Jonathan Haidt's book blamed smartphones for gutting an entire generation of teenagers.
Kansas answered that warning with a statewide law and $150,000 worth of locked boxes.
But one Missouri classroom already lived through this exact experiment months before Kansas ever tried it.
Wyandotte High School Turned Phone Collection Into a Morning Ritual
Walk into Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas, this month and you will see teenagers doing something no one filmed five years ago.
They are lining up before the first bell.
One by one, they are locking their own phones into wall-mounted storage units.
The devices stay locked until the last bell rings.
No exceptions for lunch.
No exceptions for passing periods in the hallway.
Unified School District 500 spent $150,000 building this system after Kansas lawmakers passed House Bill 2299 this year.
Governor Laura Kelly signed the bill into law in March, and it took effect statewide with the new school year.
The law bans phones, smartwatches, and earbuds for every public and accredited private school student in Kansas.
Bell to bell, no matter how bored a teenager gets during a substitute's lecture.
Conservative parents have said for years that kids need this.
Kansas just became one of the states willing to pay for it in cash instead of just talking about it.
Missouri Already Ran This Experiment and the Results Are In
Kansas is not guessing about what happens when you take the phone away.
Missouri passed its own bell-to-bell ban in 2025, a full year ahead of Kansas.
Missouri's hallways saw fewer fights once the phones disappeared.
Teachers watched student anxiety drop the second the group-chat drama stopped buzzing in kids' pockets between classes.
Some students called the whole thing flat-out boring.
Boring is exactly what conservative parents have been begging schools to bring back.
Kansas is not alone in following Missouri's lead.
A majority of states already restrict or ban phones during the school day, and Kansas just joined a list that keeps growing.
The Paragon Institute dug through the research on these bans and found one clear pattern.
Full-day bans like Kansas just adopted beat the watered-down versions that only ban phones during class periods.
Even the Washington Times, reviewing that same academic research, confirmed the bans help students focus in class.
Teachers and parents already knew that.
A classroom without phones is a calmer classroom, and no eggheaded study was ever going to tell them different.
Big Tech Spent a Decade Wiring Your Grandkids' Brains and Kansas Just Fought Back
This is the part that should make every grandparent furious.
Silicon Valley built apps specifically designed to keep a fourteen year old staring at a screen for hours.
School boards let those devices dominate the classroom for a full decade before anyone acted.
Jonathan Haidt did not write The Anxious Generation as a partisan attack on Democrats or Republicans.
He wrote it because rates of teen anxiety and depression exploded right alongside smartphone adoption, and he had the data to prove it.
Kansas taxpayers are now writing six-figure checks to build a wall Big Tech should never have made necessary.
Parents did not fail their kids here.
Apple, Google, and every app developer chasing screen-time engagement metrics did.
Kansas is the latest state forced to spend real money cleaning up Silicon Valley's mess.
If Missouri's first year is any sign, the kids locking up their phones every morning at Wyandotte High School are about to get their attention spans back.
Sources:
- Office of Governor Laura Kelly, "Governor Kelly Signs Bipartisan Bill Banning Cell Phone Use During School Day," Kansas Office of the Governor, March 19, 2026.
- KCTV5 Staff, "Kansas Banned Phones at School. Here's What Happens to Your Kid's Device," KCTV5, August 10, 2026.
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch Staff, "Missouri School Cellphone Ban: Fewer Fights, Less Anxiety, More Boredom for Students," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2026.
- Washington Times Staff, "School Cellphone Bans Help Students Focus but Have Little Impact on Test Scores, New Research Shows," Washington Times, May 6, 2026.
- Paragon Institute, "Banning Smartphones in Schools: Review of the Literature Shows Positive Impact," Paragon Institute, January 2026.
- NBC News Staff, "Half of US States Now Have Laws Banning or Regulating Cellphones in Schools, With More to Follow," NBC News, 2025.
- Jonathan Haidt, "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness," Penguin Press, 2024.
