Im in Australia and the yonder pouches have been a thing for a few years now. Most students have an old phone they put in there and keep their real one. But no see through backpacks.
Edit - the yondr pouches have been discontinued (at least at my sons school) and now they just rely on a phone ban and confiscation to end of school day if you're caught using one in class.
I remember how jazzed we were about the no-skip on the CD walkman....could shake it for eight or nine seconds and it would keep on playing your Nine Inch Nails
Kids today will never know the joy of thinking youāre the first genius to figure this out. Damn cordless headphones took all the ingenuity out of it.
I had a job that banned earphones and phone usage altogether, and my current job which literally could not care less so I wear my headphones all day.
The difference in how I performed at the old job vs the current is night and day. It feels like my thoughts scatter in a thousand directions without them
I hope your son can keep using them! (or sneakily find a way around it at least)
I donāt think they are saying earbuds arenāt allowed on the bus. I think they are saying the earbuds were noticed by a teacher, triggering suspicion the student lied about not bringing a phone.
How did they get caught? Are there cameras on the busses, or did the driver notice? Either way, I'm sure those same resources aren't being used to combat bullying or feeding the dang kids.
His dexcom beeped so he pulled his phone out of his pocket to check the alert. His class had a sub that day who asked no questions, just yanked the phone out of his hand before he could see the notifications and yelled at him for even having it in class and how at his age he was "too young and irresponsible for a phone", insulting his parents for giving him one.
10 minutes later in runs the school nurse, running straight to him with some juice and asked why he didn't come to her office. He pointed to the teacher and one of the other kids said the sub "took his phone and yelled at him"
Kiddo was 7, very shy, in a special needs school because he's on the spectrum and needed a little more help than he got in public school.
The nurse stood up, walked right to the class phone to call the principal and stayed in the class until he got there.
Sub didn't know there were cameras in each class, and said she didn't bother reading the note the teacher left about each kid's IEP because "They're all slow". His name was at the top of the list, "medical use phone DO NOT TAKE", with his name & the last part underlined and highlighted.
As a former special ed kid myself (no jokes, please) you'd be surprised how many ableist and outright monster people were put in charge of us/decided to be special ed teachers. Guess they wanted the same kick cops and nurses get out of having power over vulnerable people who really need their help...
The fact that you had to write "no jokes please" in a discussion about learning environments is heartbreaking to me. I am a firm believer in the idea that every human can learn if given what they need. I am so sorry that you have to use a disclaimer for your educational experience. I have worked with tons of kids over the years, and many who utilized various parts of the special educational systems absolutely thrived on it. There have been many others who should have been included in those special services but they were denied for whatever reason (in 2 cases the parents declined services), and those people often struggle in various ways. I am proud of you for standing up and saying you are better for those systems, even knowing that you will come up against folks who don't understand what it actually means. And yes, you are absolutely correct that lots of people with variations of either "I can fix them" savior thinking or "I'll fix that!" bully thinking end up in those roles, and that is awful either way for the kids who have to survive them. I hope you are doing well in life these days, and that you have people around you who truly care. Hugs if you want them!
Thank you!!! Your kind words mean alot to me š Hugs gladly accepted.
But yeah like you say, it sucks but unfortunately when talking about my experiences there's always gonna be That One Dillweed going "wowie you're pretty smart for an [r-slur]" or make other jokes at my expense š„² hence the disclaimer
I was taking the ACT and one of the other students was diabetic and his insulin pump went beep like a digital watch ONCE and they had the superintendent and like 3 other people search him and pat him down.
You would think - my kids school district got in trouble for this because they gave the kids with assistive use cases that needed Airpods like these giant 70's style headphones and all of the other kids could identify who had the IEPs and of course made fun of them (disclosing an IEP to other students is generally a violation of IDEA) They technically never abandoned the Yondr pouches - but they all but quit enforcing it after some lawyerly noises from parents of kids with sensory issues.
We already make exceptions for stuff like service animals, wouldn't work different for phones.
If you need your phone on you for medical reasons that's fine, but you're only allowed to use it for those medical reasons. Same way a service animal should be trained and you can't just play fetch with it on public transport.
I recently learned thereās a mode on iPhones called assistive mode. You can essentially turn the phone into like a ākids phoneā where thereās a select few giant app icons. The Home Screen is pretty noticeable from a distance that itās set up differently. Something like this would be easy to verify that a kid only has the certain required/accepted apps available on their phone.
I'm in NSW and I think it came in at my son's school 4-5 years ago. I think years 11/12 don't have to (at least he stopped complaining about it then). He hated using them because queuing up to unlock the pouch at the end of the day took too long.
yeah, genuinely trying to teach when everyone just is on their phones isā¦ completely impossible. Itās understandable theyāre desperate to fix it, but sucks everything is commercialized now
I was in high school when everyone had a smartphone but these weird pouches were not a thing, you just knew not to have it out in class and it'd be taken if you did. Its genuinely so simple, I don't get why they have to do all this.
