The bell dinged and the University Charter High School students gathered their things and headed for the door. As students flooded from classrooms, a strange, new sound filled the long hallway: the din of hundreds of students talking.
To each other.
Before the Los Angeles Unified School District cellphone ban took effect in mid-February, the use of mobile phones was ubiquitous on campuses. Not anymore.
To enforce the new policy, University High — and about 250 other LAUSD schools — have turned to a local company: Yondr, the maker of a lockable pouch commonly used at film premieres and live shows to foster a distraction-free atmosphere.
The pouches, which are sealed with a magnet, are the most popular choice among schools to enforce the new policy. Some schools have given teachers cubbies where students deposit their devices; others simply require them to be powered down and stowed. Yet, if there is a symbol of the crackdown, it is Yondr’s gray neoprene pouch.
Uni High senior Uleses Henderson shows how a Yondr pouch opens.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The ban, which affects some 800 campuses, has been praised by teachers and administrators — one told The Times it was the best thing to happen to education “since the invention of cellphones.” Amid the roll-out, they have cited anecdotal evidence and data that show the negative health effects of unfettered access to smartphones, which have contributed to an increase in anxiety, depression and other issues for students, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When I started talking to schools that were implementing [a cellphone ban], I heard from psychologists who were saying that … fights were down, drug sales were down and kids were reporting a better school day,” said LAUSD school board member Nick Melvoin, who authored the resolution to create phone-free campuses.
But what do the students at University High, the Sawtelle neighborhood school known as Uni High, think a month into the ban?
L.A. Unified school board member Nick Melvoin, left, who co-drafted the ordinance banning phones in LAUSD schools, listens to seniors Uleses Henderson, from left, Angie Mendoza, Eliase Mekale Kiflezghie, Kaylyn Kawaja and Camila Villarreal, all 17, address the issue of smartphones being locked in Yondr pouches at University High School Charter.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s not the best, but I think it’s for the best,” said Angie Mendoza, a senior and a member of the school’s student leadership council, which gathered for a casual debrief with Melvoin earlier this month. “Sometimes the lectures can be a little boring, and you have that urge to scroll on TikTok or Instagram, but that’s not the best habit. I’ve been getting better grades because I’ve been paying more attention in class.”
Others on the council also said they were learning to live with the new rules. But not every student is so charitable.
“After allowing my phone for 12 years … they are just going to take it away for three months?” asked Madison Thacker, a senior at Van Nuys High School Performing Arts Magnet. “They should have started it at the beginning of the school year. Students just don’t like change in general. Kids are going to find a way around this no matter what you do.”
Indeed, students spoke furtively of the dark arts of circumvention. Some have simply told school officials they don’t have a mobile phone. Others find decoys to place in their pouches, pocketing their real devices for surreptitious use throughout the school day.
Students make their way to class on the Sawtelle neighborhood campus of Uni High, where cellphone use was recently banned.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“As of today, I don’t know anybody who has put their phones into a pouch,” said Thacker, 17, who is allowed to use her device on campus because she manages her school’s Instagram account. “Kids are putting in old phones, they are putting in burner phones, they are putting in battery packs. And most popular: calculators.”
Then there are the various methods to break into a sealed pouch: via a magnet, with brute strength, or by using a pencil to pop it open — methods revealed in a genre of YouTube and social media videos.
Yondr Chief Executive Graham Dugoni isn’t surprised by students’ initiative. He said that the company, headquartered in Mar Vista, has talked with teens about their breaching techniques so that the company can refine its pouch design.
“We’re not naive,” said Dugoni, a former professional soccer player who launched Yondr in 2014. “We know that anything we design — and we’re constantly making improvements — they’re gonna keep finding different ways around it.”
From biker bar to school bonanza
Dugoni said that the “crystallizing moment” that led him to found Yondr occurred at a music festival in 2012.
He noticed that a drunk man was being recorded by other concertgoers without his consent. Dugoni felt the gathering should have been a safe space where revelers could enjoy themselves without being filmed. The incident sparked introspection.
Yondr Chief Executive Graham Dugoni at the Mar Vista headquarters of his company.
(Ringo Chiu / For The Times)
“Smartphones [were] just coming out, the internet was clicking into another gear,” said Dugoni. “That’s when I started to [ask] … how is this affecting people?”
Dugoni, 38, said he began imagining “device-free” environments where people could get away from the “tug and pull of modern life.” He began refining an idea for a lockable pouch and started building prototypes using materials he sourced from a hardware store. Dugoni’s first customer was a biker bar in Oakland that hosted a burlesque show. Then came a school in San Bruno.
In 2015, a phone call from comedian Dave Chappelle’s manager changed Yondr’s trajectory: the performer wanted to use the pouches at his shows, Dugoni said. Before long, Chappelle became an investor in the company. The association with the comedian gave Yondr a boost: Soon, scores of schools were signing up, including local ones. In the years before LAUSD’s ban, about 30 campuses in the district decided on their own to begin using the Yondr pouches.
