting to students, harming student learning, and districts that have gotten on top of this and created learning environments free of those distractions have better student achievement, they have better behavior from students, less discipline problems, and that's the direction the Chehalis School District wants to go,” Vander Stoep said.
While the administrators present indicated their desire to continue work on the details and potential procedure changes, they asked the board for the support to implement them.
That support was unanimous, with only slight deviations in opinion from the board members.
Vander Stoep called the communication devices a hurdle when it comes to raising the trajectory of student achievement in the district. He said he would also support a device-free school, should the administrators choose to go that route in the future.
Board member Tim LeDuc expressed his support as well, likening cellphone use in the classroom to cellphone use while driving.
“They're just as dangerous,” LeDuc said. “They're distracting, they're causing you to look away, not pay attention to what's going on around you, and by not learning as you should in the classroom, you’re setting yourself back, you're putting yourself in a dangerous position.”
LeDuc added he’d support removing cellphones completely from schools, but acknowledged there would be issues with that.
Board member Larry Petersen said the board should support a device-free learning environment and leave it up to the administrators to develop the procedures that the board could then approve.
Board member Kelsi Hamilton said she supported a device-free school for kindergarten through eighth grade, and then a device-free learning environment at the high school.
“And I would defer the procedure to the administrators and the superintendent,” Hamilton said. “I would like to revise our policy to include a belief statement, give better definitions, to highlight locker room (and) bathroom spaces, and then also say that we’ll post the procedure once it's developed, just so it's very clear and accessible at the same place that our policies are for the community.”
Board member Colleen State said she supported Hamilton’s view on device-free schools and device-free learning environments, but leaned more towards a split between grades K-5 and 6-12.
To read the district’s current cellphone policy, along with the cellphone advisory committee’s final report, visit https://chehalisschools.org/211205_2.
In other news, the board unanimously approved the adoption of the 2025-26 categorical programs budget and the 2025-26 minimum basic education requirement.
The board also unanimously approved the ratifications of the 2025-28 collective bargaining agreement with the district’s unrepresented employees group and the collective bargaining agreement with Teamsters Union Local No. 252.
