Schools have spent millions on Yondr phone pouches, designed to keep students off their devices. Are they worth it?

During the past eight years, schools in 41 states have spent millions of dollars on Yondr products — magnetically sealed fabric pouches that are used to lock up phones and other handheld tech devices — to limit use during class.

The brand, which was founded in 2014, was originally an idea the creator Graham Dugoni came up with after going to a music festival. Dugoni said he saw numerous concertgoers filming strangers without their knowledge, and he began to question the role technology plays in social spaces.

Yondr has been used in other social environments like concerts or comedy shows, but what has prompted headlines for the brand recently is the growing demand from school districts all over the world.

How does Yondr work?

Yondr, which serves over 1 million students every day in 21 countries, focuses primarily on its neoprene phone pouch.

The pouches zip up and are locked and unlocked with a separate magnetic tool called “the base.” The set costs schools $25 to $30 per student.

“The Yondr unlocking bases will open any pouch, but there are no individual keys,” a Yondr spokesperson told Yahoo News. “Only the teachers have access to the unlocking bases.”

In response to circulating videos of people seemingly “hacking” into Yondr pouches, the spokesperson claimed that those are older versions that have “been damaged and therefore look as if they would open very easily.”

How did Yondr get so popular?

The brand saw steady year-over-year growth until the pandemic, according to a Yondr spokesperson. But once schools reopened, the brand saw an explosion in outreach from schools that wanted to implement the tools in their classrooms.

“Word-of-mouth referrals from principal to principal increased the number of school partners using Yondr to the point where we now create entirely phone-free school districts,” the spokesperson said.

According to Govspend, a database of government contracts and purchases, a significant portion of the collective $2.5 million spent on Yondr occurred after May 2022.

“2023 was an extremely exciting year for Yondr Education, and we saw a 150% increase in schools using Yondr last year,” the spokesperson added, referring to the company’s partnership with schools. “2024 has started off even stronger and our forecasting is showing an even busier year.”

Yondr's popularity coincides with reports concluding that parents want phone bans in schools and students' academic performance improves without phones. The National Center for Education Statistics also reported in 2020 that 77% of schools had rules forbidding students from using their cell phones during school hours.

“The reality is that students will use their phones if they can access them,” the Yondr spokesperson said.

In July 2023, nearly 200 school districts banned together to file a lawsuit against the parent companies of Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube over "alleged harm" to students. According to the suit, schools accused the companies of directly causing classroom disciplinary problems, mental health issues and diverting attention and resources away from proper education.

Later, in November 2023, two senators proposed bipartisan legislation that would study the effects of cellphone use in classrooms from kindergarten to 12th grade.

"Widespread use of cellphones in schools are at best a distraction for young Americans; at worst, they expose schoolchildren to content that is harmful and addictive," Senator Tom Cotton, from Arkansas, said in a press release.

The arguments for Yondr

Many school administrators and parents have praised the results.

Renesha Parks, the chief wellness officer at Richmond Public Schools in Virginia, told The Hill in December 2023 that despite the cost, leaders believed implementing the pouches would "decrease the amount of infractions that are happening as a result of student's cellphone use and increase productivity."

Psychologist Roni Cohen-Sandler also told the outlet her theory that phones are preventing kids and teens from “sitting with their feelings” during school.

“If a teacher looks at them wrong, where they get a bad grade, they say they have to go to the bathroom, and they go to the bathroom and they’re texting their mom,” Cohen-Sandler said. “They’re not sort of pushing themselves in terms of developing coping skills for dealing with uncomfortable feelings and they’re not solving problems by using the resources that are available to them in school.”

During the Flint, Mich., school board vote in December, Superintendent Kevelin Jones II pointed to cyberbullying as another issue Yondr could help address during the school day.

"It's a big part of the bullying," Jones said about cellphones, according to USA Today. "It's a big part of the reason why our scholars are not on task in class."

The arguments against Yondr

Shahad Mohieldin, a program coordinator for the Young Women's Project in Washington, D.C., told USA Today that Yondr implementation doesn't address students' needs to access their phones — whether it is to communicate with a parent or for other pressing concerns.

Mohieldin told the outlet she knows students who use their phones as calculators in class or even to connect with their therapist during the day. She also pointed to students from low-income families or who have two working parents and might be unexpectedly responsible for their other siblings and household errands after class.

Rebecca Bratspies, who has a child in a Yondr school, posted on X that her neurodivergent kid relies on their phone to "navigate the day."

“This program makes it worse,” she claimed.

The cost of Yondr also challenges whether there's an equal chance for all school districts to benefit. Philadelphia public schools spokeswoman Monique Braxton told the Washington Post that schools have to request approval from the district before reaching out to Yondr and then must pay for the pouches from their budgets.

In school districts like Virginia Beach, which has 64,000 students, officials deemed the pouches too expensive.

Not all teachers are on board. Dina Hoeynck, a former teacher in Cleveland, told The 74, an education journal, that it has to be an "all or nothing" ruling. At her former school, students were allowed to access their phones between classes, and Hoeynck said the system of locking phones up at the beginning of class and then unlocking them at the end felt like "a massive waste of time."

“It led to a significant loss of instructional time and created unnecessary power struggles between teachers and students,” she added.

The issue of school shootings

A recurring concern around locking up students’ phones is what they would do in the event of a school shooting.

The Boston Globe discussed the debate in an October 2023 article, "Put an end to school shootings and then students can put away their phones." In the article, reporter Heather Hopp-Bruce pointed to how phones were a lifeline for some students and families in school shooting situations, including the Parkland, Fla., and Great Mills, Md., shooting in 2018, and the Uvalde, Texas, shooting in 2022.

“In an emergency, the first priority is always to follow school safety protocol,” the Yondr spokesperson told Yahoo News. “School staff and administrators will always have access to their phones and once students are in a safe location, administrators can unlock student pouches.”