A School District Crafts Student Cell Phone Policy with RSD

Cell phone use in schools is one of the most contentious, divisive issues facing communities across the country. Newburyport, MA, was no different.

“There was a group of parents in town, part of a Heads Up, Phones Down coalition,” recalls Middle School teacher Eric Schildge. “They had been coming to school board [sic] meetings for several months. [They were] advocating for the school, the high school in particular but the district more broadly, to take a more assertive position on getting cell phones out of schools—bell-to-bell bans, really getting rid of them as much as possible. And the approach was what you can imagine from a school board [sic] public comment: It was advocacy for a position.”

But the district was getting nowhere, and community members were becoming more entrenched in their positions. “I started saying, ‘I think we need to do something about this. People are not talking to each other; people are not listening to each other,’” said parent and School Committee member Sarah Hall. “I had parents calling me, showing up to these meetings. We needed to get everyone in the same room.”

“Being in administration for a long time,” said Superintendent Sean Gallagher, “I’ve seen the public discourse every year. It gets worse and worse. I grew up in the eighties, when you had Tip O’Neill from Massachusetts and Ronald Reagan. You couldn’t think of two people with more different views, but they could have these discussions and dialogues. It was always about the issues, never about them personally. Today, we’ve flipped that. It’s all about one-up. It’s about the insults.”

Gallagher wanted a more inclusive process, one that would make sure students, teachers, caregivers, and community members all had the chance to have their voices heard. He also knew that the traditional approaches—town halls, surveys, or public meetings—could exacerbate the growing sense of alienation and division.

“Surveys and all of that are nice, but when you send out surveys, you’re only getting part of it,” said Superintendent Gallagher. “We really want to get to the bottom of an issue. That’s where we would use constructive dialogue. When you can hear equally from teachers, students, community members, then everyone’s having input, and your solution to a problem is going to be so much better than what you could ever get through a survey or anecdotal evidence.”

Four sets of hands holding cell phones at a table

“If we get this right, we’re training our kids for when they go and become adults to realize there is a better way to deal with conflict. This is about teaching people a way to engage in these conversations that can be divisive but in a way that’s productive—and everybody leaves the table feeling valued.”

Andy Wulf, Principal

Newburyport Public High School (MA)

The crux of the conversation

Because the district had already worked with Essential Partners, they had the right tools. Gallagher could turn to Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD) to navigate the cell phone use policy discussion, providing a space for every community member to be heard—and to really hear one another. The goal, said Newburyport High School Principal Andy Wulf, was “to push out the noise so we can get to the crux of the conversation.”

Students and educators at both the Middle and High Schools had been trained to design and facilitate RSD. Dialogues had been held at the schools, and RSD had been adapted to strengthen parent-teacher meetings as well as internal evaluation processes. They even had experience using RSD to address another hotly contested issue: the criteria for naming valedictorians and salutatorians.

“We’re going to utilize our constructive dialogue with our community members, with our parents, the students, the faculty,” Gallagher said, “so we can land in a place that's good for Newburyport Public Schools.”

In February 2025, the district launched a three-month planning process for a dialogue on student cell phone use. The planning committee had eleven members, including five students. A district-wide survey was administered by the city, while planning committee members conducted one-on-one interviews with twenty-nine community members—students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community members.

On May 13, 2025, community members gathered in the high school gym for dialogue. Sixteen tables hosted six or seven participants and one facilitator each, for a total of seventy-eight attendees. Each table included at least one student, one teacher, and one parent.

“People came in with those strong convictions,” Superintendent Gallagher explained, “but they left happy because they got to express how they feel and why they feel that way but understand how we had to find some common ground.”

The dialogues themselves invited multiple perspectives that complicated a once binary conversation. Concerns about cell phone use were paired with concerns about being able to reach students in an emergency. Hopes for engagement in class were held alongside acknowledgment of the complex lives students held outside class.

