In a high school cafeteria here on a recent snowy afternoon, a 10-foot stone giant backed by magical warriors fended off a goblin army. Nearby, a Bloodsport-inspired tournament featuring sentient trees was underway.

These imaginary battles—waged by students in Joel E. Ferris High School’s wildly popular Dungeons & Dragons club—are part of the Spokane school district’s real-life war against a foe many educators consider more insidious than any villain the role-playing game can conjure up: cellphone dependency.

Spokane, along with scores of districts nationwide, banned cellphones in middle and elementary schools at the beginning of the 2024-25 school year. High schoolers must keep their phones away during class but are permitted to use them at lunch and at passing times.

Such bans are increasingly commonplace. At least 33 states and the District of Columbia require districts to place restrictions on cellphones during the school day, although research on whether banning cellphones contributes to better academic outcomes—or more improved social skills—is still emerging.

Typically, districts simply prohibit the devices that educators see as distracting students from learning and engaging with their peers and teachers.

Spokane’s leaders went further.

They created or expanded scores of clubs, sports teams, and other extracurricular activities so students could redirect the time and attention they once devoted to doomscrolling to activities in real life (or IRL, in digital parlance).

The strategy, made possible in part by a three-year, $3.4 million donation from a local nonprofit organization, has resulted in a nearly eightfold increase in school-sponsored activities and extracurriculars across all grade levels.

Student engagement—as measured by participation in at least one activity—shot up more than 30 percentage points between the 2022-23 school year and the 2024-25 school year, the first year the program was in effect. These involved students are less likely to be chronically absent and pass their classes than students who don’t participate in extracurriculars, according to district data.

The goal is to give students “a sense of belonging” to a world outside their device’s 6-inch screen, Adam Swinyard, the district’s superintendent, said in a wide-ranging interview last month.

“This is not just about, an iPhone is distracting you from your science textbook. This is bigger than that,” Swinyard said. “We want 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.”

To be sure, Swinyard and other district leaders readily acknowledge it will take more than girls’ wrestling and multicultural clubs to curb cellphone addiction.

And some teachers are unhappy that the rapid expansion of extracurriculars—which cost the roughly 29,000-student district more than $1.1 million over the past two years, on top of the grant—diverts resources that could be funneled to more traditional support for teaching and learning.

Do students think it’s working? The answer, from Rylin Frasca-Roberts, a shaggy-haired Ferris junior in the D&D club: a grudging, qualified yes.

“My freshman year, my sophomore year, whenever I would be done with school, I would just go on the bus, go back home, do homework, and then rot away on my phone,” Rylin said.

“Now, well, I still do that Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays,” he deadpanned. “But on club days, I’m here. I’m playing games and I’m being social, which is something that freshman-year me would have abhorred.”

But Teddy Osborne, a senior who carried his phone around at lunch the following day, had a typical teenage response to educators telling him to get offline and get involved: “Being forced to do it makes us want to do it less, to be honest,” said Teddy, an honors student who embraced band and sports before the initiative began.

Spokane strives to create an activity for every type of student

The district had 130 unique, district-sponsored activities in the 2022-23 school year, the year before this initiative began. That soared to 1,024 this school year and counting.

The offerings go well beyond the typical National Honors Society and drama club. The district strives to create a varied and enticing enough smorgasbord of activities so that every student in its 58 schools can find their place.

There are cooking clubs for aspiring chefs. Knitting clubs for the crafty. Community service clubs for do-gooders. One middle school offers a welding club.

The district responds to student requests, establishing a Bible club at Glover Middle School when kids expressed interest, for instance.

There’s also been a boom in what the district calls “subvarsity” sports, essentially club teams for students who want to play but may not have the time or athletic talent to be on the official varsity team.

The Dungeons & Dragons club is home to plenty of kids who, like Rylin, proudly admit they aren’t natural joiners.

“You want to be a nerd in an environment full of a lot of other nerds?” Rylin said proudly. “Come to the nerd club. This is the nerd club!”

