In this episode of UEN Homeroom, Dani and Matt are joined by the Director of the Office of Families for Utah, Aimee Winder Newton. First, listen to learn about the initiatives our state is taking to protect and inform our communities about societal dangers exacerbated by online social media. Then, get helpful tips you and your students can practice to encourage safe internet use.
In this episode of UEN Homeroom, Dani and Matt are joined by the Director of the Office of Families for Utah, Aimee Winder Newton. First, listen to learn about the initiatives our state is taking to protect and inform our communities about societal dangers exacerbated by online social media. Then, get helpful tips you and your students can practice to encourage safe internet use.
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Hey, Dani.
Hello, Matt, how are you?
I'm doing great. How are you doing?
I'm doing very well. New year, new me.
Very true. I'm so excited about the new year. Lots of goals. Do you have any goals this year?
Oh, man, I haven't even thought about my resolution yet. I usually get it like the end of January. I'm a bit of a procrastinator. Maybe that should be my goal.
Goal not to procrastinate anymore.
I'd be losing.
So I have a little bit of a goal that you probably actually helped me achieve today.
Heyo.
You've been throwing around this term a lot, and I want to know a little bit more about it. I think maybe you and our guest can help out with it today. Digital wellness?
Ooh, yes.
What is that?
So that's a really good question. So digital wellness-- I like this because we use other words to describe this kind of feeling of being a good digital citizen. We talk a lot about screen time and what that looks like for different ages up through adults. But what digital wellness is, is it's being in harmony with your devices where your devices and the apps and social media, or whatever the different things that you use are helping you and not hurting you.
So you're using your device, and your device isn't using you is kind of how I think of it. And you need to put some guardrails in place because a lot of the technology that we use on the regular is designed to be addictive. And without a plan in mind, without that kind of idea, it can just get out of control.
It sounds like a beautiful utopia. And maybe our guest today can help us get there.
That is a great idea. So today we have with us Aimee Winder Newton. And she is the Director of the Office of Families for the state of Utah, which is a totally new department.
And she's going to talk to us all about digital wellness about some of her outreach programs with all sorts of things that are affecting schools.
That's fantastic. And real fast, to your goal on digital wellness, I'm going to build in some accountability for you here. So listeners, if you follow Matt on Twitter-- and you can tell that he's gone off the rails, call him out on it. Shoot him a little DM, and let him know, like, hey, are you being your best digital self right now, Matt?
I can't wait for the DMs.
Ha-ha, you're welcome.
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Dani, I know you're a veteran of Edcamps.
I am an Edcamp veteran.
What is an Edcamp.
So great question. An Edcamp is an unconference. So it is a day that you show up with other educators. There is no schedule, no agenda, just a crazy person running around behind the scenes to make everything happen. And then you go there, and you decide what topics you want to talk about.
And then there's usually a very motivational keynote. And while that keynote is happening, people are behind the scenes making the schedule, and then you get to spend the whole day talking with other educators about things that are important to you.
It's amazing professional development. It's completely free. And this year, we have a great Edcamp down in Southern Utah on February 4 at Desert Hills Middle School. It's from 8:00 to 3:00 PM. And we have a great keynote from a Utah teacher fellow named Ryan Rarick.
Amazing. And what a great time to be going down to the southern part of our state, nice and toasty warm down there in February.
Exactly. And if you're interested in joining us there, check out more information on ucet.org.
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We're here today with Aimee Winder Newton who is the Director of the Office of Families for the state of Utah. Welcome.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Well, let's just start right out talking about digital wellness. So we're wondering, how do our digital lives impact our mental health and well being? And what should teachers, parents, and students know about it? This is kind of something that's kind of new in the last decade that we need to be aware of.
Right, so I work for Governor Cox as a senior advisor. And this is something that the governor is incredibly interested in. He started looking at data surrounding the youth of our-- or the mental health of our youth. And that's where he's been incredibly concerned about some of the trends that we're seeing. And so back in October, he gave a speech and talked about social media.
He talked about the concerns with young people, especially young women. And we can get into that a little bit later. But he mentioned three things in that speech. The first one was, he encouraged all of our school classes to look at the potential for being cell-phone-free. And we understand that it shouldn't be on the burden of the teachers to do this. That's not fair to the teachers to say, oh, you can decide in your own class because now they have to be the bad guy.
