And now, at least two Portland high schools are asking families to consider helping to foot the bill.
Kotek’s order, formalized about a month ago, included no funding to stand up the new policy, which needs to be adopted by school boards by Halloween, and operational by the first school day of 2026.
It will be a significant shift for many schools that have typically allowed students to use their phones during passing periods and lunch and have left enforcement of an “off and away” policy during class time up to individual teachers.
Nationally, one of the more popular mechanisms to cut down on student phone use during the school day have been lockable pouches, manufactured by a California-based company called Yondr, which cost around $30 per student. The pouches can only be opened via unlocking stations that are made available to students at the end of the school day.
The pouches are already in use at a number of middle and high schools around Oregon, including in Lincoln County, at the North Clackamas School District and at Grant and Cleveland High Schools in Portland, which piloted their use during the 2024-2025 school year.
For the 2025-2026 school year, it will be up to individual schools and their leaders at Portland Public Schools to decide whether or not they want to use Yondr pouches or a different strategy to comply with district and state rules prohibiting student phone use, said Isaac Cardona, the district’s chief of schools. Portland Public Schools instituted an “off and away all day” rule around phone use last winter, well in advance of Kotek’s executive order.
At least two Portland high schools — Lincoln High School downtown and Franklin High School in Southeast Portland — have already asked caregivers for donations to offset the costs of purchasing Yondr pouches. Wells High School, in Southwest Portland, has informed parents that students there will be issued the pouches in the fall, but has yet to request payment help.
“The cost for the initial purchase and startup for Yondr pouches is sizable,” Franklin leaders wrote in a recent note sent home to families of incoming students.
It will cost about $53,000 to provide Franklin High’s nearly 1,900 students with the pouches, without factoring in the cost of any replacements, officials said. Lincoln High’s total will be about $46,000 for its 1,550 students and Wells High’s outlay will be around $47,000 for its 1,570 students.
Lincoln High School told its families and caregivers that the school’s foundation will offset at least some of the cost of providing pouches to its students, but that it is seeking their “community support” to pay off the balance.
There are less expensive approaches, some parents and teachers have pointed out, though the widely used repurposed shoe caddies — in which students place phones in at the start of class and retrieve them when the bell rings — don’t lend themselves to the bell-to-bell ban on phone use.
Kotek’s order makes Oregon the 27th state to regulate the use of devices during the school day, a movement spurred by widespread concern over both academic distractions and the mental health impacts of the constant exposure to social media on developing adolescent brains.
The order does include some exceptions for students who need their phones for medical reasons, for special needs students who may rely on their phones for assistive technology and for other exemptions approved by school building administrators.
Opinions about the plans are mixed. Many teachers and parents have hailed the ban, while other caregivers have said they want to be able to reach their children in case of emergency.
Aaron Ramsey, who is a teacher at Springwater Trail High School in the Gresham-Barlow School District and whose son, Ben, will be a senior at Franklin High this fall, acknowledged that phones are a distraction for many students and can lead to power struggles with teachers.
But staff at Springwater Trail had been working hard to create universal expectations that phones were not typically allowed during class time, with consistent disciplinary support from the building’s administration when students violated the policy, he said.
“For me as a teacher, one thing I want is to help students self-regulate,” he said. “We want students to learn how to use a phone, because obviously they will be using a phone a lot when they are out of school. Instead, what we have here is a one-size-fits-all solution with large outlays.”
Ben Russell said he was skeptical that the Yondr pouches would be more than a short-term deterrent, and thought his fellow students would find ways around the requirement, from telling administrators that they’d left their phones in their cars to putting graphing calculators or other similarly shaped items into the pouches as substitutes for phones.
“What I heard from friends at Grant is that at the start, they work hard to implement and enforce it, and make sure people have the phones in the pouches, they are checking your bags,” he said. “But eventually too much work goes into that, they stop enforcing it as much and nothing changes at all.”
Others contend that the mere presence of the locking pouches can help reinforce the rules on phone use, a tool that serves as a physical reminder of the school’s expectations, even during lunch and passing periods.
“While we believe that phones have great utility, we have found that learning and social behavior improve significantly when students are fully engaged with their teachers and classmates,” administrators at Lincoln wrote to families in a letter announcing the new pouch policy.
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