Most states now require school districts to restrict student cellphone use in school. But the Spokane School District in eastern Washington took the unusual step of pairing a cellphone ban with a dramatic expansion of extracurricular activities—a bid to get students to put down their devices and Engage IRL (in real life).
The district had 130 unique, district-sponsored activities in the 2022-23 school year, the one before this initiative began. That shot up to 1,024 this school year and counting.
That growth came with logistical challenges related to transportation, staffing and funding. But a year and a half in, the district is already seeing promising results.
Student engagement—as measured by participation in at least one activity—jumped more than 30 percentage points between the 2022-23 school year and the 2024-25 school year, the first year the program went into effect. And students who take part in clubs, sports, and other activities are more likely to come to school and more likely to pass their classes, according to district data.
About 20% of students who participate in athletics or activities were chronically absent this school year, compared with 34% of students who don’t take part in those activities. And last school year, nearly 11% more high school students who engaged in at least one activity passed all their classes compared with those who did not participate.
Education Week recently interviewed Adam Swinyard, the superintendent of the roughly 29,000-student district, during a visit to the Spokane school system. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about your thinking behind combining cellphone restrictions with a big increase in extracurriculars?
Something that we have been observing for the last 15 years is a steady decline in engagement of kids. We see that manifests itself in a variety of different ways, whether that’s chronic absenteeism, kids not coming to school, or kids coming to school but not participating in the class and the activities in the way that we would hope.
Research is quickly emerging that would substantiate that the amount of times that kids are on screens is a primary antecedent to disengagement among our youth. We’ve seen that play out across a variety of metrics since around the time the iPhone came out.
This technology and this evolution among our youth happened unimaginably fast. It has felt like the frog boiling in the pot, where you wake up one day and think, “Wow, things are different for kids. Kids don’t seem to have the same level of wellness and mental health that we’re accustomed to.”
And your response to that was what?
[We said], “Let’s shrink the amount of time that is devoted to being on a screen, and let’s replace that with in real life opportunities, whether that’s a club, an activity, a sport, whether you’re in elementary, middle or high school.” Every kid every day is doing something after school, and that was the start of our Engage in Real Life initiative.
It’s just been amazing how it has taken off. Our kids have turned out in unimaginable ways. We’re just bursting at the seams and almost every type of activity. We have high school clubs, we have board game clubs, we have fly fishing clubs, we have high schools that have seven or eight sub-varsity teams.
The research suggests attendance is improving, behaviors improving, and kids’ academic performances has gone up as well.
Do you think you would have seen those improved behavioral and learning outcomes by restricting cellphones but not upping extracurriculars?
Coupling the two together really has set the conditions where people are really able to get behind it, feel invested in it.
This is not just about an iPhone is distracting you from your science textbook. This is bigger than that.
We can set the right environment where kids see that in-person interaction is the best route to belonging and connection. That not only is going to be really important for them in their childhood, but [will help them] to grow into adults that value in-person, relationships and connections.
Not that there isn’t value in what an online experience can provide, but that should be a complement—not the core of the way in which a kid or a person is moving through the world.
What would you say to a district or school leader who says, ‘So they have a knitting club, and they have a fly-fishing club. That’s nice. But I’m sure the kids are still sneaking on their phones?’
I would say absolutely they’re still addicted, and absolutely they are going to try to look at it every chance that they get. If we know that being addicted to a device is detrimental to the well-being and the healthy growth and development of kids, then we should be looking for any practical strategy available to us to try to mitigate the amount of time that they are focused on that device.
We know this is the most formidable adversary competing for the attention of kids that we have ever faced. Billions and billions of dollars are invested in these devices being highly addictive.
So, what I would say is, “Yeah, our kids are absolutely taking a peek at their phones,” and that is infinitely better than us just saying, “Well, we’re just going to accept the current reality.”
What do you do in this district when a kid violates the no-cellphone-in-class rule?
When a kid takes out a device, we don’t put them through school discipline.
We say, “Hey, put your device away.” If they take it out again, we say, “All right, we’re going to take your device. You’re not in trouble. We’ll give it back to you at the end of the day. We’re not calling your parents. We’re not making a big deal out of it.”
We’ve tried to keep it away from discipline and away from the hierarchical power structure of discipline. We’ve tried to center it on, “That’s not good for you. It is not good and it is not healthy for you to be staring at that thing nonstop.”
What would be your advice to other school districts who might want make a similar investment in extracurriculars but worry they lack the resources?
Every community is different. What every community can offer in terms of transportation is different. What every community can offer in terms of programming is different. It can feel insurmountable, or it can feel like, well, based on my urban, suburban, or rural context, we can’t make this happen.
There are opportunities within [all] communities. School districts need to pursue those and invite people in to say, “We need every kid every day being active outside of school. What do we have available in our community? What programming, what facilities, what resources, what expertise, what exists in our community that we could offer to our kids because the school district cannot do it alone.”
