A North Carolina school has taken extreme measures to reduce the amount of time that teens spend on TikTok after being forced to remove their bathroom mirrors throughout the campus in an effort to get students to stop leaving class to film videos for the viral and addictive phone app.
Screen time has become a major concern for plenty of parents and educators all across America, with many wondering about the negative long-term effects that society may see due to the increasing number of kids that are raised in front of a screen or device. This massive step from Southern Alamance Middle School is the first of its kind to gain traction in the media, and many are watching to see how it plays out.
According to Les Atkins, the school system’s public relations officer, who spoke in a video that was uploaded to YouTube by WFMY, this solution had a clear goal in mind and a specific problem that the school intended to solve. He said, “Students were going to the bathroom for long periods of time and making TikTok videos.”
Interestingly, the solution of removing bathroom mirrors from the student bathrooms seems to have worked. Atkins says that the students are visiting the restrooms less frequently, and trips are shorter than before. He 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.”
This has been done in conjunction with a new digital hall pass system that the school has recently implemented. With it, administrators are able to see the bathroom usage by each student and analyze how much of the class teens are staying in the room for. With this information, the school district was able to both identify that there was a problem and see that the new solution of removing mirrors had a positive impact on students’ time in the classroom.
Atkins made it clear that this move was not seen as a punishment by administrators but rather a move that puts students in the best possible position to kick their phone and social media addictions and to learn more efficiently while in school. He explained, “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.”
Plenty of parents and concerned Americans have pointed out the growing problem of screen time among children. It is commonplace to walk into a restaurant and see a table of young kids all glued to their cellar devices, watching mindless short-form videos that are meant to overload the body’s dopamine system.
If this solution continues to work in the Southern Alamance Middle School in North Carolina, then be on the lookout for more schools around the country to take this seemingly drastic step in an attempt to protect their students from a phone addiction that scientists are beginning to learn is far more mentally destructive to an individual than previously understood.
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