To facilitate all this, the district has employees who serve as “engagement navigators"—one for each of its five feeder patterns. They fill a unique position akin to a combination concierge, coach, and social worker.

The navigators make sure all students understand the district’s extracurricular offerings, ensure high-interest clubs get off the ground, and help find arrangements for students who may want to join an activity but lack transportation.

Principal sees nixing phones and upping extracurriculars as going on ‘offense’

Some students can’t stay after school because they take care of a younger sibling or work to support their families.

Others have transportation challenges that the engagement navigators, extra buses devoted to after-school programs, and the district’s coordination with the city transit system haven’t been able to work around.

So, in some schools, the push to help students explore IRL interests has become part of the school day.

Ferris, for instance, offers clubs during lunch, including an angler’s club for fishing fans and pickup basketball.

Glover Middle School hosts lunchtime tennis and bowling tournaments. Students can also play board games, ping pong, or old-school video games like Frogger and Donkey Kong.

“If they’re gonna play a video game, I always tell the kids, it has to be from when I was a kid,” said Michael Stark, the school’s principal.

Glover has also turned its morning advisory period over to clubs. Students can do arts and crafts, play volleyball or indoor basketball, or sing karaoke with Stark.

That’s helped whet kids’ appetites for activities, enticing some to join after-school clubs that they may not have otherwise considered, Stark said.

Stark expected the shift from cellphones to be “structural,” he said. Instead, it’s been “cultural.”

“Before we had this laser-like focus on getting kids off their stupid devices and giving them more real-world things to do, we spent all day long playing defense,” Stark said. “We were finding out about these fights that happened through social media. We were doing lots of behavior monitoring after the fact.”

With the cellphone ban—which is strict in middle schools, where students can’t even use their phones during lunch—and the explosion of extracurriculars, the district is “on offense,” he said.

At Glover, activities became so popular that they strained the school’s budget. Stark estimates the school paid about $20,000 in additional money last school year to run the clubs, including stipends of $28 an hour for teachers who work overtime to lead the activities.

“We grossly underestimated the amount of kids that were going to be interested,” Stark said. “I can’t think of a better problem to have.”

To cover the extra costs, the school made cuts to photocopying and other “stuff that doesn’t make a difference for kids,” he added.

Community partners are key to the activity expansion

To help fuel this extracurricular explosion, the district’s list of community partnerships shot up to 35 organizations, from six before the initiative began.

Many of these partners, such as Spokane Pickleball, a nonprofit that aims to expand the sport in the city, and Inland Chess, a local chess organization, provide support and resources for clubs.

The district has also reached out to the community for in-kind donations and other resources. In some cases, the response has been overwhelming: Several schools got so much donated yarn for their knitting clubs—a popular extracurricular option—that they had to devise a system for keeping track of it.

Perhaps the most important partnership, however, remains with LaunchNW, the local nonprofit organization that provided the roughly three-year grant to start the initiative.

That funding covers the salaries of both the district’s five engagement navigators, and another half dozen navigators centered at organizations around the community. Those community-based navigators help support activities for students in Spokane public schools, even though they aren’t employed by the district itself.

For instance, through Manzanita House Spokane, a local organization that works with refugee families, high schoolers from several schools have formed a cricket club that now competes against kids in other cities.

Cricket, a bat-and-ball sport that shares some DNA with baseball, isn’t prominent in the United States. But it’s popular in some of the students’ countries of origin, including Afghanistan and India.

“These kids generally would not have been engaged in after-school activities, because it isn’t in their wheelhouse,” said Ben Small, the executive director of LaunchNW and a former superintendent of the nearby Central Valley school district.

LaunchNW also developed a one-stop-shop portal to help parents register their children for activities, including those offered by community organizations that aren’t affiliated with the district.

Students who participate in extracurricular activities have better grades and attendance

While that platform will remain available even after the grant largely wraps up in the 2026-2027 school year, it’s unclear how Spokane will continue major parts of the Engage IRL initiative without this outside financing. Small said his organization is committed to helping the district pinpoint sustainable funding sources.

