When Lauren, a rule-abiding eighth-grader in New York, got her first school-issued Yondr phone pouch in sixth grade, she accidentally hacked it. “My dad watched it happen. I had it unlocked, and the needle got caught on some fabric and bent all the way backward,” she says. (The pouches have a patented locking mechanism similar to the anti-theft tags on clothes.) Many of her classmates were breaking them on purpose. “People were saying the sixth-graders might not be able to go on their annual Six Flags trip because the school was spending so much money replacing Yondr pouches.”
Lauren is one of more than 2 million students in 50 states and 35 countries who scramble each school day to check that one final text or TikTok before sliding their phone into a gray neoprene pouch made by Los Angeles–based Yondr, which brought in over $5 million from government contracts — mainly school districts — in the first three quarters of 2024 alone, according to data service GovSpend. At many schools that use Yondr, each student receives a pouch at the beginning of the school year like they would a textbook. Before entering the building, they snap their pouches shut, then open them on their way out using plate-size magnetic unlocking bases mounted on the walls or rolled out on carts near the exits.
The pouches start at $30 apiece, though the price can be negotiated down to $27, based on emails I reviewed between a Yondr rep and the principal of Sacramento’s McClatchy High School. The cost includes the unlocking bases, implementation and training, and customer-service support. The pouches are paid for from a variety of streams, including Title I, II, and IV funding, as well as funds meant for COVID relief, mental health, safety, and technology, all of which are outlined in a three-page funding document Yondr sends to prospective schools.
Teens spend an average of an hour and a half on their phones during a 6.5-hour school day, according to a new study. The “phone prisons,” as Lauren calls them, are intended to keep students off their phones and remove the burden of enforcement from teachers — intended being the operative word. Nadia says her son, a sixth-grader in New York, checks the Apple watch he got over the summer for Mets scores during his after-school program by simply … giving the pouch a tug. “There are gaps at the top of the Yondr pouch, so he told me he just pulls as hard as he can.” (Some students, teachers, and parents requested anonymity so they could talk more freely about what’s really happening at their schools.)
Other students aren’t even putting their phones or watches in their Yondrs in the first place. Lovely Castillo-Bojorquez, an eighth-grader at Beaumont Middle School in Portland, Oregon, said, “If I’m honest, most of my classmates at school do not use it. We mainly just leave it in our lockers or just hide it under some books or something.” Lauren estimates that about a quarter of her classmates use their pouches.
Some students put burner phones in their Yondrs, says Fran, a middle-school English teacher in Alabama; others lock vapes and weed inside so they can sneak them past bag checks. Kids have been known to stuff Rx Bars, calculators, and even portable Battleship games in their otherwise-flat Yondrs to give them a realistic bulge. And there are parents who support and even encourage their kids to bypass the system. Sarah says that she and her anxious seventh-grade daughter, who attends middle school in New York, “have a little scam: We lock an old phone in and keep the real one accessible.” Jennifer told me that she and her eighth-grade daughter, who also attends middle school in New York, puts her phone on silent and do-not-disturb and hides it in her backpack. All of which brings up an uncomfortable question: Do the pouches actually work?
Yondr got its start in entertainment, not education. Its first client, in 2014, was a small venue in Oakland, California. Dave Chappelle was an early adopter, requiring the pouches during his 2015 comedy tour, as was Alicia Keys. The 2016 Guns N’ Roses reunion was a Yondr event, and Jack White used Yondr at his shows in 2018. Founder Graham Dugoni says that education and live performance have been the two pillars of the company from the beginning. “I would go to eight schools a day, and I would go to venues at night,” he explains. “We started doing shows with a few artists, and that got a lot more notoriety, so we became known for that sooner.”
By 2016, the technology had been used in 57 venues and 300 schools. Denver school districts got the idea to try Yondr the following year, after teachers experienced locking their phones in Yondr pouches during local concerts. “After seeing how it worked, I thought, Oh my God, I need this for my classroom,” said Broomfield High School chemistry teacher Kay Davidson in an interview with the Denver Post. In 2019, San Mateo High School in California became the largest public school to deploy Yondr pouches for all 1,700 of its students.
Yondr saw a more than tenfold increase in sales from government contracts between 2021 and 2023, primarily with school districts. And that was before the U.S. surgeon general called for warning labels for adolescents on social-media platforms and the publication of Jonathan Haidt’s extremely buzzy book, The Anxious Generation, which advocates for phone-free schools as one of four solutions to what Haidt calls the “rewiring of childhood.” Today, around 70 percent of Yondr’s business comes from schools. Its main competitors are the signal-blocking PhonX3 pouch, launched in schools in 2023, which is used by approximately 400,000 students, and the see-through Nukase, launched in early 2024, which is used by only about 12,000 students, per sales executives at both companies.
