One day last February, Joel Nam, a student at Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles, emerged from class at lunchtime and heard a sharp banging noise echoing around the quad.
That morning, his school had distributed Yondr pouches, fabric smartphone pockets that schools around the country are using to enforce bell-to-bell cellphone bans. Some four hours later at Van Nuys, students had figured out that whacking the pouches against tables and railings at a particular angle would cause them to spring open, freeing the smartphones trapped inside.
Soon, Joel’s classmates had figured out that a strong magnet available on Amazon could unlock the pouches, too, he said. “A lot of kids picked rocks up off the ground, flat rectangular rocks, and just slipped them in,” said Joel, 18, a senior. “You can’t tell if it’s a phone or not.”
It’s a classic tale of a sophisticated object brought down by simple means. iPhone, meet drop of water. Cybertruck window, meet steel ball. Yondr pouch, meet powerful magnet. Or tree. Or rock. Or scissors.
Some might have found it mildly amusing, how easily the best-laid plans by adults had been undone by the ingenuity of teenagers. Joel, writing for his school paper, took a different view. The initiative was a costly “failure,” he wrote in an opinion article last summer. “The most good that came out of the Yondr pouches was an excellent case study in why district-level decisions made in a vacuum almost always backfire.”
At least 34 states require districts to ban or restrict students’ use of smartphones in the classroom, citing concerns that they cause chaos for teachers and detract from young people’s mental health. Yondr has pitched itself to districts as a streamlined solution to these knotty problems, offering a “Phone-Free Schools Program” that includes the signal-blocking pouches, magnetic locking stations and training for teachers.
The pouches are now used daily by three million students across all 50 states, according to Yondr, at a cost of $20 to $25 per student. The company declined to disclose sales figures, but according to GovSpend, a database that tracks local contracts, it secured $19 million in sales to K-12 schools around the country in 2025.
As adults approach consensus that phone-free spaces are a good idea for students, a secondary conundrum has emerged, and a market to go along with it: How do you create those spaces?
Concerts to Classrooms
Yondr pouches did not start out primarily as a classroom accessory. Graham Dugoni, 39, a former professional soccer player, founded the company in 2014. The idea came from seeing people filming a drunk man at a music festival in 2012. His thinking went: There is a sense of freedom that can only be enjoyed when people set aside their phones.
He found early success with live performers, including the comedian Dave Chappelle, who used the pouches to keep audiences from filming performances starting in 2015. “I know my show is protected, and it empowers me to be more honest and open with the audience,” Mr. Chappelle told The New York Times the next year.
Mr. Dugoni also pitched them to schools, some of which were already curious about how to eliminate phones from their classrooms. School cellphone bans predate Yondr: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg enforced one in New York City — to vigorous complaints — as early as 2007.
The company began presenting to legislators and school boards: “Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent,” reads the title of one slide in a 2022 presentation from Yondr to the board of education for Torrington Public Schools in Connecticut. And in 2024, as New York legislators considered a cellphone ban, Yondr paid two lobbyists in the state more than $100,000, according to public disclosures. The next year, Yondr received at least $4 million from districts and schools in New York, according to GovSpend.
In some districts, Yondr’s approach seems to be working. Sari Beth Rosenberg, who teaches U.S. history at the High School for Environmental Studies in Manhattan, said she expected her students to “push back and be angry or be in withdrawal because it is such an addictive tool at this point.”
Instead, when the school began using the pouches in 2025, the students seemed to be “relieved” to be temporarily without their devices.
“It set up this norm that made it so that phones are just not a part of the culture anymore,” Ms. Rosenberg, who has taught for 24 years, added. “You just don’t have your phone in class.”
Other teachers have had a more uneven experience. Ben Mosley, the principal of Glenmount Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore, first ordered the pouches in 2021, before his district had a phone-free policy. The pouches were helpful in getting students to adjust to a phone-free environment, he said. But when students destroyed them — leaving them littered in the cafeteria, in bathrooms and on the blacktop — the school was left to pick up the tab.
“We were just running through money that we did not have,” Dr. Mosley said.
Mr. Dugoni said that most of the schools Yondr works with had tried more D.I.Y. methods to keep students off their devices, but that “they don’t really work.” He argued that his company’s system went further than those solutions, by providing training and support for teachers before and during the school year.
“If a school has another way of doing it, and it works for them, fantastic,” he added.
At Glenmount, Dr. Mosley said, the school’s staff now collects phones at the beginning of the day and puts them in a phone locker. It has been “smooth sailing,” he said.
Robert Docter, a government teacher at Van Nuys, has also tried more straightforward methods. His students store their cellphones in a clear plastic caddy that hangs on the wall of the classroom. It cost $10 and works just fine, he said.
“I think spending a bunch of money on a product right away was not wise,” he said of Yondr.
Slaying the ‘Phone Zombies’
Despite some students’ determination to outsmart their schools’ phone bans, there are plenty who say they appreciate the policy more than they expected. Rex Wolpoff, 15, a sophomore in Weston, Conn., said he saw students who used to be “phone zombies” chatting with their friends during free period.
He is not alone: More than 40 percent of teenagers ages 13 to 17 support banning cellphones during class, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the fall.
Elijah Bayron, 17, a junior in Ithaca, N.Y., said that without phones, his classes were easier to follow and his classmates were participating more. But the Yondr pouches that the school passed out at the beginning of the year seemed to have disappeared by late November, Elijah said. Students just weren’t using them — instead, teachers now ask students to keep their phones in their backpacks or lockers.
“I definitely think that same amount of money could have gone to a lot of other things to improve the education experience,” Elijah said. (Better air-conditioning was one example he gave.) “It didn’t have to be that complicated to get the same results,” he added.
Kalynn Bayron, Elijah’s mother, likes that he can get to his phone immediately in the case of an emergency, without having to rush to the nearest magnetic unlocking station.
Other families have found the transition more difficult.
Lyla Long, 16 and a junior at Cold Spring Harbor High School in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., and her mother said they had a shared Google Doc through which they could communicate during the day by typing messages into the collaborative document.
“If they don’t have their phone because it’s in the Yondr, I can talk to them on a Google Doc if it’s an emergency,” Melinda Long, Lyla’s mother, said.
Lyla said that her school was trying to enforce the use of Yondr pouches but that the new policy “doesn’t work as it should.” She described classmates who had opened up their pouches by using pencils and by “slamming them against the floor.”
For now, phone bans do not seem to be going anywhere. Joel, the senior at Van Nuys, thinks the pouches are an inadequate Band-Aid for a much deeper problem: how attached teenagers are to their cell phones.
“I’m on my phone, too, during class, probably more often than I should be,” he said. He wants a phone ban to succeed. But he’s still not convinced Yondr is the right fix.
It may be a tall order for any one method — pouch, bin, locker — to solve the problem of teenagers being glued to their devices. And some suggest there’s a wider social phenomenon at play, too.
Observing his peers’ urge to thwart the Yondr pouches at his middle school, Rex, the 15-year-old from Connecticut, mused: “There was almost this youthful, sort of rebellious feeling within us to kind of go against the system.”
Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture.
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