What we need is all of our schools to look at this specifically and see if this is a policy they should enforce. And it's one of those things that, from a local control perspective, which is something the governor supports, we believe that the individual communities have to decide. It's not just about the teachers wanting this. It has to be teachers, parents, and administrators all on the same page saying, we're going to put cell phones aside when the kids walk into the classroom and just get used to a cell-phone-free environment.
There are some school districts that are already doing this. Granite School District is one where they've let each school community decide what's best for them as far as this policy goes. And they have some schools that are cell-phone-free.
But it's something that governor's encouraging our schools to look at and to consider and see if this is something that they can do. Because we know, unequivocally, kids are distracted when they have their cell phones with them in the classroom. And I'm sure our teachers can agree.
The second thing he talked about in his speech is just this notion of, we don't have guardrails for social media companies right now. It's a free-for-all. And we have kids-- technically, they're supposed to be over 13 to get a social media account, but you can put in whatever birth year you want. There's no parental oversight. We have tech companies who are gathering data on our kids. And this is something that we want to look at legislatively.
And then the third thing he talked about is the fact that, though mental health can be impacted by the amount of social media usage from kids, the even greater impact is how much parents are using social media around their kids. Because your kid having to compete for attention from their parent with an Instagram or some TikTok reel or whatever, what message does that send to our kids? And so those are the three things that the governor has been very concerned about.
It's really interesting. It seems like the Office of the Family has been tasked with sharing the dangers of social media across the state, particularly in our schools and, again with parents and their families. There's many dangers to social media.
I mean, we could go down a rabbit hole and talk about every single one of them. And we would be here for the whole day. But what are some of the specific dangers that are affecting the development of students at different levels-- elementary, high school, maybe even as adults as well?
Well, first of all, just to kind of give you a little information on what federal laws are in place to protect kids-- so there's one called COPPA. It's the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. They originally, when that bill was originally proposed, it was supposed to be for kids 16 and under. So if you're under 16, you've got to comply with certain things.
And social media companies talked them down to 13 as the age. And so that's where you get the-- you can only have an account if you're at least 13. And otherwise, they have to do certain things that they didn't want to have to worry about. I think that should be of concern to us. How old is the right age for kids to have social media?
When the governor started talking to a researcher named Jonathan Haidt who testified before a US Senate committee, Jonathan found that there were some sharp increases in mental health issues for kids. And if you look at the chart showing some of these mental health, one in particular is self-harm for kids, how many kids who ended in the emergency room because of self-harm. And this is especially profound for young girls.
But if you're looking at the year in early 2000s, the graph kind of goes along fairly consistently. And then around 2009, 2010, it takes a sharp curve up like a hockey stick. And he said rarely, in the mental health field, do we see such a sharp uptick of something. And this isn't just in the US. So you can't blame it on something here in our country, some sort of episode or event that happened. It's across the world, kids in these age groups are seeing this sharp increase in mental health issues.
And so the only thing that they could come to the reasonable conclusion of is that those were the years social media started to take off. And as they looked further, what they found is, young girls, about the time they go through puberty-- so 11 to 13 is when they're the most vulnerable on social media. And it's because their brain's being developed, their hormones, they are-- body image is a big deal. So when you're constantly scrolling and you're seeing everybody else's perfect picture and you feel like you're not enough already, it's exacerbating that.
And then you add into that, algorithms that are geared towards these kids and potential vulnerabilities that they have. It's a scary thing. And so one of the things I'm doing-- so the Office of Families, by the way, it's a new office that the governor wanted to start. The goal was to look at proactive upstream solutions to strengthen families on the front end so government isn't spending so much money later on to fix problems.
And so I'm a one-woman office. It's not growing-- it's not growing government here. But my charge is to look at things that can do that, that help strengthen families. And one of my five charges is childhood mental health. And so that's where the social media pieces come in. So it's just one small part of my job. But we do want to send the message.
