Charles Longshore distinctly remembers the tipping point that led his Alabama middle school to ban cell phones, two years before the state adopted its own ban.

Longshore, then the assistant principal at Dothan Preparatory Academy, had gotten wind that two girls planned to fight in the courtyard between classes and pulled them into the office about 10 minutes before the scheduled rumble. That prevented the fight, but it didn’t stop hundreds of other students from racing to the courtyard hoping to watch a spectacle advertised through texts and chats, with their own phones out ready to record it.

Stories like these — along with countless less dramatic moments of distraction and disengagement — have made cell phone bans a rare point of bipartisan agreement on education policy. Twenty-six states now have . Two-thirds of principals said their school had a bell-to-bell ban in a .

But so far there hasn’t been much concrete evidence about the impacts of school cell phone bans.

“The policy action is just happening at a level that far surpasses the available evidence,” said David Figlio, an economics professor at the University of Rochester. “The available evidence is largely people’s hunches.”

Figlio and Umut Özek, a senior economist at RAND Corp., a research organization, set out to address that gap. Their study, , analyzes data from a large, county-level urban school district in Florida, which was the first state to adopt a cell phone ban.

The study found modest improvements in test scores in the second year of the ban, after an increase in suspensions in the first year.

The Florida school district had adopted a bell-to-bell ban, more restrictive than the state law, which requires that students not use their phones during instructional time. Students violating the ban had their phones confiscated but got them back at the end of the school day. Students could also face discipline, including suspension, for violating the ban.

Florida students take standardized tests three times a year, and schools report discipline and attendance daily, giving researchers a lot of information to work with.

Using data about cell phone usage coming from each school building, the researchers first identified schools where students used cell phones at higher and lower levels before the ban, which went into effect in 2023. Middle schools had higher cell phone use than high schools before and after the ban.

Researchers then used data from the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years to compare changes in schools with the highest cell phone use before the ban and those with the lowest.

This study design, known as difference within difference, allows researchers to draw stronger conclusions about causality.

In the second year of the ban, average test scores on the higher-stakes spring test went up by 1.1 percentiles more in the schools where students previously used their phones a lot, compared with low-activity schools. The results were more significant for middle and high school students, and boys seemed to benefit more than girls.

But the gains came with tradeoffs. Suspensions went up in the first year of the ban, the study found, especially for Black boys.

And white students saw greater test score growth than Black students.

“Black students seem to be accruing fewer of the benefits of the cell phone ban and more of the disciplinary costs,” Figlio said.

The study can’t answer why Black students — who often face disproportionate discipline — were suspended more often. The increase largely went away in the second year of the ban. Still, Figlio said, the finding calls for schools to be thoughtful about how they approach enforcement.

The study didn’t directly measure school climate — the kind of improvement Longshore and other principals often notice most after they adopt a ban — but researchers did track unexcused absences and students changing schools, potential proxies for how content or safe students feel at school.

Both metrics improved after the cell phone ban was in effect. In fact, the study found that the improvements in attendance contributed to about half the increase in student test scores after the ban.

Figlio called the test score increases “meaningful but not game-changing.”

“It’s not transforming test scores,” he said. “But we’re observing palpable improvement. We’re observing kids attending school more.”

Test score declines blamed on cell phones

American students’ scores on and have been trending down for the past decade, well before COVID disruptions. Researchers are not entirely sure why, but one theory is that the rise of cell phone and social media use among children has had deleterious cognitive and social effects.

“We lack direct evidence of a causal link between smartphones and learning, but I’m convinced that this technology is a key driver of youth mental health challenges, a distraction from learning, both inside and outside of schools, and a deterrent to reading,” Harvard education professor Martin West told the .

Because social media wasn’t introduced to children through a randomized controlled trial, it’s hard to isolate the effects, West said at the hearing. Cell phone bans provide an opportunity to study what happens when social media is removed from the school environment.

But West urged policymakers and parents to address social media use outside of school as well. A study published in JAMA earlier this month found that than those who used little or no social media.

Figlio said he’s prepared to say that cell phones are a driver of test score declines, but there’s not enough evidence to say whether they’re the primary driver.

Longshore, whose school was not involved in the study and who had not read the study when he spoke to Chalkbeat, said state test scores didn’t change significantly after the school started requiring students to leave their phones in a lockbox all day. The school maintained its trajectory of slow but steady growth.

But far fewer students failed their classes, he said. Longshore referred roughly 80 students to summer school the year before the ban. This past summer, it was just 20.

Longshore, who left Dothan at the end of last school year to take a principal job in another district, didn’t suspend students who violated the ban. Instead, after the first offense, the school would hold onto the phone until a parent could pick it up. At a high-poverty school where many parents work multiple jobs, students might go days without their phones — and the parent usually made sure the child didn’t bring it to school again.

