The first school year without cellphones on campus is coming to an end. CTV News visited Royal West Academy to ask: did it have the desired effect? “It’s really nice to see students talking to each other a lot more than they were in the past,” said Adam Wiltzer, a physics and calculus teacher at Royal West. “The cafeteria is a lot noisier. The halls are a lot noisier, and it’s a good thing.” Royal West has had a ban on phones in place since the 2024/2025 school year, but the directive from the Ministry of Education makes it a lot easier to enforce. “Before the law came into effect, there was no way for me to actually say ‘You can never have it.’ Now, it’s very easy to do,” Wiltzer said. The ban also applies during the breaks between classes and in the halls during lunch hour. For the first time since the pandemic, teachers are noticing a community feel inside the school again. “It was eerily quiet at lunch and at recess. All the students were sitting on their phones looking at social media or playing games on their phones,” Wiltzer said. “Now, students are almost forced to interact with each other.” Students are also noticing the benefits. “Our generation went through COVID right before we came to high school. So, I think that it had a huge effect on it. And people were very used to being on their phones way too much,” said Braden Gurevitch, a Grade 10 student and next year’s student body president. “I think the ban just helped people with their social skills at school.” The school administration is seeing the change in the student body, as well, but believes the province-wide ban could be more flexible. “We still want to teach our kids to be responsible users rather than just an outright ban,” said David Lee, Royal West Academy Principal. “But for now, it is the ministry’s guideline. So we are implementing it.” Mental health benefits falling short Beyond the obvious benefits the ban has had for school culture, researchers studying teen mental health are not seeing a clear benefit. “A lot of young people were sort of relying on smartphones as a way of coping with isolation and bullying at school,” said Vincent Paquin, a psychiatrist at the Jewish General Hospital, who teaches youth mental health at McGill University. “It doesn’t mean that the phones were a solution here, but they were a distraction in the context of social isolation.” Without additional work to address isolation, Paquin does not believe a cellphone ban alone will help to address the mental health crisis young people are facing. Often, students will spend more time on their phones at home to compensate for the missed hours during the school day, he said. “At the end of the day, we are trying to prepare young people for the transition out of school. We want them to know how to deal with a phone that is constantly asking for their attention,” Paquin said. A year later, is the ban working? In some ways, yes. But, if the goal is to teach teens how to have a healthy relationship with technology, there is still work to do.
