For generations, students have cut class to hang out in the restrooms. It used to mean they were smoking or flushing cherry bombs. I remember when they took the doors off the bathroom stalls to try and curb drug use in my school.
But today there's a whole new kind of addiction that has kids hanging out in the bathrooms: TikTok.
Southern Alamance Middle School in Graham, North Carolina, took the drastic step to remove the mirrors from their bathrooms because their students refused to stop cutting class to make TikTok videos.
"Students were going to the bathroom for long periods of time and making TikTok videos," Les Atkins, the public relations officer for the school system said.
Getting any sort of response to a TikTok video has been shown to release dopamine in the pleasure centers of the brain, which is highly addictive, and can lead to depression as the brain grows more tolerant of the happy hormone.
Taking away the mirrors was essentially the equivalent of interrupting a drug supply chain, and the school has seen results.
Atkins said,
"Not as many visits to the bathroom, not staying as long and students are held accountable and then when there's accountability you see a great difference.
"We're trying to educate students: we all have cell phones now. We have to learn to use them. We have to learn when to put them down."
Other schools are going a different route and banning phones altogether.
Newburgh Free Academy in New York banned phones altogether. Not only did students stop making TikTok videos in the bathroom, but they started talking to each other.
"There was laughter in the lunchroom again.
"It's a game-changer; it's night and day. I saw kids' faces again," said Dennis Maher, an English teacher.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says,
"Smartphones are basically kryptonite for learning," he said. "When children have a phone in their pocket, and most schools say you have to keep your phone in your pocket, you can't use it during class, is like saying in a drug detox clinic, 'You can keep your heroin in your pocket, just don't shoot up.'"
"If kids have access to a phone, they will text, they will check their social media, they will not pay attention the teacher or to each other in person," he said.
While taking away the mirrors in the bathroom may have solved one problem, letting kids have phones in schools at all will likely solve very little.
On the other hand, we would never know about half the stuff happening in our schools if kids didn't have their phones with them.
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