In fact, the governor is so passionate about this that, in his budget that he released last week, he proposed a half a million for Research on social media and how it impacts our youth and another half a million on a public service campaign to help educate parents on what's happening with kids and social media. And we need-- boy, do we need parents to be more engaged.
That's one thing that I feel like, it's so nice to continue hearing from this administration is the focus on mental health and wellness. We've had Abby Cox on a few times on our podcast. And it's so nice to hear her talking about the importance of mental wellness for our educators and for our students. And so it's kind of nice that there's a couple of different fronts that are trying to address this issue that, after a few years of the pandemic, I think all of our mental health tanked. And so it's nice to see that there's that effort.
And the Cox family, they love our educators. Like you said, first lady, that's one of her initiatives. The governor, in his budget, just recently put a significant increase to the WPU and proposing $6,000 in compensation for each teacher over and above whatever their school district decides to do. So our teachers do not get enough recognition. They are the heroes that are on the front lines with our kids and are such an incredible, important part of our kids' lives.
We obviously could not agree more with that. But this is a good time for a student question.
Hello, I'm Ella from KJH. My question is, are the dangers we face online different from the dangers in real life? Are common societal dangers made worse by online social media?
OK, well, I'll tell you something else that we're seeing. And this isn't just kids that are dealing with it, but it's adults too. And that is political polarization. And if you look at the real world before social media became a big thing, when people disagreed politically, we were a lot more civil about it, weren't we? And we could all agree on facts, and we could all agree on basic things that were happening in our country.
Well, now what's happening, because of social media, and because of how their algorithms work to give you content that you want or agree with, now what it's doing is it's tainting everyone's reality on what's happening-- on facts, on situations, on solutions. And we're getting in our own little tribalistic corners, and that's causing problems for both young people and adults. It's part of why I think we see such a tremendous political divide.
And it's a huge priority for Governor Cox to figure out, how do we break out of that? And so this is something that I think we all need to be concerned about. And it's one of the downsides of social media.
I love that because it's keying into something that is used to-- I think a lot of people said it was a childish thing of having certain opinions and being really forceful about those opinions. But now we're seeing that, in the larger society, due to the kind of echo chamber mentality of social media, and so I really appreciate that.
Now, earlier in the conversation, you said that one of your big directives is childhood mental health. You also have four others. What are some of the other projects that you're working on? And how can they help student growth in Utah, teacher growth, all the things that are associated with them?
Yeah, well, let me tell you, the Office of Families are five priorities that we're focusing on right now. And they kind of go through the span of life as far as age group. So the first one, we're talking about babies. And one of the things the governor's included in his budget is money to expand our home visitation program. So this is a program that we have right now, mostly for mothers on WIC, so low-income families who are potentially vulnerable where, after they have their baby, somebody is going into their home and checking on them.
It may be a nurse if they're a more vulnerable family. It may be a professional who's just teaching them, developmentally, where their child should be and bringing them a book and saying here, read every day, and asking if they've been to their well-child visit, and checking on mom's mental health, and all of that.
So we know this is an evidence-based program. That means that they've looked at data to see all the different things that this helps prevent. It helps prevent child abuse. It helps increase educational outcomes for these babies. And we know a baby's brain is 80% developed by the time they're three. So this is a prime time for us to be focusing on kids.
So that's one of the things that we'd like to expand in the state. We know, for every dollar we spend on this program, we save between $2 and $6 in social services later on. So it kind of fits within our mission to look proactively at how we can strengthen families rather than having to spend money on the criminal justice system or poverty initiatives or homelessness later on. So that's one.
The next one is child care. So now we're talking, these kids that-- young kids, before they go to school full time, what happens to them? We want to make sure we have high-quality child care. The governor's included in his budget funding for all-day kindergarten that's optional for parents. So we hope the legislature passes that because that's something that can help give these kiddos an edge.
The other thing for child care that we recognize is, according to a recent survey, more parents see one parent working and one parent staying home as the ideal, and yet they're not able to do that financially. So how do we help give families the best opportunity to do what they think is right for their kids?
Some families want to have both parents working. That's great. We want to make sure that there's good child care solutions for them. But if a family can't afford to have one home or one home part time, how do we help do that? And so the governor's also proposed some tax breaks in his budget to do that.