With chronic absenteeism already high, Longshore said the last thing he wanted was more students out of class as a result of the ban.

And in fact, discipline at the school improved significantly. There was less drama, Longshore said, and far fewer fights. The lunchroom got loud again with students talking to their classmates.

Future research on cell phone bans could dig into school climate surveys or examine academic or discipline data in different school contexts, Figlio said. The question of impact is “not asked and answered,” he said.

“I care a lot about test scores, but I care even more about kids’ life outcomes — graduating high school, attending college, workforce participation,” he said. “These are things we won’t know for a while.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .Ěý

Scores last week on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP test, often called “the Nation’s Report Card,” showed that just 22% of seniors were “proficient” or above in math, down from 24% in 2019. And just 35% were proficient in reading, down from 37% in 2019. Higher percentages in 2024 also scored in NAEP’s “below basic” level in both subjects.

That has prompted a chorus of protests from experts who believe that, among other problems, digital devices and social media are dragging down U.S. teens. 

Harvard scholar Martin West, who co-leads the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, said in an the day the scores appeared that emerging evidence of widening achievement gaps in other developed countries suggests that we should be looking at “factors that transcend national boundaries.”

The rise of smartphones — and particularly the advent of social media use among young people — seems a likely culprit, he said.

“The timing fits,” West wrote. “Phones distract students from math homework just as much as they do from reading.” And surveys show that disadvantaged students spend the most time on their devices, “while motivated students of all backgrounds may be able to use them to enhance their learning.” He noted that disadvantaged students saw the biggest score drops.

While there’s no definitive causal link between smartphones and learning, West said, the circumstantial evidence is “sufficiently strong” to justify experimenting with all-day “bell-to-bell” phone bans in schools, as well as continued efforts to “rein in students’ near-constant use of other digital devices while in class.”

A 2024 found that about one in three teachers consider students distracted by cell phones “a major problem.” Among high school teachers, that figure rises sharply, to 72%. More recently, Pew researchers 74% of U.S. adults say they would support banning cellphones during class for middle and high school students, up from 68% last fall. 

Much of that momentum grows from years of efforts by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has pushed for schools to . Haidt, author of the mega-bestseller , says there’s growing evidence of an “international epidemic” of mental illness that started around 2012, caused in part by social media and teens’ uptake of smartphones in the early 2010s. 

“Many parents now see the addiction and distraction these devices cause in their children; most of us have heard harrowing stories of self-harming behavior and suicide attempts among our friends’ children,” Haidt wrote in 2023, weeks after the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warning that social media use in particular can carry “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

Murthy said there wasn’t enough evidence to determine if social media use “is sufficiently safe” for young people, especially during adolescence, “a particularly vulnerable period of brain development.” While the evidence suggests that social media could put kids’ mental health and well-being at risk, he admitted that more research is needed to fully understand its impact.

To San Diego State University professor and psychologist Jean Twenge, the new NAEP scores “are yet another indication that academic performance is suffering and we need to do something.”

The academic declines predate the COVID pandemic, she said, reaching back to the early 2010s, just as smartphones became popular — Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. “So yes, teens having access to their phones during the school day could certainly be one of the causes of the declines in test scores,” she said in an email.

Twenge, author of the new book , said bell-to-bell phone bans “are one obvious and usually low-cost solution.” That idea, she said, “has only started to catch on in the last year, so we don’t yet know what impact it’s having.” She noted that it’s not even clear how many schools have adopted them, but theorized that they’ll make a difference.

“When the phone is available, it’s just too tempting for students to look at it,” she said. “When rules are only classroom-by-classroom, many teachers allow students to use their phones after they’ve completed their work. What teenager wouldn’t rush through their work to get on their phone? It’s setting them up to fail.”

‘The research is not strong, but public opinion is’

Research on the topic and related issues is beginning to emerge, but doubts about its utility leave a few researchers skeptical.

Writing in Education Next last week, University of Virginia cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham noted that more screen time is with poor attention regulation, for instance. Most studies, he said, support the hypothesis that children’s screen time is associated with poorer attentional control, but the size of the observed relationship, on average, is small.

He warned that educators should keep in mind the context of kids’ digital device use, such as the notion that more screen time could coincide with particular styles of parenting that could also affect kids’ abilities. “Parents may allow their child more access to screens in an effort to improve their child’s mood or behavior,” he wrote. “Or screen activities may keep the child occupied so parents have time for their own pursuits.”

And of course wealthy families may have easier access to pastimes that aren’t screen-based. “In each case,” Willingham said, “it may be elements of the context that have the critical effect on attention, not digital activities per se.”