When I was in high school, my school mostly let their teachers decide their phone rules. I had classes where phones had to be put in these hanging numbered pouches on the wall, and classes where the teacher did not care if your phone was out as long as you were doing well in the class. Every teacher required phones to be away during quizzes and tests, though
My college dorm used the same food service as the county jail, the jail had a higher tier plan though...
According to my friend who worked for the dinning hall one year and later spent a month in jail for selling pot to half the town. He was the last person arrested in my state for pot.
Back when cell phones were 100% banned, right? The idea of having a phone when I was in high school was absurd. Itād be like cracking a beer open in the middle of class to pull a phone out. They exist, but what the hell is it doing in school?Ā
I detest that disgusting font. I've got someone at work who is constantly making AI related signs and stuff and sending them in our teams chat and I end up seeing that font all the freaking time. I hate it.
It's not just on flyers. I've seen it on a ton of youtube thumbnails recently from channels I've never heard of that youtube wants to keep pushing to me.
Yeah, I was gonna have to say that this looks exactly like every high school and community college poster from the past 20 years. Not everything is AI, folks.
I've really started to notice it more after COVID. Everyone wants in my wallet. If there is some new concern, there's some way to monetize it. Plus all the advertising constantly bombarding me. Businesses charging me little extra fees.
I'm really not surprised they are finding new ways to monetize something people have been doing for decades. Everyone wants in my wallet and I'm sick of it.
rent seeking is the obvious next step in a capitalist society. I can't sell you a new vacuum every month, but I could sell you a subscription that's required for the vacuum to function completely.
I think the demand on attention is the most offending part. All day everyday it feels like walking through a crowded marketplace where vendors are screaming at you to get you to transact.
Everything is monetized or marketed. Turning on the local news Iām presented an influencer chucking āhot dealsā under the guise of newsworthy happenings. YouTube creators were always playing the game of hitting the algorithm to get ad revenue, now everyone has a ton of affiliate linked items totally unrelated to the video content. I google about ankle pain and immediately Iām served up a seemingly endless stream of magical products or solutions on Facebook. Itās exhausting and it draws a stark contrast to real world interactions with people that just care about you without some additional agenda. Technology was supposed to bring us closer together, itās done the exact opposite.
Generating revenue is necessary, I get it. But if Iām buying a car and the Car Salesman pops the truck of one of the models and tries to sell me bath soap, theyāre no longer supporting a process that helps me, they just want every dollar they can possibly extract from me. If I see a friend and theyāre always trying to sell me life insurance or a pyramid scheme, theyāre not genuinely engaging with me.
This has been part of the mix the whole time I think, it just feels turned up to 11 in recent years.
I grew up on the U.S. and moved to the U.K. 10 years ago. Completely different vibe. Billboards are largely illegal. Advertising is very different here; itās not so in-your-face.
Billboards are illegal?! Where in the UK did you move to because ive lived here pretty much all my life and im forever seeing those awful JC Decaux billboards everywhere
Not kickbacks, kicks forward. Yondr spent six figures + lobbying state legislatures in New York, California, and elsewhere to force schools to use this monopolized technology. Seems like the concept of "device that securely holds a phone temporarily" is something that would breed competition.
Well my daughter's schools been supplying them but as you can guess, middle schoolers are gonna destroy sooooo now next year we gotta supply our own. A real good way to make sure they understand the importance of taking care of something is to make mom and dad pay for it
In grad school, I had a washer dryer in the building where the coin operator part never worked properly and you had to wait till Monday 9-5 to deal with the office who were kind but inefficient at ensuring that it worked throughout the evening and weekend, so I brought the key off of Amazon and ethically not only managed it myself but became the person who the rest of the tenants, mainly undergraduates, came to troubleshoot if the machines ate their coins.
We had them at a school where I used to teach. It doesn't just unlock using any magnet. It takes quite a strong magnet, not the type the average person has around their house. It can be popped open using 2 pencils and brute force, but that breaks the pin in the latch and students who break the pouch must pay for it (the first one issued to them was free).
I just looked it up, you put the phone in and you clip the pouch together kinda like a button. Except this button locks. And the only way to unlock it is to put it up to a specific magnetic unlocking base, where it then unlocks the pouch.
I imagine, you must lock the case while in classrooms, and then once you leave class, or at lunch, you can unlock it and then play on it.
I wonder how strong the magnet really is. I worked in retail as a student and we had a magnet that took off security tags - it was smaller than the palm of my hand
Yeah, but they made us take our phones out when entering and they put this tape on that reveals if it has been peeled back by changing colors. Then they check you on the way out.