The third issue that I'm focused on, youth mental health. I mentioned that, not only are we looking at social media, but we're looking at childhood trauma. We know that, when kids are having trauma as children, that carries through into adulthood. It impacts their physical health, their emotional health, their mental health, their educational opportunities.
There's a lot of things affected. So how do we become a trauma-informed state? And that's something that we are looking at right now in our Department of Health and Human Services.
The fourth one that we're looking at is ensuring all high schoolers graduate. We know that there's something called the success sequence that the Brookings Institution came out with that says if a student will graduate from high school, engage full time in the workforce, and then get married before they have children, if they do it in that order, they have a 97% chance of not being in poverty.
So graduation is huge. And that could look differently for different kids. If we have kids who are failing out in ninth grade and struggling, and we know that their chances of graduation are diminished, are there other tracks we can get them into, vocational training or things like that so that they are able to engage in the workforce? So we're working with different stakeholders there.
And then, the last one is just encouraging our business community to have family-friendly workforce policies. And I'll tell you something that I would love to see more of. And that is, how do we have family leave policies for school teachers?
I think that is something that we have missed the boat. If you look at, especially elementary school, we have mostly women. They're childbearing age. What happens if they want to start their family? Are they really-- are we expecting truly that they're going to work at around the summer schedule?
And so we'd love to encourage school districts to look at their family leave policies and include dads in that. At some point, we've got to recognize, when you have a baby, having the dad at home for at least a few weeks to be able to help bond and help around the house and take care of other children and help mom heal or whatever else is needed, that's critical. We need our dads. And so those family-friendly workforce policies are really, really important.
I think that's so important because, as you pointed out, especially in elementary school, those are mostly female teachers of childbearing age. And it's impossible right now, especially if you're in your first three years in the field, you can get fired if you have to take longer than your 12 weeks. And what does that look like? And we need to make it possible for our women to come back to work and maybe work in a part-time role and still get benefits that they need.
Because a part-time teacher is better than no teacher. And where we have such a short shortage of substitutes, it's really hard. And you can't make these policies work if there isn't someone to help take over the class when they go on maternity leave. So I think I think all of these things are really wonderful and a great direction.
Well, and the last thing we want to do is drive away our good teachers. I mean, we need our good teachers. So however we can make that work so that they can also balance family responsibilities, we want to be the most family-friendly state. In fact, somebody made a comment once to the governor of, I thought Utah was a family-friendly state. And he said, well, it is. We're very family friendly.
And they said, well, why is it that my daughter who's a schoolteacher doesn't get enough leave to be home with her baby and bond and have that time and get nursing established and all of these things? And honestly, because of how the school system is structured where it's not the governor's decision-- he doesn't get to have a say on this. It's really the school districts and pushing that down.
And we recognize the strain the school districts are under. We have a shortage of teachers. So how are we going to fill in the gaps here? But I think it's time, like you say, to get creative on, how does this look? And are there opportunities for more flexibility for school teachers and the part-time piece that you're talking about so that we can keep the best and the brightest in this profession.
And that flexibility-- I think, a lot of times, secondary teachers will have that opportunity to have their kiddo at the school daycare, which is awesome. But what about elementary teachers? There's not daycares within every school. So I think there's a lot of different ways to make it work. And I just appreciate that you all are having those conversations.
Well, and there's just so many positives in what you just said too. One of the things that really hit me from early in what you just said was literacy. If we have a higher literacy rate with younger kids, it keeps people out of poverty. It keeps people in school. It keeps people economically viable and all sorts of things. And so that, as an English teacher, definitely gets me into a space where I'm going getting really excited about this because that's one of the key indicators that we're actually going to have an economically viable society as well.
So Matt, let me ask you a question.
Yeah, please.
So one of the things that I get concerned about is seeing the lack of male teachers in this profession because I think, especially for a lot of these vulnerable boys, having that male role model-- well, and girls too, really, it's such a great thing for them. And you can't be what you can't see.
If we want more boys to grow up and think they want to be schoolteachers, we need them to be able to see that. We see that in high school. There's male teachers in high school and middle school, but how many elementary school teachers are male? It's a very small percentage.