Starting in early 2024, Dugoni said, public policy support for phone-free spaces increased significantly, leading school districts across the country to institute cellphone bans. Today, Yondr pouches are used by about 2 million students in all 50 states.
Dugoni said his company hears directly from students: Many thank Yondr for restoring some normalcy to their school days, so that they’re “actually able to make friends,” he said. But the company also gets “hate mail,” he conceded. “It’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Dugoni said of the missives. “You know, ‘You’re ruining my life, taking my phone.’ … It’s not all daisies.”
Enforcing the ban
LAUSD allocated about $7 million for schools to purchase equipment to enforce the cellphone policy, which also covers devices such as the Apple Watch and smart glasses. About 80% of the middle and high schools eligible for funding are using Yondr pouches, the company said.
Students at Uni High and other schools who are caught breaking the rules for the first time lose their phone for the rest of the day. If they are found in violation again, their device is confiscated — and their parent or guardian is notified and required to retrieve it on a designated day.
That last part is key, said Claudia Middleton, Uni High’s principal. Getting buy-in from parents — so that students are also held accountable at home — has helped smooth rough edges of the program’s debut.
Uni High Principal Claudia Middleton, right, speaks with students about their use of Yondr pouches.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The district has left the choreography of pouching — and policing — to the schools.
At Uni High, each morning, students arrive via the Texas Avenue campus’ main entrance, where school personnel watch as they place their phones and other devices in their pouches and seal them. At the end of the day, unlocking bases are placed at various exits.
Middleton said Uni High has found ways of identifying scofflaws. Take, for example, the process undertaken when a student, at the morning check-in, claims to not have a cellphone. Middleton said that the pupil’s parent or guardian is contacted and told what the teen has said. That roots out some of the rule flouters.
“We’ve actually had a couple of parents say, ‘What?! They do have it,” Middleton said with a laugh.
In the three weeks after the school of roughly 1,400 students began using the Yondr pouches, Middleton said, the administration had confiscated about 15 phones.
Mendoza, who noted that her average daily screen time has plummeted from about seven hours to as little as three, said none of her friends had ever had their phones taken away.
Senior Uleses Henderson, another student on the leadership council, said that underclassmen may feel that the Yondr program is “random,” but juniors and seniors grasp that “there has to be some type of enforcement with the phone.”
Student exit classrooms at Lennox Middle School, where Yondr pouches have been used since 2022.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“They’re definitely not in agreement with it,” Henderson said, “but there is an understanding of why it is happening.”
Thacker, however, complained that the ban has upended classes at her school where mobile phones are regularly used. She studies journalism and previously used her iPhone to record interviews. When the ban was instituted she had to buy a standalone recorder. “We are having to jump through a lot of random hoops,” she said.
Educators saw things differently.
Soon after the new policy went into effect, Paul Duke, Uni High’s dean of students, said that a teacher pulled him aside to tell him, incredulously, that students were actually paying attention to his lessons.
“Teachers,” Duke said, “are being listened to.”
A look into LAUSD’s future
Lennox Middle School Principal Lissett Pichardo talked about the scourge of cellphones on her South Bay campus as if it were an existential threat.
She said that upon return to in-person learning in fall 2021 after the pandemic had forced a retreat to distance learning, phones were a major contributor to an atmosphere that proved so toxic she considered leaving her job.
“The cellphones were gonna kill us. That was the worst year, professionally, of my life,” she said, explaining that the use of digital devices was rampant, despite already having a ban in place. Then there was the fighting.
Lennox Middle School Principal Lissett Pichardo reached out to Yondr after students’ cellphone use became unmanageable.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Students “would video tape each other [fighting] and they would AirDrop it to everyone,” Pichardo said. “It was terrible. I was like, ‘I’m gonna quit.’ ”
Instead, Pichardo reached out to Yondr and struck a deal with the company. Its pouches debuted at the middle school, which has 1,195 students, in fall 2022.
The changes were almost instantaneous. Kids became increasingly engaged in class. They socialized more and fought less, Pichardo said. Students shared similar sentiments with The Times.
“It makes me concentrate more on my work,” a girl said.
“The school would be different if everybody was on their phone,” a boy said. “There would be more drama and there would be fights on a daily basis.”
Yondr pouches are stored inside hanging cubbies in one Lennox Middle School classroom.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The strides made at Lennox Middle School over the last three years may give a sense of what’s in store for LAUSD schools.
“They’ll roll their eyes at first,” Dugoni said. “They’ll resist the idea — they’ve never known a world without a smartphone. Most of them will reluctantly admit after three or four weeks that they feel less anxious, that they enjoy not being on their phone.”