While Dugoni says that Yondr’s rise “has been almost totally by referral and word of mouth,” the company hired Albany firm Patricia Lynch Associates for $10,000 a month from January through June 2024 — the same period during which New York governor Kathy Hochul was considering a statewide limit on the use of phones in classrooms — to lobby Hochul and an official in Mayor Eric Adams’s office for cell-free policies, culminating in a $13.5 million proposed ban.
On September 30, Dugoni presented to Oklahoma’s Common Education Committee, directly after state representatives watched a recorded introduction by Jonathan Haidt. The next month, the leaders of the state senate’s education committee said they intended to file legislation to propose statewide restrictions on cell phones in schools, joining at least 15 other states that have either banned or restricted students’ use of cell phones in school or recommended that local districts enact their own bans or restrictions. And from July through September of last year, Yondr paid the lobbying firm Actum $15,000 to push for a California assembly bill that would require every school district, charter school, and county office of education to limit or prohibit the use of smartphones by July 1, 2026; the bill was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September.
Yondr is also influencing educators directly. At a conference hosted by the New York State United Teachers union in September, a Yondr pouch sat atop each place setting, along with instructions for operating it and a device to unlock it. “In the field of education, you definitely are aware that Yondrs exist, but people probably hadn’t seen them up close,” says David Rounds, a social-studies teacher at Bethlehem High School outside of Albany, who was a panelist at the conference along with Dugoni. Rounds says he’d seen Dugoni speak before, and he was skeptical. “I’m not a big corporate guy. Here I’m thinking, Oh, great, the founder is using this as a way to make money. But when you listen to the person’s philosophy of why they created it, you get a sense that they actually believe in it,” he says.
David Blanchard, the superintendent of New York’s Schoharie Central School District, was another panelist. When asked how his district was able to fund the purchase of Yondr (through grants before rolling the cost into its general fund), Blanchard replied, “As far as I’m concerned, the price we pay for this program is worth — I shouldn’t say this with Yondr reps in the room — it’s worth way more money than you can imagine.” A few minutes later, he declared, “We all know that cell phones in class doesn’t work, we all know there’s a tool that we can use to get it to stop, and I have it right behind me.” Then he pulled a Yondr pouch out from behind his back in what feels a little like a pitch from a Cutco knife salesman.
In addition to lobbying and evangelizing, Yondr is on a hiring spree. The company, which employs just over 100 people, had 86 job openings posted on LinkedIn as of late November, nearly all of them in sales. These reps liaise directly with decision-makers at schools. In an April email to Greenbrier, Arkansas, superintendent Scott Spainhour, a Yondr rep promised that “you’re not just getting a product; you’ll be gaining a partner in creating a distraction-free, productive learning environment,” according to the South Arkansas Reckoning. (Ultimately, Greenbrier and roughly 180 other school districts would apply to participate in Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s phone-free pilot program, which is estimated to net Yondr $7 million.) Though that partnership includes training materials, it does not include staff, which means that teachers and administrators are the ones who have to stand at the door checking pouches in the morning and patrolling the cafeteria during lunchtime.
While the company provides testimonials and case studies to prospective partners, evidence that phone pouches actually work is slim. A recent Yondr white paper links to just two studies: One is nearly ten years old, and both focus on the positive effects of low- or no-cost phone bans that include consequences like detention for sneaking in phones, not on pouches. When I went looking for more data, I discovered a recent review from the London School of Economics and Political Science, which found that the research behind bans in general, let alone specific tools, just isn’t there. “One of our key conclusions is that there is a notable absence of rigorous studies comparing a multitude of factors on academic outcomes,” says Miriam Rahali, Ph.D., the review’s lead author.
What Yondr really seems to be selling — in addition to neoprene pouches — is an ethos. “It’s such a philosophy-first company as opposed to a product company,” Yondr’s publicist told me when I first reached out. “What we’re helping a school do is create a culture change. And it’s a pretty significant culture change,” explains Dugoni. “There’s an element of social psychology. If someone is to smuggle a phone into a show and pull it out, the people around them tend to look at them and go, ‘What are you doing? We’re here for this show. We’re here to be in the moment.’ And that’s what we try to help schools accomplish in the educational setting as well. It’s an expectation that allows young people to open up to the benefits of what’s happening inside a phone-free space.”
