Kind of ironic that a smartphone is bad but a “text and call” phone is good. You can turn a smartphone into a text and call phone with parental controls. Maybe these schools should educate parents on them. I’m not even sure if they still sell any text and call phones in the US. The old ones will not work at least with the carrier changes iirc.

I will say that even with text and call phones of my generation we were just as bad. Texting t9 into hoodie pockets all through class. The same “mean girls” issues that people harp on with smartphones predate the tech. Even my grandparents had cruel popular kid cliques in school. And unlike internet age kids they had literally no outlet from it.