Jasmine Anderson is an eighth grader at Martin Luther King junior Middle School in Richmond. They’re piloting yonder pouches to lock up cell phones and store them in a supervised backpack. Jasmine Armstead teaches eighth grade English. When you first started this, you put the phone in the pouch and you gave it back to the student? Yes. How did that work? It didn’t. It didn’t really work because they were always messing with the pouch, trying to open it, trying to open it, trying to break in it, because, again, they’re teenagers. Principal Annette Dabney says removing phones from the hands of her 500 students is the only solution. The engagement is up, um, at SOL. Test scores are up, which is fantastic. Um, disruption. The classes are down, teachers are able to teach. A recent study found that 95% of teens own a cell phone, and kids can receive up to 500 notifications a day, many during school hours. And more than half of students spend at least 43 minutes on their phone at school, roughly the same amount of time as a class period.