Students seem to already be aware of the benefits of untethering themselves from their phones — they just don’t believe Yondr is the right tool to unlock them. When Josh Palmateer, a senior at Archie Williams High School in San Anselmo, California, conducted an informal survey of his peers, “98 percent don’t want it,” Palmateer said, the it being Yondr. In a survey conducted by Portland Public Schools, Oregon’s largest school district, the majority of students said they’d prefer phone-free classrooms. Of the 2,147 students who responded, however, only 110 believed that Yondr pouches were the way to do it. The report said students instead wanted “appropriately serious and consistently enforced consequences for personal electronic device use to encourage policy adherence.”
Students also say they’re aware that their schools don’t have the money for air conditioning or even paper, and they believe interventions like phone caddies (a.k.a. pocket charts; picture an over-the-door shoe holder for phones) and phone lockers (each student locks their phone into a little slot and holds onto the key) can be just as successful for a fraction of the cost. “The pocket system was just as effective when properly enforced, and far cheaper and less logistically complicated,” wrote Noah Brown, a junior at Grant High School in Portland in a petition that currently has 1,385 signatures. He’s still fired up halfway into the school year. “We had a working cell policy in place that required very little investment, and yet school admin still believed it was necessary to spend tens of thousands of dollars in the same year that they fired teachers and cut programs, including the maker space,” he says. In an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting on the first day of school, fellow Grant student Vincent Trueworthy admitted that the prospect of using Yondr made him “excited just to not have my phone and to not have that distraction,” but also “the problem was solved last year in two or three of my classes where we had phone caddies.”
On a rainy Friday morning in late November, I stationed myself outside the entrance to Grant High School, which spent $60,825 on Yondr pouches this school year after receiving a $20,625 discount as a Portland “flagship school.” I watched as nearly 2,200 students streamed in — maybe half of whom showed their Yondrs to the two adults standing just inside the entrance, enforcing the school’s pouch policy.
Grant principal James McGee told me when we talked in January that Grant tried caddies. The problem was that some teachers weren’t strict about using them, and compliance was almost nil when there was a substitute. Plus students were on their phones between classes and at lunch, scoring drugs, filming fights, but mainly ignoring each other in favor of their screens. Between what I observed while I waited in the lobby to talk with McGee — at least half a dozen students with Beats by Dre headphones around their necks or an earbud in their ear — and at the school’s entrance in November, the students’ phones weren’t necessarily in their Yondrs, but they weren’t in their hands either. It seemed like Yondr had at least partially delivered on the culture change they promised. And the company will almost certainly get the chance to bring that change to other area schools: Three days before McGee and I met, the Portland school board recently voted to adopt a new districtwide policy mandating that all students in all grades turn off their phones during school hours, including lunch.
Like McGee, Rounds, the Bethlehem social-studies teacher, found the caddie system lacking. “Frankly, enforcing it every single day was a grind, and kids would spend their whole lunch period on their devices,” he says. A year and a half ago, his school switched to Yondr pouches. “The amount of conversation that occurs and the amount of smiles I see these days is night and day compared to what it was before.” Recently, however, Bethlehem administrators noticed an uptick in the number of students not using their Yondrs. To tighten enforcement, the school now calls a parent if a kid claims that they left their phone at home. “With any approach, you have to have constant administrative support,” explains Rounds. “That type of enforcement is necessary so the policy doesn’t start to dissipate.”
Can’t you enforce a ban without Yondr? I ask him. “It’s a really good question,” he replies. “I don’t think the rollout of our plan would have been as effective without it. Though now that it’s been established as part of our culture, I don’t think it matters as much anymore.”
In dozens of Reddit discussions, a common refrain from teachers is that Yondr can help only if school administration is strongly committed to enforcing a cell ban. One teacher put it this way: “Yondr bags work exactly as well as the faculty that enforces them … I have seen these bags work extremely well. I have also seen them fail.” Leo, a chemistry teacher at a public high school in Harlem, used to work at a charter school that used Yondr pouches. “It took the kids about a month to realize they can hit it on the back of their shoe at the right speed and angle to open the pouch without breaking it—or just provide a fake phone,” he says. “You don’t need Yondr; it’s a waste of $50,000. You need an admin who will say to parents, ‘Phones are a distraction. If the teacher sees it out and calls me, I will come and take it, and you don’t get it back until a guardian comes and gets it.’ Trust me, a parent losing half a day’s pay, you will never see that phone again.”
At Sutter Middle School in Folsom, California, they abandoned the pouches after a year. “What was funny was that the first week, there were a lot of kids lined up at those unlocking stations. A month or two in, there weren’t as many students lined up, which told me they didn’t have their phones locked away,” says Sutter principal Tarik McFall. During Yondr’s reign, kids caught with their phones out of their pouches would be written up. This year, he says, “the expectation is just that phones were put away.” The consequences and compliance rates remain the same—minus the pouches and their $28,398 price tag.