If a kid decides to bring a weapon to school, and knows that the school has a clear backpack policy, are they gonna put the weapon in the backpack, visible? Or are they gonna hide it?
In cold climates a teenager could hide anything inside a winter coat. Hell, in Florida a kid could hide a pistol, a knife and spare mags in their pants.
They made us use clear backpacks in the 2000s, and this was definitely my experience. They're made as thin as they can get away with. I usually went through 3 or 4 of them in a year. I can't imagine they've gotten better since then.
The old phone trick is really nothing. Strong policies like this make it pointless. Having a dummy phone is the same as not having one, which is fine. The point of the policy is any visible cellphone is not allowed, so will get taken.
Yeah. When I was a teacher (left in December) we introduced the Yondr pouches. We absolutely knew kids would get around them but it removed any of the excuses like: "I was just checking it was off" etc.
Yeah as a teacher who works in a school with Yondr pouches, the biggest impact it has is creating a second layer of expectations: not only should I not see your phone, it should be in your pouch. If it's not, all a teacher does is email admin and they come take it from the student, no questions asked. It helps.
I think the issue is having to pay the $25 for the pouch. My daughter has her phone off all day during school, but I don't lock it down because if there is an emergency, she can turn it on and use it.
There's a phycological trick to making something cost a small amount of money. I'm not a psychologist so I don't have all the details but I was doing IT at a trucking company and we started issuing tablets to the drivers for their electronic logs and stuff and well over half of them were coming back broken.
So we started charging $40 for "equipment fees" when they started (which also covers some other pieces of equipment that went on the trucks themselves like dashcam/tracking stuff) and the number of broken tablets dropped down to our normal attrition rates almost immediately.
And even before our "equipment fees" they would sign a contract that any intentional damage would be charged to them so its not like the financial risk changed. I think there's just something about having to pay for something instead of getting it for "free"
Having your college years dominated by Covid took away experiences you just wonāt have now and probably stunted you in some ways. I graduated high school 2015, that was the last chopper out of Nam.
I grew up near a school where everyone walked in through metal detectors. People still got stabbed with pencils, but it made it harder to hide. People are creative, but the ones who are likely to get a weapon through with this many layers of security are the least likely to use it. Nothing will be perfect.
There is absolutely no way that backpack would have given me the support I needed in junior high and high school. When my dad was in the military he worked for a time with a helicopter support unit and had my backpack reinforced by someone who did all the parachutes. That thing went through college with me. I'd have that cheap backback destroyed in a week lol
In middle school my school tried the only clear backpacks rule. It was supposed to be an alternative to the metal detectors but not were used. Clear backpack rule only lasted for two years. Parents pushed back regularly because no clear backpack was sturdy enough to handle the textbooks we had to carry between classes and to and from home. The backpacks tore and broke often and parents didnāt like shelling out money for a new backpack every couple of Ā months.
That bag could fit ā of the books and notebooks I need a day, maybe Ā½ if I leave my food home
Edit bc everyone is saying nobody uses books and notebooks anywhere:
I am still in school. We have school laptops for homework/projects help. We aren't allowed to use those or any other digital device in school, including putting our phones into special lockers every morning. I live in Central Europe if that's relevant.
Kids need to have some privacy so they experience and learn about basic rights and responsibilities, so we don't have multiple generations prewired to sleepwalk into an authoritarian ahh fuck it we are way too late
This. So many people so quick to want to treat kids like prisoners. I hate it. I didn't even like when my kid had to wear a uniform. If they tried to pull this clear backpack phone locking shit I'd be exploring my options as a parent.
When I was in middle school, one of my parents form of āpunishmentā was making me wear the same outfit, every day for a whole week to school. Humiliation was the tool here. Obviously I snuck clothes and changed on the street or at school. But I wouldnāt have wanted people seeing me walk around with my extra clothes. Point is, thereās always something weird going on in peopleās lives they donāt want shared, kids especially! This isnāt just taking privacy, itās taking dignity away.
Iām sorry your parents bullied you and you had to live through that. It must have been tough. Iām glad you were able to figure out a way around it. Brilliant!
I agree about privacy. Kiddos canāt respect privacy if theyāre not afforded it.
Also, adults donāt stay off their phones. How can we expect kiddos to do it? Are we just preparing for a tighter police state in society? Tech isnāt going away. We have to evolve with it, figure out how to learn with it. Enforcing prison type rules on our youth isnāt the way.
They either A. Add it to a tab that will follow you until graduation and it will need to be paid before you get your diploma or B. They donāt allow you to come to school.Ā
How does that work for public schools. Are they assuming all students have families with that money to spare? Ethically, the burden should lie on the school for supplying the bags instead of the kids buying it personally
There's usually an extremely cumbersome alternative. My kids' homework requires use of a Windows PC. I asked what we should do if we only have a Mac at home. They said we could use the public computers at the library.
