Back in early March of 2025, every student at our school was introduced to the Yondr pouch. These phone pouches seal shut after a phone is placed inside and can only be reopened with a special magnet. They are designed to keep students off their phones during class.
Almost instantly, the quad was filled with attempts to slam them open, buzz about buying magnets that open the Yondr pouches off Amazon and surprisingly clever methods of discretion.
Instead of putting their phones into the pouches, students would place various items into their pouches to fool their teachers. These would range from calculators to flat rectangular rocks.
The $7 million used to fund the tried and failed venture was evidently too little, too late.
To wrangle teenagers’ phones from their very hands in the middle of the second semester was a bad idea from the start. The implementation of Yondr pouches meant the loss of the most useful tool students have in the classroom, especially in the case of an emergency.
The potential of sickness and personal emergencies, or worse, natural disasters, posed an extraordinary risk if students could not reach out to loved ones. Proposed solutions like emails, contacting the school or the nurse’s office, for many students, just aren’t sufficient in addressing the risk Yondr pouches create.
Time is critical in an emergency. The crucial moments students could lose on the way to the nurse’s office or writing an email could be spared just by sending a text, even more so in the quick seconds needed to dial a number.
While it’s certain that phones have become an increasingly evident distraction in classrooms, the solution was never jarringly stripping students of the major channel of their autonomy. In other words, the Yondr pouches were a failed experiment.
The final nail in this experiment’s lifespan was students’ refusal to return their pouches to the administration at the end of the last spring semester, resulting in its discontinuation here at Van Nuys High School.
Nevertheless, the short-lived, “long-missed” Yondr pouches here represent a vital misunderstanding by LAUSD.
LAUSD funding priorities reportedly included reducing class sizes, restoring hours for support staff, increased compensation for staff, student plans like the Black Student Achievement Plan or specifics like arts programs, which received $30 million more than the last fiscal year.
However, that doesn’t detract from the fact that LAUSD lost significant green this past year due to decreased attendance and federal cuts; gambling money with the Yondr pouches under such precarious circumstances makes little sense. Instead of embarking on not only a costly but also risky program, the district should have been focusing on school campuses and student needs.
But as shown previously, enhancing the landscapes of schools and providing more thorough student support were not definitive priorities.
The most glaring example of the misplaced budget here at Van Nuys High School is the shortage of paper, with each teacher, like art teacher Ms. Kellie Long-Hayden allowed only 5,000 sheets of paper to last the entire fall semester.
Teachers here have been placed under a paper ceiling.
The Yondr pouches’ futility during the school year and its failure to return for the new one indicates that students are not receptive to such a shocking and pricey change, especially at the expense of the things here at Van Nuys High School that are presently affecting them.
Van Nuys was one of the first and few schools whose student body outright rejected the Yondr pouches. It will not be the last.
Something shouldn’t have to fail to prioritize more glaring and persistent issues in our school.
LAUSD’s $7 million dollar mistake can be just that — a costly mistake.
However, it needs to be said that the Yondr pouches do not solely reflect LAUSD’s financial mismanagement but also highlight a fatal flaw of not knowing what their students need.
Students need a better campus and more support to thrive academically. They don’t need a fumbling attempt to remove the one thing they can rely on in the classroom.
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2025 print edition.