Schildge noted that “a lot of people left [the dialogue] with that sense of ‘oh, this is much more of a complex and nuanced issue than I thought.’” School dialogue coordinator Lynne Cote agreed: “It was an eye-opening experience for anyone who was there to feel like this is a different way to talk about a difficult subject. I did feel that when they left that dialogue, they felt lighter than when they walked in.”

Dialogue for More Effective Policymaking

Drawing from the accumulated feedback, a new cell phone use policy was drafted and presented at a School Committee meeting. Two of the planning committee members who had served as dialogue facilitators were part of the presenting team. The School Committee considered the proposal, suggested adjustments, and endorsed its adoption by the district.

“It was the ultimate achievement in the process because we had just put in all this work for months on end,” student facilitator Tommy Rich recalls. “The School Committee was really receptive to it because they knew what was going on.”

Cote remembered the words of a School Committee member who had strongly supported Heads Up, Phones Down, who said, “This process has been incredible, and I am so pleased with the work you guys did.”

“I didn’t get my entire way, but I still feel really great about the process and the outcome. I talked with other parents, and most of them were the exact same. We feel that this is good, better than we thought it would be. The buy-in is very high. The listening didn’t change what I wanted to happen, but it definitely changed how strongly I felt about it happening.”

Kristen Vicente, parent

Newburyport Public Schools (MA)

“The buy-in is very high.”

Importantly, the dialogue process facilitated broader community support for the final cell phone policy. “If the school had just said, ‘here’s our new cell phone policy,’ it would have been hideous,” said Cote. “The principal, the superintendent, they would have had so many phone calls. I think our process eliminated that.”

Kristen Vicente, a parent and former educator who served on the planning committee, said: “I feel good about the policy, but would I have changed parts of it? Sure, but I’m ninety percent happy with where it got to, and I think that’s amazing in policymaking. If at the beginning we just said, ‘This is the policy because we’re going to do it,’ I think we could have got to the same end, but I think we would have had less buy-in, more pushback, more behaviors, more drama around the actual decision.”

“It was a very civil way of disagreeing with other people and still showing respect toward them because of the intense guidelines for something that is so hotly debated,” Vicente added. “I didn’t get my entire way, but I still feel really great about the process and the outcome. I talked with other parents, and most of them were the exact same. We feel that this is good, better than we thought it would be. The buy-in is very high. The listening didn’t change what I wanted to happen, but it definitely changed how strongly I felt about it happening.”

The dialogue process was so crucial that, in the end, Superintendent Gallagher reflected, “It really wasn’t even the policy that was talked about [at the School Committee meeting]—it was the process.”

He elaborated, “The parents and the school community members thought where we landed with the policy is great, but it was the entire process that we took the whole community through, that’s where we were receiving the accolades. In the beginning, some didn’t believe what we were saying, but by the time we got to [the end of] that entire process, they were very satisfied with how we handled it versus maybe some other districts.”

The final policy, adopted for the 2025-2026 school year, allows students to use cell phones before school, during their lunch period, and after school. During class hours, no student cell phone use is allowed. Students are allowed to keep their cell phones turned off and on their persons.

Ongoing Listening and Training the Next Generation

This is one of many ways that Newburyport Public Schools’ “culture of listening” has paid off.

As assistant district superintendent Lisa Furlong said, “A cycle of listening creates connection, but connection also allows more listening. It’s been a way to walk that talk. If you’re all sitting at a table, we’re connected. We’re listening. Iterations [of RSD] create that culture.”

Schildge pointed to the role of district leaders as they identified the issue and then prescribed the appropriate response—dialogue.“In a lot of districts, the response to those public comments might have been to say, ‘Let’s acquiesce to their demands or try to prevent them from dictating school district policy, or let’s craft a policy to placate these parents and address their concerns.’” But in Newburyport, district leaders said that what was needed was more listening.

“This generation that we’re educating,” said Gallagher, “if they can be masters in constructive dialogue, then the whole world is going to be a better place.”

“If we get this right, we’re training our kids for when they go and become adults to realize there is a better way to deal with conflict,” said Principal Wulf. “This is about teaching people a way to engage in these conversations that can be divisive but in a way that’s productive—and everybody leaves the table feeling valued.”