“It’s like they don’t trust us,” says Eva King, a 14-year-old pupil at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, DC. Deal’s administration has banned mobile phones during the entire school day. Pupils must store their devices inside Yondr pouches — grey padded cases that supposedly can be opened only with a special tool. Adults unlock the pouches with special magnets as pupils leave for the day.

Unsurprisingly, pupils have hacked the system. (“What do you expect?” Eva says. “We’re middle-schoolers.”) The girls recite a list of workarounds. Those magnets have become hot commodities, and a few have gone missing. Pupils have been seen banging pouches open in toilets.

Debates about teenagers’ access to phones and their use in schools have heated up lately. Some state legislatures in America are passing laws to stop phones from being used in classrooms, without banning them from schools altogether. A popular book published in March, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, has drawn fresh attention to evidence that social media, mostly accessed through smartphones, may be to blame for a sharp rise in anxiety, depression and self-harm among young people today.

Some researchers are unconvinced that phones are causing mental illness. Although America and Britain have reported a rise in problems as social-media use has surged, not all rich countries have had similarly correlated increases. “Adolescence is influenced by multiple things (sic),” says Margarita Panayiotou, a researcher at the University of Manchester. “It would be unrealistic to expect that one thing — social media — is driving adolescent mental health.”

Most parents want their children to have phones available at school. In February, the National Parents’ Union, an advocacy group, polled 1,506 public-school parents and found that a majority think that pupils should be allowed to use phones during free time. Larry McEwen, a parent at Deal and the school’s basketball coach, agrees. He believes pupils should have phones for emergencies. He and Eva King cited a lockdown last year at a nearby school because of a gun scare. That was when having phones came in handy.

Yet the devices are plainly disruptive. Pupils can receive more than 50 notifications during a school day, according to a study of 203 children by Common Sense Media, a non-profit group based in San Francisco. Teachers complain that pupils watch YouTube and use other apps in class. Phones can be instruments of bullying, and pupils have been secretly videographed while using toilets or undressing in locker rooms. These days, the notorious schoolyard fight can be organised by phone.

It is also clear that mobile phones can undermine learning. Several studies have found that their use decreases concentration in school, and the phones don’t only affect the user. “There’s a second-hand-smoke effect,” says Sabine Polak, a founder of the Phone-Free Schools Movement, another advocacy group.

New state laws seek to enforce phone-free classrooms while keeping pupils and parents connected. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a law last year that bans the use of mobile phones by pupils in class, and a similar law in Indiana is due to go into effect this month. Other states are considering bills along the same lines. These moves are distinct from the more ubiquitous push for legislation aimed at protecting children from social media (according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 30 states and Puerto Rico are debating laws designed to protect children on the internet).

Emerging parents power

As US campus confrontations evaporate with the summer break, a key but mostly behind-the-scenes constituency — parents of students — is flexing its power in ways that could be critical in shaping the long-term effects and future course of free speech uprisings on campuses. Many US parents — especially those with substantial financial and political clout — have been limiting or even dictating their children’s college acceptance decisions based on their own protest-related perspectives. Some have begun filing lawsuits against institutions over their responses to the protests.

The protests have largely involved students demanding protection for Palestinian civilians suffering and dying under Israeli military bombardment in Gaza. Parents can be found on both sides of that divide – some complaining that college presidents have not done enough to prevent classroom disruption, and others arguing that police power and institutional sanctions have been unfairly wielded against non-violent demonstrators.

From a legal perspective, the parents of student protesters who were arrested or suspended appear to have the stronger position, says Robert Kleinfeldt, a Florida lawyer who handles First Amendment (freedom of speech) cases.

The argument in such cases, says Kleinfeldt, is that the college or university broke its contract with its students by unfairly denying them the experience they purchased with their tuition fees. “Because you have a right to be there – you’ve paid to be there,” he says.

But from a sheer power perspective, parents who dislike the student protests appear to have the upper hand, says Mimi Doe, a college admissions adviser who counsels wealthy families in the US and abroad. Ms Doe is chief executive and a co-founder of Top Tier Admissions, a service so exclusive that she describes working with parents who can express their displeasure by cutting donations to the likes of the University of Pennsylvania or by “stepping off the board at Harvard”.

And overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, this moneyed tier consists of parents who are alarmed by the chaos surrounding student protest encampments seen in recent weeks across dozens of US campuses, and will not allow their children to attend such institutions. “They are all dismayed by this,” another elite-oriented college admissions adviser, Brian Taylor, managing partner of Ivy Coach, says of the parents he advises.

The use of legal power by such parents in higher education seems to be a natural evolution of what has been happening at the school level in the US, where parents of financial means increasingly find they can overpower local school officials. Doe says she has been an admissions adviser for about 20 years, “and I’ve seen — in the past three, four or five years — parents become even more litigious to their children’s high schools, if things are not going according to their plan”.

A common target for such alienation at the post-secondary level, she and other experts aver, is Columbia University. That Ivy League institution was the spark for the nationwide explosion of student protest, right after Republican members of the US Congress called Columbia president Baroness Shafik to Washington for a public hearing that led her to immediately order police to clear a largely peaceful gathering of student demonstrators from the lawns of her New York City campus.

Parents opposed to pro-Palestinian activism often have turned to institutions they see as offering a clearer commitment to banning overt criticism of Israel, such as Brandeis University, with its historical Jewish roots. Some parents, mirroring the political arguments made by congressional Republicans, also have suggested that they fear companies will not hire the graduates of such institutions, seeing the prolonged protest encampments as evidence that their students don’t face rigorous academic demands.