3 days ago
'We didn't expect it to be life changing': Hoover, Bergman say banning phones was just that
DES MOINES, Iowa — Looking back on their year as pioneers, two very different schools sound remarkably similar.
'We anticipated a lot of pushback and we got hardly any,' says Sydney Gerritsen, director of student affairs at Bergman Academy, central Iowa's only non-church-affiliated private school.
'It didn't take long for most of our kids to go 'got it—keep the phone away during the 45 minutes of class,'' says Qynne Kelly, principal at Des Moines' Hoover High School, one of the metro's most diverse public high schools. 'I'd say now we're taking maybe–at most—ten cell phones a week.'
Looking for a way to solve the nationwide problem of cell phones in schools, Hoover banned phones, requiring all students to keep them in their backpacks during class. Kelly says the small-but-difficult rule change affected everything.
'You could start with a 14% increase in As and Bs,' she says. 'We'll be over 55% As and Bs after this semester—maybe even higher. Failures cut in half.'
In addition to grades, student behavior at Hoover improved as well.
'Out-of-school suspension is down 60%. That's 6-0,' she adds.
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Bergman, with its younger student body running grades K-8, took the ban up a level: all students were required to check them in at the front office at the beginning of the day. As they left in the afternoon, the phones were returned.
The results were much the same as Hoover's.
'It was so good to see them engage more with each other,' Gerritsen said. 'That is the biggest thing that we noticed this year, is the inter-student engagement was completely different than it's been the last couple of years with those older students.'
Kelly says classrooms at Hoover came alive without the distractions of phones.
'When you used to go in a year ago, there were a lot of kids honestly looking down at their laps, looking at cell phones,' Kelly remembers. 'You'd go in and a kid would be watching a full-length film on their cell phone!'
She says 90% of students followed the rule immediately. Others came around quickly and the entire atmosphere changed.
'Now it's entirely different. You go in there and you hear chatter and engagement and learning—like and energy, a buzz is what I would call it. And not just in the classrooms, in the hallways as well.'
Both leaders say they expect other schools to see the same sort of results during the 2025-26 school year as they follow the new law signed by Governor Kim Reynolds this spring, banning cell phones from all Iowa classrooms.
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'It ended up being easier than we thought,' Gerritsen says. 'We know we don't have high schoolers. We know that can be a different level of challenge, and I know high schoolers are probably going to approach it differently. They're not going to have wooden boxes in the office to lock 700 phones in. But it can work, and the kids do see that it makes a huge difference for them.'
And both leaders agree the key to success is having a clear plan in place.
'First it's explaining the 'why,'' Kelly says. 'Second it is being consistent, and third is trusting your team to do the job—and make sure that your community is supportive of the people who are going to be doing that.'
Below are the full interviews with Bergman Academy Director of Student Affairs Sydney Gerritsen and Hoover High School Principal Qynne Kelly.
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