Still, even now, finding money and resources for an ever-blooming menu of clubs and sports teams remains a hurdle, school leaders say.

“Finances have been a challenge, as we add more clubs,” said Ivan Corley, the principal of Lewis and Clark High School. “We’re struggling at times figuring out how to help teachers continue something that kids are enjoying.”

Money isn’t the only limited resource. At some schools, it’s often the same few teachers volunteering to lead clubs.

What’s more, the $28 an hour stipend given to teachers for the time they spend running a club doesn’t extend to the hours devoted to planning activities or finding resources, such as calling around to local ethnic restaurants for in-kind food donations to a multicultural club.

Swinyard also knows teachers have raised concerns about money spent on clubs at a time when the district’s budget is tight.

“We know what the research says about classroom instruction and we’re diverting resources to extracurricular,” Swinyard acknowledged.

The district still invests in more traditional strategies to improve teaching and learning, including an emphasis on professional learning communities, he said. But in his mind, steering resources to extracurriculars is “one of, if not the most important thing we can do right now,” Swinyard said.

“We can have the best curriculum and instruction, we can have the best classroom programs available, but if kids are not engaged, if they’re not coming to school, or if they’re coming to school and not feeling a connection and a desire to participate, it doesn’t matter how good instruction is.”

Swinyard noted that disciplinary infractions are down since the launch of both the cellphone ban and the Engage IRL initiative—and not just for behavior problems tied to cellphones.

About 20% of students who participate in athletics or activities were chronically absent this school year, compared with 34% of unengaged students.

Academic achievement is also higher among kids who participate in extracurriculars. Last school year, 10.6% more high school students who engaged in at least one activity passed all their classes compared with those who did not participate.

Cellphones are a ‘formidable adversary’ for educators, superintendent says

Teachers—and especially students—are quick to point out that some teachers are a lot stricter than others in enforcing the no-phones rule.

“People are still on their phones under their desks, and the teachers notice, but they don’t really care much as long as people are getting their work done,” said Teddy, the Ferris High junior.

School leaders know students are getting around the rules. But at minimum, the no-phone policy is a stumbling block to constant digital communication, said Heidi Hayes, Glover’s assistant principal.

“They keep their phones away for the most part,” Hayes said. “They sneak them into the bathroom and text sometimes, but it’s less immediate for them.”

Swinyard didn’t expect the initiative to suddenly silence the siren song of cellphones, which he described as the “most formidable adversary competing for the attention of kids that we have ever faced.”

And the district isn’t particularly punitive when students break the rules and check their phone in class.

The first time that happens, teachers will give them a warning. The second time, they’ll have their phone taken away for the rest of the day. When students violate the rules habitually—say, for 10 days in a row—school leaders may get parents involved, but that happens rarely, Swinyard said.

“It’s not a power struggle,” he said. “We’ve tried to keep it away from discipline and center it on, ‘that’s not good for you, and it is not healthy for you to be staring at that thing nonstop.’”

Still, it’s an open question whether Spokane’s strategy actually leads to less time on screens once students return home, one expert noted.

Increasing extracurriculars to get kids off their devices is a “really amazing thing to do,” said Merve Lapus, the vice president for education outreach and partnerships at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that studies the connection between youth and technology.

But he’s not sure if participating in a club or activity will necessarily have any lasting impact on students’ digital habits.

Has the extracurricular experience “taught [students] anything about why they shouldn’t be on their phone?” Lapus wondered. “Maybe not. [Maybe] it’s just a delay, right?”

But in school, as students look away from screens and engage with their peers in person, the hallways and cafeterias are noisier.

“I guess it felt a little bit more controlled,” back when kids were on their phones, said Stark, the Glover principal, as he ran karaoke club during advisory period.

He paused, listening as kids belted out standards like Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Christmas carols, to raucous applause.

Then he added, “I don’t mind the noise. It’s the sound of being a 14-year-old.”