This article is the second in a two-part series exploring the results of the Communities That Care Coalition’s 2025 Prevention Needs Assessment Survey. The coalition is co-hosted by the Franklin Regional Council of Governments and Community Action Pioneer Valley.
GREENFIELD — According to data from the Communities That Care Coalition’s Prevention Needs Assessment Survey, schools that have implemented a bell-to-bell cellphone ban have seen an uptick in student engagement this year.
Since 2003, the Communities That Care Coalition has surveyed more than 40,000 students in grades eight, 10 and 12 from all nine public school districts in Franklin County and the North Quabbin region to evaluate youth habits and overall emotional and physical health.
Coalition officials gathered at the John W. Oliver Transit Center, alongside members of the Franklin Regional Council of Governments (FRCOG), on Wednesday morning to present the 2025 data and discuss potential solutions in a series of breakout groups.
Student engagement, which is measured by students’ responses to survey questions such as “How often did you enjoy being in school?” or by asking students how many whole days of school they skipped in the month prior to taking the survey, has seen a gradual decrease since 2012, when 58% of surveyed students showed engagement in their education compared to only 31% this year.
According to survey data presented by Communities That Care Coalition Coordinator Kat Allen, schools saw a roughly 7% decrease in student engagement between 2022 and 2025. However, Allen noted that schools that have implemented a bell-to-bell cellphone ban bucked this downward trend with a roughly 10% jump in reported engagement.
“Phone-free schools saw big improvements in student engagement,” Allen said. “Implementation matters; unenforced policies don’t see the same improvements in engagement as schools that enforce their phone bans.”
Communities That Care Coalition peer leader Katy McGinnis presented data collected by University of Massachusetts Amherst epidemiology professor Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson, which shows a correlation between students’ social media use and their rates of depression.
McGinnis said more than 40% of students in the region reported spending three hours a day or more on social media, with Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat being among the most popular sites.
“We see a pretty clear relationship where risk of depressive symptoms increases with more time on social media. Similarly, we see that the more time young people spend on social media, the higher the depressive symptom score is on average, so the more severe the symptoms of depressions are,” McGinnis said. “Social media doesn’t seem to affect everybody equally — girls are much more likely to see a stronger relationship between social media and depressive symptoms than boys do. … The same patterns also hold true for anxiety.”
McGinnis explained that anxiety trends and suicidal ideation, plans and attempts are higher among students who spend a lot of time on social media, noting that a student’s risk of suicide more than doubles when he or she spends three hours on social media, rather than not using it.
In addition to higher rates of depression, McGinnis said the data also found a link between increased social media use and declining grades, poor perception of self and social anxiety.
“Our local data also shows that time on social media is correlated with academic failure or bad grades, worrying about physical appearance, worrying about peer issues, using social media to avoid difficult feelings and situations, and getting enough sleep at night,” McGinnis said. “We see that every additional hour of social media use is associated with a 14% higher risk of depression, an 11% higher risk of anxiety, an 11% higher risk of suicidal thoughts and an 18% higher risk of suicidal planning.”
Allen suggested that parents talk with their teens about the time they spend online and try to limit the amount of time their children spend on social media. She noted that in moderation, some social media use allows teens to feel a shared connection to their peers, but she emphasized that young people are not using social media in moderation.
Noting that most social media sites do not have strong age verification measures, Allen said schools and legislators should play a role in protecting young people from harmful or excessive social media use.
“We can make better choices as a society. We can move the minimum age of social media later and have some age verification. … We’re not doing any age verification,” Allen said. “From a policy perspective, we can fully support legislation or any sort of movement toward limiting social media and cellphones in schools. My concern, because I’m an administrator in a district, is that the policy alone is not enough to support the actual change.”