The debate over whether or not cellphones should be permitted in the classroom is still going strong as the summer is coming to a close.
Many teachers, school administrators, and state legislators have been advocating for stricter regulations with the goal of protecting students’ mental health. They claim that after decades of research into how technology affects American children and years of vying for their attention, they’ve had enough.
“It’s a losing battle for kids & their brain,” Tyler Rablin, a high school teacher in Sunnyside, Washington, tweeted in May. Rablin, who wrote that he once championed phones in the classroom as a learning tool, now likens teenagers with cellphones to alcoholics at a bar.
“The phone is no longer a passive tool,” he wrote. “Their phone is actively and intentionally working against the goals of learning, of having a productive and meaningful life.”
The campaign to ban children from using their phones in class has had some success in recent years. According to Department of Education data, the percentage of schools that forbade the use of cellphones for non-academic purposes increased from 66 to 77 percent between 2015 and 2020.
In a 2020 research, it was shown that 78 percent of the middle and high schools polled had a policy against using cellphones in class, with 96 percent having some sort of smartphone policy. According to the report, over half of instructors across all grade levels are aware that students are using their phones in class, and 99 percent of them favor cellphone usage limitations.
In 2019, California became the first state to pass legislation giving schools the power to control the use of cellphones during school hours.
A spokesperson for the senator who wrote the bill said that while it doesn’t ban cellphones or require schools to adopt prohibitive policies, the bill’s significance lies in the fact that it is the first piece of legislation to link smartphones with a decline in student mental health and the first to ask schools to consider implementing smartphone regulations with students’ health in mind.
However, when other states tried to enact more stringent laws, they encountered opposition.
When it was put out in Maine in 2019, a measure banning student smartphone usage during instruction, lunch, and downtime was soundly defeated.
“There seemed at that time to be no appetite to even consider the proposal,” state Representative Heidi Sampson, who sponsored the bill, told CBS News in an email. “Some felt it was an unrealistic expectation to ban them in schools, ‘cellphones are here to stay, get used to it.’ Most ignored and dismissed evidence for the concerns.”
According to EdWeek, Arizona and Utah also made attempts to implement some sort of cellphone restrictions for schools but were unsuccessful.
In January 2022, the Nebraska state legislature proposed a law that would have required students to leave their phones in a transparent, personal storage box at the entrance of the classroom for the duration of the lesson. In April, the bill was defeated. In July, a similar proposal was made in Pennsylvania’s General Assembly.
The state of Maryland has taken a different approach, introducing a measure to establish a task force to investigate the impact of smartphone use on students and instructors. Likewise, when it was put out in 2019. However, the bill’s sponsor, state senator Joanna Benson, told CBS News that she intends to consult with teachers, tweak the legislation, and present it when Congress reconvenes in January.
Parental and student opposition to limiting regulations is audible because they want their children to have access to one another in an emergency. Mass shootings at schools, like those in Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas, have only increased such worries.
“I feel extremely strong about cellphones being allowed so the children have access to emergency services or their parents in the event of a catastrophe,” Bruce Knell, father of two children in the Lander School District of Wyoming and a Casper city councilman, told CBS News. “I feel more strongly as a parent than I do a politician.”
However, according to Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a youngster using a smartphone in an emergency is rarely the wisest course of action.
“I understand that a cellphone can meet the emotional needs of a parent and child in the moment,” he said, “but a child’s only job in a lockdown situation should be to stay quiet and give 100% of their attention to the educator.”
Trump, who oversees safety workshops in schools around the nation, recognizes the importance of the 911 calls made by children inside the Uvalde school during the massacre. However, he asserted that if the responsibility of phoning 911 falls to a youngster, it is as a result of a higher level crisis response system failing.
“By all accounts, the situation at Uvalde did not follow a number of best practices,” he said. “We have protocol and trained crisis teams for times like these.”
However, the issues go beyond school shootings. The Associated Press reported that in February, students at Torrington Middle School in Connecticut organized a protest when the school board decided to limit smartphone usage. After several students activated fire alarms and police were brought to the location, the administration dismissed the pupils for the day.
A petition opposing the rule was initiated that day by Michael Mosel, who claimed to be the parent of a Torrington student. He argued that the money would have been better spent on other educational initiatives. Since then, more than 600 people have signed it.
“The students are fed up with administrators and the board of education constantly overlooking and ignoring the basic needs of our students,” Mosel wrote in the petition. He emphasized that the school board was trying to “restrict the use of phones while in use, regardless of the situation. (e.g. medical, mental health, emergency, etc).”
Jake Langlais, the superintendent of Lewiston public schools in Maine, acknowledges the worry experienced by both students and parents, but believes there must be a solution to the ongoing issues brought on by cell phones in the classroom.
“Cellphone use and social media are the number one distraction during the school day,” he told CBS News. “I understand the sense of security that a phone can provide to a parent, but school should be a place for learning and becoming who you are. Constant phone access is proving to run contrary.”
One of the numerous districts attempting to reach a consensus is Lewiston. In order to assure that every classroom can place outgoing calls, the Crane School District in Missouri, which announced that it will outlaw cellphones, smart watches, headphones, and digital cameras in the upcoming school year, is implementing a new phone system during the summer.
According to Cocopah Middle School in Arizona, parents and students were required to sign a “technology contract” that included a promise not to text their children mindlessly while they are in class.
Yondr pouches, which magnetically lock phones like individual burritos, are becoming more and more popular. Students at Bronxdale High School in New York may have their phones with them while yet having the gadgets rendered useless. High school students in Fairfax County, Virginia, are permitted to use their smartphones at lunch and in between courses.
With the exception of “dumb” phones like flip phones and internet-enabled Kindles and tablets, cellphones have just been prohibited at the Buxton School in western Massachusetts for both students and instructors.
“The habits of mind that smartphones have introduced and, at this point, essentially demand, are diametrically opposed to the educational project of a place like Buxton,” Franny Shuker-Haines, Buxton’s director of outreach, told CBS News. “Our purpose is to give students the chance to become self-aware stewards of their community, and smartphones constantly work against that essential mission.”