In my son's elementary school, the only males in the building are my dad, who is the PE helper guy and the head custodian. There is not one male teacher or administrator there.
So how do we help attract more males into the profession?
I will say this. My son just finished his student teaching, English.
Very cool.
Secondary school teacher, so anyway, we're-- and my daughter-- his wife is an elementary school teacher. So we love our teachers. But how do we help attract more men into the profession?
Well, it's partly in what you've already said. And I'm not speaking for every man out there--
What?
I know, right?
[LAUGHTER]
But there's a point early in the conversation where you said, we need to make one-parent households who are out working more viable. That's a big part of why there's not a whole lot of male teachers at different levels because, if a traditional household, if the male is supposed to go out and earn the paycheck and the female is supposed to stay home and take care of the children, which isn't every household, but it's a lot of households, if that's the case, then the male needs to have a job that would support the entire household.
And unfortunately, the pay that a teacher makes isn't necessarily enough to make a whole household run and get them out of poverty and support two or three kids. And so talking to other male teachers, that's been an issue. And so raising pay, paying teachers what they're worth, but also paying them a living wage because we know that a living wage is $70,000 a year.
But the teachers in Utah are paid well below that. And so raising the wage. But then, part of the reason why a lot of male teachers aren't in-- or males aren't in teaching is because they leave teaching to go to other things in education, whether it be working for the district or doing an admin certificate or doing coaching and things like that. And that is great. It keeps them in the profession, but it doesn't keep them in the classroom where they're most viable to keep kids coming back to school.
And so those two things are what I hear most from other male educators of why, either, A, they're leaving the profession to go do something else or leaving the classroom to go do something else in education is because it comes down to, I need to make more money for my family. And I want to have that upward mobility in my life. And that's a great goal. But if we could make that upward mobility more associated with being in the classroom, that'd be great.
Yeah. I'd like to add two things.
Please.
Even though I'm not a man. I'm married to a male teacher.
That's true.
So I do get a lot of his perspective on this. And I think two things that also would be incredibly useful, not just for bringing more males into the profession, but for everyone, number one, it doesn't feel like a respected profession when the profession and educators in general feel like they are constantly being attacked and blamed for a lot of problems. Nobody wants that job. Even if crazy things in our legislature don't pass, even just the fact that some of these things are brought up every year, and teachers feel attacked, I think that's something.
I think the other thing is, especially to get more males into elementary schools, which we need, is, elementary school teachers don't get a paid prep like high school teachers do.
Yeah, that's true.
So if you were talking to me about going into education right now, and you were, like, OK, so you can work with near-grown adults-- you don't have to deal with a lot of little-kid shenanigans, and you get an hour and a half to prepare for the next day every day. Or you can go with our youngest students, and you teach everything, and you don't get a prep period. Good luck. Which are going to choose?
No, you're right, that prep period is huge, and that's unfortunate.
And I don't think-- we talk about a lot of things every year at the legislative session. I haven't heard that one brought up. So how can we make it so it is a choice for more people? So I think these are great questions that you're asking and that we do need to have these kind of conversations.
Absolutely. And it's something that will keep people coming into the profession. Every educator I meet-- I worked a lot with first-year teachers. They want to be there. And it's not because they want the paycheck. They know that the paycheck isn't the most important part of their job.
They're there because they love the kids, they love the subject matter, they love the fact that-- according to a few teachers-- they love the fact that they get to talk about their passions every day with students and get students passionate about what they're passionate about. And that was a big driver for me was, I got to talk literature with ninth graders and get them excited about Steinbeck. That was just great.
Oh, yeah. It's the best job.
It really is.
It really is. It's the best job. There's a downside like any profession. But being a teacher-- and our teachers in Utah are just the best.
We do have great teachers. We appreciate them. And they've been through some hard things the last few years, I mean, COVID, first of all. Wow, did we test everybody's physical and mental limits? That one--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--rough, rough year, two years, three, I don't know. I kind of like--
Still, still, yeah, we're still recovering.
We're still dealing with the backlash, right?
Yeah, and in education, where you're like, oh, now we're seeing this dip in test scores, so it still feels like we're in the midst of the struggle. But I do feel like an optimism that I haven't seen in the past two school years.