In one 2024 study, University of Delaware researchers from 1,459 middle schoolers, ages 11 to 15, finding that their academic achievement decreased as their self-reported use of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and X increased. Controlling for age, gender, race and ethnicity, they found that participants’ grades dropped as the frequency of their social media use across all four platforms rose.

By contrast, a by Chinese researchers found that medical students who used social media platforms like WeChat to discuss their work did better and were more engaged in discussions. 

Marilyn Campbell, a professor in the school of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at Australia’s , cautioned that current peer-reviewed research hasn’t found an airtight causal connection between mobile phone use and students’ academic performance, their mental health or even the likelihood of being cyberbullied. 

“The research is not strong, but public opinion is,” she said. “Public opinion is driving this, or else why would politicians get involved?”  

Australia has had a near-total cell phone ban in public schools since 2023, and lawmakers have sung its praises: In South Australia, where the ban didn’t take effect until 2024, showed a 63% decline in “critical incidents involving social media” in the first six months, with behavioral issues down 54% and violent incidents down 10%. But Campbell has noted that there’s little reliable research on academics, mental health and the like.

Banning phones in school makes a kind of logical sense to many people, she said, because there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting it. But she said it’s often a false connection. Campbell compared it to watching summer ice cream sales rise and concluding that it’s ice cream that makes sunglasses fly off the shelves. 

In a of 22 research studies from 12 countries, Campbell and several colleagues found “little to no conclusive evidence” that broad mobile phone bans in schools produce better academics or mental health, or that they reduce cyberbullying. 

Conversely, she said, it’s not entirely clear if banning cell phones in school could have unintended harmful consequences, such as parents finding it more difficult to get kids to do homework or to put away their phones at home “because they’ve got to catch up on all their social media that they haven’t been able to during the break times,” Campbell said.

She also said it’s possible that students in schools with phone bans are staying up later with their phones and missing sleep, which would also have a negative effect on academics.

Campbell also said broad bans leave young people with less practice self-regulating their device use. “Kids leave our schools when they’re 18,” she said. “They’re adults, they’re going to university, and they have had no training [or] practical experience of saying, ‘I really want to look at my phone, but I know it’s rude or it’s the wrong thing to do, and I’m going to control myself and not do this.’ They’ve had none of that experience when they go to work, when they go to further education.”

And in a few cases, she said, bans on devices can hurt poor kids. She recalled a school in Australia with a lot of kids from low-income families whose principal said many students have phones, but few can afford data plans. The principal, she said, encouraged kids to bring their phones to school so they could take advantage of the school’s Wi Fi. 

“He said, ‘If I can get them to school, I can keep them safe. They’re not wandering around the malls and getting in trouble. I can feed them, and hopefully they might learn something.’”

Tom Kane, an economist and education professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said the next year or so will be key as scholars push to study U.S. school cell phone bans already in place for evidence that they’ve made a difference. “That’s central to this question of what’s been driving the loss in achievement,” he said.

While such bans can’t address all of the conditions making achievement suffer, he said, they can eliminate distractions during the school day. He just hopes the findings see the light of day sooner rather than later, with a scientific consensus emerging over the next year or two.

“We can’t wait a decade to figure out what was the effect of these cell phone bans,” he said. 

Harvard’s West, who also serves on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, said policymakers also need to consider higher, clearer standards for students and ways to hold schools accountable for ensuring kids meet state standards — he noted that, for all the derision No Child Left Behind generated, “it produced results” such as steadily rising levels of achievement, driven by large gains for the nation’s lowest-performers — the opposite of what we’re seeing now.

West’s two sons have phones, and he admitted that he takes comfort “in being able to reach my boys as needed.” But he also appreciates experts’ calls to put phones away. “Coupled with greater accountability around student achievement, it may be the single most important thing we can do to help our kids learn,” he wrote.

While the evidence for phone bans improving academics might take years, one teacher said he’s seeing results already, in a matter of weeks. 

Blake Harvard, an AP high school psychology teacher in Madison, Ala., a suburb of Huntsville, said Alabama’s , enacted in May, is already having an effect since school began in early August. “I’m getting more from my students than I did” last year, he said. “Now, of course, that’s anecdotal, but I sincerely think discussions are better. I’m getting more student participation from [students] in the past who may have been trying to sneak a cell phone.”

Harvard, the author of a recent book on the psychology of student attention, said he and his colleagues initially worried that students wouldn’t put up with a ban. “But they’ve been fine about it, honestly,” he said. “Very quickly, everyone was just like, ‘Well, O.K., this is the way it is.’”

Harvard makes sure he talks to classes each fall about the brain science behind attention, such as how multitasking is a myth. “You can’t consciously pay attention to two things at once,” he said. 

