Cellphone bans spread in U.S. schools amid growing mental health worries

Students returning to school in a growing number of states and districts are facing tight restrictions and outright bans on cellphone use as evidence mounts of the damaging impact persistent connection to the internet has on teenagers.

In Los Angeles, the second-largest district in the country, the school board voted in June to ban cellphone use. In Clark County, Nev., the district will require students in middle and high schools to store phones in pouches during the day, starting this fall. Several states — including Indiana, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida — have enacted legislation limiting cellphone access during the school year. And governors in at least three other states, including Virginia, have called on schools to restrict or ban the devices. Other states have provided funding to support restrictive policies.

Of the nation’s 20 largest school districts, at least seven forbid use of cellphones during the school day or plan to do so, while at least another seven impose significant restrictions, such as barring use during class time but permitting phones during lunch or when students are between classes, according to a Washington Post review.

Pressure on school leaders has come from teachers and parents who see cellphones as a distraction, an impediment to learning and a constant toll on students’ mental health.

“Everybody has been saying, ‘Take the phones,’” New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks, whose district plans to announce a cellphone ban soon, told NY1 this summer. “It is a major problem. Parents, teachers, administrators and kids. So we’re going to try and get ready to do something that makes some sense.”

The most recent federal survey, in 2021, found that 43% of high schools and 77% of middle schools prohibit nonacademic use of cellphones or smartphones during school hours. Experts and administrators say those numbers have risen significantly.

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Among schools with restrictions, policies and practices vary. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg district in North Carolina allows students to bring cellphones to school but requires they be kept in silent mode while on school property and forbids any noninstructional use including personal calls and texts. The Houston Independent School District requires that phones be turned off. The Duval County district in Florida mandates that students turn off and stow away their phones in pockets or personal bags during class time.

Penalties for violating phone rules usually include confiscation, sometimes requiring parents to retrieve the device from an administrator’s office. Occasionally, misbehavior yields more-severe consequences, such as exclusion from extracurricular activities or even suspension, for repeat offenders.

Other districts ban use of phones during instructional time — or allow teachers to do so in their individual classes — but permit use during lunch or in the hallways.

The most restrictive polices require students to hand over phones for the entire school day or store them in a locking pouch, such as those sold by Yondr. Demand for the $30 pouches has skyrocketed, more than tripling this calendar year, the company said, though it would not say how many are in use. The company projects that it will serve more than 2 million students by year’s end.

In Los Angeles, officials are exploring how to implement a cellphone ban that will extend through the entire school day.

“Knowing what we know, something must be done,” Alberto M. Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said in an interview. “Smartphones and the content students access relentlessly 24/7 are distracting kids from learning and eroding their mental health.”

Walking into lunchrooms, he said, he often sees tables of four or five students where everyone is staring at their phones, rather than interacting with one another.

“It’s heartbreaking,” he said.

The pendulum swings back

In 2009-2010, before cellphones became ubiquitous, schools generally barred their use, seeing them as distractions. A federal survey that year found that 91% of all schools prohibited nonacademic use of cellphones during school hours.

That started to change as companies began developing applications and programs that allowed cellphones to be used for educational purposes, said Victor Pereira, a lecturer on education at Harvard University. Phones could suddenly be used as a measurement device in laboratories or to play games that test learning. By 2015-2016, just 66% of all schools barred their use. Then the coronavirus pandemic arrived, and for many students, phones were a lifeline to learning in a virtual school environment.

But in the years since, as some students began to exhibit a dependency on cellular devices, schools started returning to earlier prohibitions. By 2020-2021, the share of all schools barring use reached 77% — although those figures are much lower among high schools.

“Decisions to put cellphones in front of young people at different ages — it’s been a pendulum,” Pereira said.

Lobbying for phone-free schools has spiked. A group of advocates and academics wrote Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in October asking him to urge schools to adopt phone-free policies. A bipartisan Senate bill would create a $5 million grant program to cover the costs of secure containers for storing phones during the school day. Last year, the White House directed the Education Department to create model policies around devices as part of a youth mental health initiative, though the agency has yet to release them.

In a 2023 advisory, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy warned that social media, which children often access through their phones, is a direct threat to mental health. He said social media usage can spur depression, anxiety, body dissatisfaction, disordered eating behaviors and low self-esteem, especially among teenage girls. Murthy suggested parents establish “tech-free” zones in which children cannot access their phones.