Definitely, yeah.
It was better this year, the vibe.
I was thinking about how many times-- Dani and I are trainers for UEN, and we go out and we work with teachers across the state, and we work in classrooms, how many of those teachers come out every month, every year, and it's in the thousands. It's in the tens of thousands. They want to come out. They want to do professional development because they want to get better at their craft.
And so we have a batch of teachers here in Utah who have gone through a traumatic experience. They have gone through COVID. They've gone through some of these difficult points with different things that have been talked about in the media. But they're still here. They're still trying. They're still working, and they're still hungry, by and large.
And so I think, if we're going to keep teachers, male or female, in the profession, professionalizing them, giving them choice on how they professionalize themselves, paying them more, and helping them find ways to protect their mental health day to day are going to be tremendous.
Well, and I think too-- the other thing that is unfortunate. I think this is cable news and social media to blame for this is, you start getting a very small group of people who are going after teachers. And it makes teachers feel ungrateful.
But because of how the 24-hour news cycle works where everybody's wanting to pay for clicks, and they want to have the most salacious story to attract news, I feel like the media has made it sound like everybody is mad about different things. CRT, or emotional wellness is sometimes something that's controversial, and all of these things-- and really, you've got just a really small group, and yet it feels-- I'm sure, to some teachers, it feels like you have the whole world against you. And I just want our teachers to know, we are behind you.
I hear the governor and first lady talk all the time about, please, go volunteer in the classrooms. When you are in those classrooms and you see what those teachers do and you feel their heart and you feel where their passion is and what they want to do for these kids and how they want to see them succeed, it changes you.
And so getting more parents in the classroom to volunteer and help-- and as I go out and start engaging with the business community on family-friendly policies, that's one of the things we're going to talk about too is, give flexibility to your employees so that they can go to their parent-teacher conferences, and they can go volunteer in the classrooms. Because I feel like it's so important for them to see and understand what a teacher is and what they do and how hard it is and how much they give. So thank you to our teachers.
Absolutely. I love that. And it is just, even if it is just a few voices, if those are the ones that are shouting at the board meetings, at the school board meetings, it can feel like it's everyone. So it's nice to hear that reminder that it's not all.
It's not, no.
The majority of our-- the large majority of our Utah parents are so grateful for teachers, and they love what you do. So thank you.
Well, kind of switching gears back to what we were talking about social media, a lot of schools and districts and, in the state legislature, there's been talk about banning cell phones in schools. How do you think that a cell phone ban would change the environment in schools and in classrooms?
Well, first of all, I'll just reiterate, Governor Cox really believes in the local control piece and that schools and school districts should make that decision and that the states shouldn't necessarily be imposing. You guys get enough of Big Brother imposing things on you. We don't need to make that harder. And like I said, it's got to be the whole community that supports this.
And so I think what we would say is, school districts and schools look at this and see if this is a policy. Don't make each teacher have to decide. It needs to be an overall school policy if you're going to do it. But what it does is it helps our kids focus.
And it helps-- I've heard some teachers say, oh, yeah, I'd love to have cell phones out of the classroom because I know those kids aren't listening. And sometimes I'm up there talking, and nobody is looking or paying attention because they're all on their phones. And it's, like, why am I here?
I've heard other teachers say, you know, my hardest kids, they're distracted by their phones, so they don't cause as much problems in the classroom. And so sometimes that's nice, but that's not good for our kids. And it's not good for our teachers either.
And so we would encourage the schools and school districts to look at this and see if it's the right thing for them. We may have some legislators who decide that they want to look at an overall ban. Again, we believe it should local decision-making.
I'm just curious because I agree with you, students get distracted, students have a hard time in class, period, let alone with a cell phone in their face. Are there ways that we could approach using cell phones in classrooms that would be in a positive way, rather than-- or retraining teachers or working with LEAs to make sure that cell phones are used appropriately in classrooms?
Yeah, I think that's a great idea. And you even could do a hybrid approach where you have cubbies as the kids walk in. They put them there, but if teachers want to use the cell phones for something that they're doing, they can say, go get your phone out of your cubby, and let them use them for a classroom activity or something like that.
