NORMANDY — Several schools in the St. Louis area have forbidden students from using phones during class or passing periods. Next year, Normandy Schools Collaborative will take it a step further.
Starting in January, the north St. Louis County district will bar students from bringing cellphones onto school grounds, with punishments as high as placement in alternative school.
Administrators said the move is part of an effort to cut down on bullying and fights and improve academic performance.
Normandy scored in the bottom 2% of districts statewide last school year, with 9% students scoring proficient or better in Math and 12.6% in English.
The stakes are high. Last fall, the state Board of Education voted to release Normandy to local governance, and this summer marked the first time in 10 years that the task of improving the district fell on a board made up entirely of elected members.
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“We’re working hard to show the state that we’re taking steps to improve what we’re doing for our schools,” Assistant Superintendent of Student Support Services Tony Brooks said at a meeting last week.
Parents weren’t happy about the cellphone ban.
About 50 came to Normandy Middle School last Thursday for the first and only community meeting dedicated to the cellphone policy. Many said they were blindsided by the decision and felt it unsafe for their children to leave their cellphones at home.
“With all the shootings in the schools, how does this work?” asked one parent.
“Not only are the grounds unsafe, the streets are unsafe,” said another.
Deonna Davis-Day said barring cellphones wasn’t the answer to Normandy’s shortcomings. There are bigger issues keeping the district from moving forward, she said, such as a teacher shortage, which Normandy addressed with the hiring of international teachers primarily from the Philippines.
“We say we’re addressing academics, but there’s no tutoring,” Davis-Day said. “We’ve replaced our long-term substitutes with international teachers who the students say can’t speak English. They say that they’re translating for the international teachers” using their phones.
Policies restricting cellphones in schools have become increasingly common over the past two years.
This year, Rogers Middle School in the Affton School District prohibited students from using their phones all school day. Ladue Middle School took away cellphone privileges after Ladue High School did the same two years ago and saw positive results. In November, the Clayton School Board approved a policy that allowed principals to determine how or whether students could access their personal devices.
Normandy officials insisted a district-wide, full-on cellphone ban was necessary.
The district twice tried to use Yondr pouches — expensive, locked bags that can only be opened using a special device — but students destroyed them or brought dummy phones.
Cellphones have led to cyberbullying, sexual misconduct, and staged fights, Director of Safety and Security Norman Campbell said. He said he’s seen students run toward fights just so they could grab footage for social media. Students have created “fight pages” across various platforms to post clips of the brawls.
“The reality is that they have these cellphones to promote, to exploit and to embarrass our district,” Campbell said.
Venencia Small was in the crowd with her son, a sixth grader. She said she’s seen dozens of the fights online and reported them to her child’s school principal. But her kid isn’t one of the students who runs toward the fights, she said, and it didn’t seem fair to cut off her direct line of contact with him during the school day.
“If these children at this young age care about filming something and getting credit for something so bad, that’s a mental health issue. Invest in mental health,” Small said.
Punishments for violating the policy start with warning letters sent home, then 3-day detentions, then one-day suspensions with a student’s phone held until a parent meeting. Repeated violations would result in a possible placement in an alternative setting for at least one school quarter.
Superintendent Michael Triplett said more parents showed up for the cellphone policy discussion than parent-teacher conferences, which was “concerning.”
He also lamented Normandy’s low academic ranking.
“We have to do some things,” Triplett said.
In addition to the cellphone policy, the district is also working on a turnaround plan for Normandy High School to improve test scores.
District-wide, Normandy hired consultant Solution Tree for professional development in 2023 at a $4 million price tag.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographers captured November 2024 in hundreds of images. Here are just some of those photos. Edited by Jenna Jones.
