The book check-out rate at an Oklahoma high school’s library has increased by double digits compared to last year.
It’s been a tough and busy week for conservatives, so I was glad to see this eyebrow-raising story from a few days ago while catching up with my hometown newspaper, the Tulsa World.
Back in May, the Oklahoma legislature passed and Governor Kevin Stitt signed into law Senate Bill 139, which mandates that Oklahoma public school districts ban cellphones and other electronic gadgets (smart watches, tablets, bluetooth headphones, etc.) during the school day. The goal was to keep kids off TikTok and other Information Age distractions and focused on learning and expanding their minds while in the school building.
Tulsa World reporter Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton wanted to look into the law’s real-world effects, so she talked to the librarians at Charles Page High School and Freshman Academy in Sands Springs, a town just outside Tulsa, Okla. What she found was that the book check-out rate has increased by double digits compared to last year.
“It started at the very beginning of the year,” [librarian Mikael] Howard told Krehbiel-Burton. “Kids were coming in who knew they couldn’t have their phones out and needed something to keep themselves busy at the end of the hour.”
“We started noticing kids we usually didn’t see in here coming in multiple times per week, so we started running the numbers.”
Those numbers indicated that their building’s check-out rates are up anywhere from 10% to 53% depending on the day, with Friday as the busiest day of a typical week.
This is all excellent news — and I don’t particularly mind a bit that kids aren’t necessarily checking out Tolstoy and Dante. You can’t turn kids into serious readers if they don’t build the habit of reading books in the first place.
Here’s a little more from Krehbiel-Burton’s report:
A junior at Charles Page, Jailyn Shipman was among the students in the library on a recent Friday morning, hoping to check out a new book by her favorite author, Lynn Painter. Shipman is a fan of romance novels and said she was a regular in the library before the ban took effect.
“It shouldn’t have been so normalized to be on our phones all the time,” Shipman told the World. “[Phones] were really that bad in schools to the point kids weren’t reading.”
Wise words from this high school junior. Maybe the kids are going to be all right after all.
Yes — this is “anecdata.” We shouldn’t read too much into this. But it’s an early and encouraging sign that school cell phone bans are having a positive effect.