And I know there's, from time to time, they have been helpful tool for teachers. And so like I said, this isn't something that we think we should be dictating. It really needs to be up to your school community.
I love that. That's great. So you said something that was really-- both Dani and I have heard it before. And we both-- we have questions about it. Earlier in the conversation, you said, you want us to be a trauma-informed state. What does that mean? And what can school-- school administrators, counselors, district administrators do to support being trauma-informed in schools?
Well, I'm not an expert on this. But I'll tell you where I think we need to start, as a state. And that is, we need an entity who can own and be the central location for data, best practices, and training on trauma-informed. And I don't know if you've heard of the ACEs survey. It stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences survey. And you can google it, and you can take the survey. And it asks you questions about your childhood.
You know, did you ever go without food? Did you have parents who were divorced? Did you have anybody in your home who had mental illness? Was anybody incarcerated? It goes through this whole list of questions. And there is data that shows, if you get over a four on that, there are health outcomes that change. And so learning how to be trauma-informed would benefit educational community, health care, pediatricians' offices, how they talk to kids about childhood trauma.
Our health departments are hungry for it. But it's looking at an overall system and figuring out, how are we approaching things? And are we doing it in a way that, if you have somebody struggling with trauma-- if you have a kiddo in your classroom who was beaten the night before by his parents and you have kind of an inkling that something's going on at home, are you equipped, as a teacher, to know the kinds of things to say and the kind of environment to help that child in?
And those are the things that we need to look more into because we do have an awful lot of our kids who deal with trauma. And it's awful, and it's not fair, but it shouldn't have to be a detractor from their education either.
I absolutely-- that resonates with me because one of the things I used to tell first-year teachers, one of the things that I was first told was, make best friends with your counselor because you never know, in your school, when you're going to come across that kid who has had a mental health issue, has a trauma at home, has something happening that you-- is nearly invisible to you as a teacher, but you can tell something wrong is going on.
And so I always wanted to make sure that the teachers I worked with knew that they could walk down the hall with a kid, take them to their counselors and say, hey, can you just talk to him for a while? And that doesn't put the impetus on the teacher to do that, have that trauma-informed conversation because we're not psychologists. We don't know the best practices sometimes. But it does give us an outlet to make sure the kid is taken care of, the child is taking care of.
Well, and isn't it interesting, in this day and age, I feel like we have put so much on teachers. We expect you-- you're with our kids more than even parents are sometimes. So there's this expectation that teachers are having to be the counselor and therapist and-- well, I guess they're kind of the same thing-- but assess issues and teach and parent.
And we put so much on our teachers, and you're right. We've got to get more help. You bring up a good point too on, do we need more therapists in the school and counselors and people who can help kids? Because we're in a different situation now than we were 25 years ago.
That's kind of going into the next question I have for you is, we expect so much from our teachers. And one of the things that in the last decade that we've been expecting from our teachers is that they, one, are good digital citizens and, two, that they teach our students to be good digital citizens.
How do you see that happening if students aren't on or aware of social media? We're not teaching them how to be necessarily good digital citizens online. Do you feel like that is our teachers' responsibility? Should that be just for parents? What do you think about the actual teaching of digital citizenship?
Well, I think it's great. And I think it should be parents, first of all, being a little more informed. We have a lot of problems because of parents not being involved in their kids' social media. You remember the TikTok challenges where school property is getting damaged.
And we have school districts who are getting threats all the time through social media. And it travels through, and it ends up costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars as administration and police and everybody else have to go and investigate. So parents have got to step up and be more involved in their kids' online behavior. They have to.
We have to get to a point where that is the expectation of parents. Now, while that being said, I do think too, because we haven't held social media companies accountable, there's got to be some potential legislation too to look at, how do we rein this in and create accountability for the things that are happening?
When you're feeding kids algorithms about eating disorders to a kid who's got an eating disorder and creating bigger problems, that's not a good thing. When our kids are staying up all night on social media and then being too tired to go to school the next day-- like, parents, have your kids check in their phones at night in your bedroom. That's what we did when our kids were teenagers is they had to come plug their phone into our bedroom every night before they went to bed.