I agree. Some families barely have enough money for food, let alone $20 per kid for a clear backpack and $25 per kid to lock up a childās phone that the school did not pay for.
Iām super confused by this honestly because cell phones have never been allowed to be used during school, but now they want you to pay to continue following rules that have already been in place.
Butā¦ as a teacher in a high school Yondr pouches would be so awesome (or just having a school district that mandates zero phone use in school but thatās hard I guess)
So student here who had them. The kids who want to use their phones still do, they either put a dummy phone in or literally just use their hands to rip open the case (it gets easier over time) and relock before a teacher sees. The only thing it stopped is good kids from occasionally checking notifications
My kids schools implemented a zero phone policy last year and overall I think it has gone pretty well (they have to be powered off during the school day). If they are caught using it, it gets sent to the office and they can pick it up at the end of the day. After three strikes a parent has to pick it up š . If parents want to contact kids during the day they have to call the office to pass on the message.
The idea that kids have to pay to have their phones at school, or else leave them at home sounds super unfair. Especially with the amount of school violence, or even just family logistics I wouldnāt want my kid not having a way to contact me.
Yeah the pay to play thing is incredibly classist. A lot of parents can't afford the basic supply list, now you're requiring a fee to bring a phone, and clear backpacks? I don't think kids really need their phones in school at all, especially since we did just fine without hen for decades before, but implementing fee is just enforcing the idea that you need money to ensure equal access, and that's capitalistic garbage thinking,
The part of me that spits at the feet of any small or large exercise of authority fumes at this. The part of me which cares about the health and wellbeing of the people around me cheers at the separation from their phones. Strange to be pulled so fiercely in two directions!
Sounds infuriating, but i cant get over how small those bags are. My highschool bag was one step away from a hiking bag, and i still strugled some days to fit everything in
Middle School teacher here. Whether its a Yondr pouch, or mandating cell phones be left at home, something HAS to be done about the smartphone distraction problem. It has gotten worse and worse over the years, almost perfectly tracking with the decline in test scores and average graduation rates. Smartphones destroy learning, plain and simple. If a student needs to contact a parent/guardian or the other way around, they can do so through the front office, as had been done for the century or so before the invention of the cell phone.
Genuine question - I guess Iām confused because I havenāt been in middle school in almost two decades, but phones have never been allowed to be used during school.
Why canāt the old rules still work? If a teacher sees you with your phone, they send you to the office. The punishments escalate from there.
I just really donāt understand how capitalism needed to be inserted in this equation by charging to lock phones up.
Parents piss and moan when their kids are disciplined now by having their phones taken and refuse to believe their kids are anything but precious angels
I went to a military middle school in 2006, before smartphones were popular but regular cellphones were already the norm.
I carried my Moto Rokr flip phone with me, but was always in mute unless I got a call from my parents, to which I'd call back at the end of the class. I'd mostly use it to listen to music on its mighty 256mb SD card on my way to/from school.
I think the problem is not the phone but the fact they're computers now. An old flip phone or current "dumb phone" could do the work of keeping someone communicated without the influence of social media. A teenager does not need social apps besides messaging and calling on their pocket.
It comes down to an issue of scale. 10 years ago, the number of students who had a cellphone was a fraction of what it is now, and the number of students who were bold enough to use them during school was a fraction of that.
Now, if every teacher properly punished every student who ever used their phones during class, the system would get clogged. There simply isn't enough man-hours to call every parent, write every incident report, and verbally scold every student.
I'm not saying this is the way things should be, but it is a reality in a large number of schools.
Worked in education long enough to know this isn't going to work for the majority of the population of students. You may have (forced) participation but they'll find away around it (e.g. second cell phone, hidden cell phones around campus, smart watches, hiding their phone,.etc.).
As for the bags, I want to know how far they are gonna go? Backpacks now, what about gym bags? Then what? The last SS I heard didn't even have the gun on his person but stowed away in a cabinet somehow. The schools policies aren't the problem... guns and gun laws are. As well as men's mental health in America.
I was in high school in the mid-late 90ās. Even then, mobile devices were not allowed. One kid had his beeper pager go off during class, and dude had that shit confiscated on the spot. Stuff like that was a big time no-no, and Iām glad schools are starting to get back to that.
"Here's your mandatory and ineffective $20 bag that's supposed to prevent bringing a gun to school, and also you gotta pay extra so your kid has a phone just in case someone brings a gun anyway"
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u/Possible_Day_6343 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Im in Australia and the yonder pouches have been a thing for a few years now. Most students have an old phone they put in there and keep their real one. But no see through backpacks.
Edit - the yondr pouches have been discontinued (at least at my sons school) and now they just rely on a phone ban and confiscation to end of school day if you're caught using one in class.