Students Face New Phone Rules in 17 More States

Jamel Bishop is seeing a big change in his classrooms as he begins his senior year at Doss High School in Louisville, Kentucky, where cellphones are now banned during instructional time. In previous years, students often weren't paying attention and wasted class time by repeating questions, the teenager says. Now, teachers can provide "more one-on-one time for the students who actually need it."

• Kentucky is one of 17 states and the District of Columbia starting this school year with new restrictions, bringing the total to 35 states that have laws or rules limiting phones and other electronic devices in school, the AP reports. This change has come remarkably quickly: Florida became the first state to pass such a law in 2023.

• Both Democrats and Republicans have taken up the cause, reflecting a growing consensus that phones are bad for kids' mental health and take their focus away from learning, even as some researchers say the issue is less clear-cut. "Anytime you have a bill that's passed in California and Florida, you know you're probably onto something that's pretty popular," Georgia state Rep. Scott Hilton, a Republican, told a forum on cellphone use last week in Atlanta.
• Phones are banned throughout the school day in 18 of the states and the District of Columbia, although Georgia and Florida impose such "bell-to-bell" bans only from kindergarten through eighth grade. Another seven states ban them during class time, but not between classes or during lunch. Still others, particularly those with traditions of local school control, mandate only a cellphone policy, believing districts will take the hint and sharply restrict phone access.

• For students, the rules add new school-day rituals, like putting phones in magnetic pouches or special lockers. Students have been locking up their phones during class at McNair High School in suburban Atlanta since last year. Audreanna Johnson, a junior, says "most of them did not want to turn in their phones" at first, because students would use them to gossip, texting "their other friends in other classes to see what's the tea and what's going on around the building." That resentment is "starting to ease down" now, she says. "More students are willing to give up their phones and not get distracted."
• Some parents, however, want constant contact. In a survey of 125 Georgia school districts by Emory University researchers, parental resistance was cited as the top obstacle to regulating student use of social and digital media. Johnson's mother, Audrena Johnson, says she worries most about knowing her children are safe from violence at school.

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• Some researchers say it's not yet clear what types of social media may cause harm or whether restrictions have benefits, but teachers "love the policy," according to Julie Gazmararian, a professor of public health at Emory University who does surveys and focus groups to research the effects of a phone ban in middle school grades in the Marietta school district near Atlanta. "They could focus more on teaching," Gazmararian says. "There were just not the disruptions."
• Another benefit: more positive interactions among students. "They were saying that kids are talking to each other in the hallways and in the cafeteria," Gazmararian says. "And in the classroom, there is a noticeably lower [number] of discipline referrals."