Baltimore City educators are searching for ways to reduce the harm that social media platforms cause their young students. The main question they're facing is how.

A panel hosted Friday morning by the Baltimore Curriculum Project, a nonprofit that runs many of the city’s charter schools, aimed to jump-start those efforts.

Michael Lucas, assistant principal at Hampstead Hill Academy, said his school started with a conversation about student well-being, and how social media shapes it.

Developing research links high social media usage to symptoms of depression and anxiety, low self-esteem, shortened attention spans and more.

“We came to the conclusion that it's a mental health crisis, and we actually have to do something about it.” Lucas said. “Like we can't just allow kids to continue kind of on this trajectory.”

This year, Hampstead Hill students are required to lock their phones in pouches for the whole school day.

“We think our kids would be better off if they didn't have access to their phone for seven hours a day,” Lucas said. “While they're here, they just can't have it.”

Now, Lucas says his students are more engaged with each other and their classes.

Before, he said, “I spent all recess telling them to put their phones away. They would sneak into the bathroom to check their phones.”

Lucas says he encourages every school to find a way to separate students from their phones during school hours.

But Joshua Civin, the city school district’s chief legal officer, said it’s important to remember that social media companies make on-the-ground solutions like these much harder to execute.

“There are deliberate actions by our social media platform corporations that make it more difficult for us to do our work, and make it harder for us to benefit from the positive of social media,” he said.

Algorithms push users down rabbit holes, Civin said. Refreshing feeds give dopamine hits similar to slot machines.

“Sometimes we blame ourselves for lack of willpower,” he said. “We're in a battle that's not a fair fight.”

In July, the city school district joined 500 others nationwide in a lawsuit against major social media companies to ensure they “design these [apps] in mind for kids,” Civin said. “There needs to be more resources for us to abate this harm.”

Those resources range from more counselors and mental health professionals within schools, Civin said, to footing the $7,000 per year bill for items like Hampstead Hill’s Yondr pouches.

Social media’s role in school violence 

Lucas said that the presence of social media also increases in-school violence and conflicts.

“There's no fight now that’s not recorded,” he said. “So if you get in a fight, it will be recorded, and everybody will see it. And if you get called out to a fight, it will be on a social media platform, and everybody will see it. So many kids feel like ‘I had to show up. If I didn't show up, everybody would know.’”

And even when school officials mitigate the conflict one-on-one with students, it is often rehashed by social media, Civin added.

“Social media has a life of its own,” he said. “So you've done the hard work to get the kids calmed down, but the image is already out there. And then some other kid brings the image back up in a feed, and you're off to the races again.”

Lachond Carter, a social worker at Frederick Elementary School, said social media often sparks conflict through cyberbullying.

In a public hearing on Wednesday, Councilman Zeke Cohen said social media has a major role in “exacerbating bullying, and in leading conflicts to the point of escalation that often in some cases involve violence and guns.”

City schools CEO Sonja Santelises said the district has “only started touching around the edges” of addressing social media’s role in violence.

“I don’t think we have that strategic, full-force, how are we really going to counter that,” she said.

Civin said the district struggles to implement a city-wide social media policy because of its prioritization of school autonomy to make their own policies.

“When things get to a groundswell, there may be a case where this is something that is such a huge cry that we want to make a city schools policy,” he said.