And those are things that the parents should be responsible for. I don't believe-- we put enough on our teachers. We shouldn't be expecting them to do this too. That being said, I am not opposed to seeing digital safety courses or even a portion of a section of-- I don't know, health or computer science or one of our required classes containing information on digital safety. I think it's a great idea.
Thank you so much for joining us today. If our listeners want to go out and find more out about the Office of Families, all of your policies, where can they find that, on the internet, or how can get in contact with you?
Well, I'm brand new. So I just started in September. But they are welcome to email me at awn@utah.gov.
Very cool. Thank you so much for being here today.
Thank you. It's been wonderful.
Great to talk to you.
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All right, Matt, I really enjoyed that interview with Aimee. But I'm wondering, as a former high school teacher-- I taught elementary. So phones wasn't really a big deal back in the day when I was in the classroom. How do you feel about cell phones in class?
So I have kind of a different point of view. I always thought about cell phones as a tool. So if I could use the cell phone or have the students use the cell phone in some way and work with their parents to do that, it was a much better situation overall because, if you just create your own rule, and there's no standardized rule at the school, then you start getting these really weird moments with students where they're distracted anyways because they snuck their phone in the class, and--
Yeah, they do the pocket sneak.
Exactly, or they're staring at their lap or whatever it is. And you know they're not focused. And then they also have that compounded stress of, I'm going to get caught doing this. And so my class, after watching Junior Illuminate, UCET in I think, 2017 or 2018, she told me that the classes that are most innovative usually have the cell phones being used. It's the teachers that have the home away or where they put the cell phones away, that have the largest problems that she sees as a consultant.
And so I started adopting a rule in my classroom that, you could have a cell phone on your table out if you needed to, but it needed to be for a practical purpose in class. And so students were doing it to do research. Some of them weren't listening to music during class because we were a writing class. I thought that I need to listen to music to write. But then, also, doing film projects-- way easier with a cell phone. Doing audio projects-- way easier with a cell phone. And so--
Well, they're amazing tools. When we were growing up, cell phones did not have these amazing cameras on them. They didn't have recording devices. I think there's so many ways that we can use them to create that are positive.
And then, putting my parent hat on, I like knowing that, if I need to, I can get a hold of my kid. And it really stresses me out. I don't I don't care if it's out on his desk all the time. But if he wants to shoot me a text, I feel like he should be able to. And that makes me a little nervous about these kind of conversations.
I think where they're headed with a cell phone ban, I would be much happier and much more understanding as a person, and as a teacher, if it was a pushing for legislation against certain apps.
Yes.
Social media, those are the things-- I can understand why a full cell phone ban would be a good talking point and a good point to look for. But I think the stepping stones along the way of having age limits and bans on certain apps for students-- and that's going to have a much larger effect over time than just straight-out banning the technology.
Right, right. And I always feel like we need to prepare our students for the real world. Somehow, in K-12, it is not the real world, and you live by a different set of rules than you live in when you grow up. And we're supposed to be preparing our students to live in the real world. And when they graduate from high school, they're probably going to have a cell phone.
And what if they haven't been able to develop those kind of study habits when there's not someone saying no, no, no, no, no. As far as your idea of banning certain apps-- all for it. If the data is there that is saying, like this is bad for developing minds' mental health, which it does seem to be pointing in that direction-- great, get rid of those apps. But I don't think banning a whole device is necessarily the way.
Yeah, and I think that's where our guest, she directed us towards, was, yeah, the goal might be to ban cell phones in schools, but also, it's up to local control. It's up to the different schools, the different districts, to make the decision that's best for the constituency.
And along that path, some school, some district might come upon the perfect solution for what's going on. And I that's something really valuable about Utah is that we're willing to try new things, see what's happening inside our classrooms, and then hopefully disseminate that information to everyone of what's best practices.
Absolutely. I'd really like to hear from some of our Utah teachers on this. If you have a cell phone policy that is working really well, either in your classroom or in your school, hit us up on Twitter. Let us know what is working. Because I think it'd be really interesting to see, what are the other options out there?
Absolutely. Well, thanks, Dani.
Yeah.
All right, we'll see you guys next time. Bye, everyone.
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