Principal Defends Cell Phone-Free School Policy After Viral Video (Exclusive)

A middle school principal’s take on cell phone bans led to her going viral on TikTok.

Katie Buffum’s joke about a hot topic in education — eliminating cell phone use during the school day — led to a recent TikTok spreading wide as parents, educators and students weigh in on bans that many schools nationwide are facing for the first time this year.

Buffum, principal of Woodland Park Middle School in Southern California, tells PEOPLE that her perspective on the matter comes with experience.

“I’m at Woodland Park Middle School, which is a middle school, in San Marcos Unified School District, which is part of San Diego County. It is my third year as a principal. Prior to this, I was at a K-8 school for about eight years as an assistant principal. Before that, I was an assistant principal at Woodland Park and an assistant principal at San Leo Middle School, and I was a teacher prior to that,” she tells PEOPLE.

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Having been a teacher, currently serving as an administrator and also being a parent has led to Buffum exploring all sides of the issue, something she’s grateful her school district has done as well.

“We started last year, right after winter break. We started the initiative by talking. Our district got together a group of students from all the levels and talked to them about it. They talked to parents. They talked to the school board. They got a lot of input that first semester, and then they came to a decision. And so, then we implemented it last year during the second semester, and then we’ve started again this semester,” she explains.

“I feel very lucky to be in a district that took input from all stakeholders and saw what they wanted, because if we didn’t… if we just implemented something without talking to anybody about it, I think we would have had a really upset community,” she continues. “Even this summer, they did it again with students and parents and families and the board to review what the policy was again to see if they wanted any changes. They all said no, so I think that was a big piece of it.”

As she got ready for the new school year, Buffum shared a TikTok joking about printing schedules for the students for the year.

“Realizing we will have to print over 1300 class schedules because students can’t use their phones to see their schedules and where to go each period on the first day of school,” she wrote on the video, where she puts her head in her hands as “It’s a Hard-Knock Life” from the Annie soundtrack plays.

Buffum explains that it was especially a joke because even before students lost the ability to have their phones during the day, they always got a paper copy of their schedule to start the year.

“This year, more kids definitely had a paper in hand, walking around looking for classes. That was very different. Last year, I didn’t even think of that because we were starting a new semester, and they already knew their classes were. But that was pretty cute.”

Implementing the no phones policy looks different in different places. In Buffum’s school, they tested a “parking lot,” with slots hanging in the front of the classroom where students could deposit and charge their phones while in class.

“We all decided that, we knew students were going to come with our phones, so we decided that cell phones had to be put away when the last bell for school starting rang, so we all decided that once that first bell went off, students knew they had to be put away. In class, if you take it out, first you get a warning. If they do it again, they get another warning, but they have to put in the parking lot. If there’s a third warning, for them to realize this is serious and something we can’t have, we call parents to come pick up the phone,” she explains.

The whole semester, just one parent had to come collect a phone. For that student, they worked out a policy where the phone would be dropped off at the front office at the beginning of the day and collected from there at the end.

“What was interesting was, we noticed that it was our eighth graders that really struggled more with it than our younger grades, because they’ve been in schools with phones for longer.”

It was also important to educators and parents that students understood the reasoning behind the decision.

“We made a lot of videos trying to explain to them why we were doing it because the kids did not understand why we were doing it. They felt it was punishment towards them — that we just didn’t feel that we couldn’t trust them, that we didn’t think that they were responsible enough. At the middle school level, they really feel like they’re responsible. We made a lot of videos and talked about the purpose of it and why it was happening. It was across all the middle schools. I did not have one parent who had anything negative to say about the policy. They were very supportive of it.”

As it went into action, teachers, administrators, and students found themselves troubleshooting problems that would arise in real time.

“Some students really enjoy taking a picture of when something is due, so they would take pictures of the whiteboards. They were like, ‘Well, I need to be able to take pictures.’ We talked about learning different strategies like writing it down in their notebook, so that was a new thing for them. We also have Chromebooks, so we talked about taking some pictures with their Chromebooks. It’s all about seeing a problem and being like, ‘Let’s find different ways to do it.’ ”

As a parent to a middle schooler, Buffum admits it took some getting used to on that side of things. “I texted him because I had forgotten that I wanted him to know he was being picked up by somebody. And I’m like, ‘Why isn’t he responding?’ As a parent, I had to remember, ‘Oh, my gosh, he’s supposed to be in class. He shouldn’t be looking at his phone.’ All of us parents had to adjust, and it was a difficult one to swallow, because we all want to get a hold of our children quickly.”

The concerns of parents who fear the worst have also been taken into consideration by the school in how they implemented this policy.

“If there’s ever an emergency where the parent needs their child, we’ve always been proactive in going to get a child and helping where we can. Children with an IEP that need to have their phones have special stickers so that teachers know why they have phones, but it isn’t drawing attention to it from other students. If God forbid anything ever happened where an intruder comes into our school, our district doesn’t lock up the phones. They are allowed to be in their backpacks so in the event of an emergency, they are more than welcome to use it. I do understand that there’s a lockdown like, even if my child was in a lockdown, I feel comfortable knowing that his phone is in his backpack, if he needs me.”

So far, Buffum has noticed that there’s been “less drama” among the students, another welcome conclusion from the removal of phones.

“There’s less filming of each other. Filming each other without permission has become a problem, and now that’s less so,” she explains.

“We also hope that means less cyberbullying because they don’t have those videos and aren’t online to do anything negative during the school day. We’re hoping for more concentration because a lot of the time, students think about what they’re missing in chats or on social media,” she continues.

Buffum notes, “That’s one reason I started to do TikTok. I wanted to show them that social media could be a positive platform and not an area where people are harassing people or putting them down or talking bad about people. It can be a way to just have fun.”

Moving forward into their first full school year with new phone policies in place, Buffum is hopeful.

“I hope for more social interactions, more kids getting along. We’ve noticed they’re moving around more at lunch, and we’ve added music and are trying different things to get them involved. It’s nice to have eight hours a day where they’re not getting influenced by anything and are staying in a positive light, while in school.”