A study published in 2022 concluded that taking away phones could help learning. It was based on an experiment in which different classrooms of New York Institute of Technology undergraduates spent six weeks learning with and without cellphones. Afterward, researchers surveyed the students on their mindset and what they learned.

“We found the people who did not have their phones had lower levels of anxiety, high levels of course comprehension and high levels of mindfulness,” said Melissa Huey, an assistant professor of psychology at New York Tech and one of the two authors of the study.

She added that the outcomes she observed among college students would probably be more pronounced for K-12 students.

A push from teachers

Some of the recent push for restrictive policies has come from teachers, who see firsthand how distracting phones can be and who are exhausted from policing student use.

Seventy-two percent of high school teachers reported that students getting distracted by cellphones was a “major problem” in their classrooms, according to a fall 2023 Pew Research Center survey. The National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, reports educators’ widespread frustration with cellphone use and encourages its members to negotiate local policies “restricting access to personal devices during the school day.”

That approach worked in Cleveland, where the teachers union successfully pushed for a student cellphone ban in negotiating its recently approved contract.

The newly approved language requires administrators at every school to collect student cellphones before students go to their classrooms. It takes effect this school year.

The previous policy required that students keep their phones off, but that meant constant monitoring by teachers, said Shari Obrenski, president of the Cleveland Teachers Union.

Teachers were also concerned about fights. Obrenski said high school students used cellphones to schedule fights, record them and post the videos to social media. “They were using the phones to create chaos and perpetuate violence in our schools,” she said.

There’s often pushback from students and sometimes from parents when cellphone restrictions are adopted, administrators say.

Some parents worry about reaching their children during an emergency — such as a school shooting. Advocates respond that students can use phones in the school office if there’s a need to communicate with a parent or caregiver, and that school shootings are rare.

On Change.org, more than 170 petitions about cellphone bans, most of them calling for fewer restrictions, have been created over the past six months, together garnering more than 120,000 signatures, a spokeswoman for the platform said.

One targeting a new law in Louisiana banning cellphone use, created by students, has garnered more than 43,000 signatures. “As high school students, we are currently being treated little better than kindergartners,” the petition says.

Two approaches in Florida

Last year, Florida became the first state to enact a law that requires all public schools to ban student cellphone use during class time and block access to social media on district WiFi networks. Districts may decide whether students can access phones during lunch and between classes.

In July, Florida’s Hillsborough County adopted a policy that requires phones to be placed on silent and put away in middle and elementary school. In high schools, phones can be used only during lunch, with exceptions for teachers who want to utilize phones for instruction.

Steinbrenner High School English teacher Calvin Dillon said in an interview that blanket bans won’t work.

“Thinking that you can actually get rid of the phones, it’s not realistic. It’s naive,” Dillon said. “But if you create a situation or an experience that’s more interesting than what they could find in the phone for 20 seconds, you know, then you’re doing your job.”

Nate Casibang, a senior at Sickles High School in Hillsborough County, said he understands why lawmakers were eager to ban phones from the classroom. But he likes using the device for educational purposes, like in one of his favorite classes last year, French, where the teacher relied on the educational platform Canvas to post assignments and grades. Most days, students were expected to use their phones to access Canvas, he said.

Nate, 17, knows that phones can be harmful — he doesn’t like how he feels after scrolling on TikTok for two hours. But he doesn’t want people to forget that good comes from phones, too.

“It’s easy to paint a bad narrative,” he said. “But also, more people than you could ever imagine are using it to be smarter, and smarter than any previous generation.”

Elsewhere in Florida, Orange County Public Schools adopted a full ban, requiring students in all grades to leave their cellphones silenced and in backpacks all day long.

Marc Wasko, principal of the 3,500-student Timber Creek High School in Orange County, said he was surprised by how quickly students adapted. At first, he said, administrators were confiscating about 100 phones a day. That quickly dropped to about 10 to 30.

The school added lunchtime programming to help students with the transition. On Tuesdays and Fridays, there’s pickleball. Sometimes there’s a DJ. Students read and use the library more.

Wasko recalled joyful moments that might never have happened if students were glued to their phone screens: Kids brought Polaroid and digital cameras to school to capture homecoming week last school year. They seem to be talking more, he said. Students now greet him in the hallway.

“It was nice,” Wasko said, “to see kids being kids.”