Looking at one’s social media notifications while driving is dangerous. Likewise, he said, “If you’re looking at all your notifications in class, that’s getting your attention. So the lesson itself can’t get your attention.”

Just a few weeks into the semester, Harvard said his students have already figured out that while the law says they can’t have a phone “on their person” during the school day, they can keep it stowed in a backpack on the floor — the school doesn’t have lockers. As he was walking among desks the other day, he noticed a phone visible in a student’s open backpack. He joked that he might have to write her up, to which she replied, “It’s not ‘on my person.’” 

Harvard thought to himself, “Well, if students didn’t know what ‘on my person’ meant before this, in legal parlance, they know what it means now. They figured it out quickly.”

Disclosures: The Future of High School Network and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ both receive financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, XQ and the Walton Family Foundation.

In Florida, in elementary and middle schools, from bell to bell, recently sailed through the state Legislature.

Gov. Ron  on May 30, 2025. The same bill calls for high schools in six Florida districts to adopt the ban during the upcoming school year and produce a report on its effectiveness by Dec. 1, 2026.

But in the debate over whether phones in K-12 schools – and – .

We are experts in and who in Florida in November and December 2024 to learn how they’re using digital media and the role tech plays in their lives at home and at school. Their responses were insightful – and occasionally surprising.

Adults generally cite four reasons to ban phone use during school: to improve kids’ mental health, to strengthen academic outcomes, to reduce and to help limit kids’ overall screen time.

But as our survey shows, it may be a bit much to expect a cellphone ban to accomplish all of that.

What do kids want?

Some of the questions in our survey shine light on kids’ feelings toward banning cellphones – even though we didn’t ask that question directly.

We asked them if they feel relief when they’re in a situation where they can’t use their smartphone, and 31% said yes.

Additionally, 34% of kids agreed with the statement that social media causes more harm than good.

And kids were 1.5 to 2 times more likely to agree with those statements if they attended schools where phones are banned or confiscated for most of the school day, with use only permitted at certain times. That group covered 70% of the students we surveyed because many individual schools or in Florida have already limited students’ cellphone use.

How students use cellphones matters

Some “power users” of cellphone apps could likely use a break from them.

Twenty percent of children we surveyed said — that is, notifications from apps that pop up on the phone’s screen — are never turned off. These notifications are likely coming from the most popular apps kids reported using, like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

This 20% of children was roughly three times more likely to report experiencing anxiety than kids who rarely or never have their notifications on.

They were also nearly five times more likely to report earning mostly D’s and F’s in school than kids whose notifications are always or sometimes off.

Our survey results also suggest phone bans would likely have positive effects on grades and mental health among some of the heaviest screen users. For example, 22% of kids reported using their favorite app for six or more hours per day. These students were three times more likely to report earning mostly D’s and F’s in school than kids who spend an hour or less on their favorite app each day.

They also were six times more likely than hour-or-less users to report severe depression symptoms. These insights remained even after ruling out numerous other possible explanations for the difference — like age, household income, gender, parent’s education, race and ethnicity.

Banning students’ access to phones at school means these kids would not receive notifications for at least that seven-hour period and have fewer hours in the day to use apps.

Phones and mental health

However, other data we collected suggests that bans aren’t a universal benefit for all children.

Seventeen percent of kids who attend schools that ban or confiscate phones report severe depression symptoms, compared with just 4% among kids who keep their phones with them during the school day.

This finding held even after we ruled out other potential explanations for what we were seeing, such as the type of school students attend and other demographic factors.

We are not suggesting that our survey shows phone bans cause mental health problems.

It is possible, for instance, that the schools where kids already were struggling with their mental health simply happened to be the ones that have banned phones. Also, our survey didn’t ask kids how long phones have been banned at their schools. If the bans just launched, there may be positive effects on mental health or grades yet to come.

In order to get a better sense of the bans’ effects on mental health, we would need to examine mental health indicators before and after phone bans.

To get a long-term view on this question, we are planning to do a nationwide survey of digital media use and mental health, starting with 11- to 13-year-olds and tracking them into adulthood.

Even with the limitations of our data from this survey, however, we can conclude that banning phones in schools is unlikely to be an immediate solution to mental health problems of kids ages 11-13.

Grades up, cyberbullying down

Students at schools where phones are barred or confiscated didn’t report earning higher grades than children at schools where kids keep their phones.

This finding held for students at both private and public schools, and even after ruling out other possible explanations like differences in gender and household income, since .

There are limits to our findings here: Grades are not a perfect measure of learning, and they’re not standardized across schools. It’s possible that kids at phone-free schools are in fact learning more than those at schools where kids carry their phones around during school hours – even if they earn the same grades.

We asked kids how often in the past three months they’d experienced mistreatment online – like being called hurtful names or having lies or rumors spread about them. Kids at schools where phone use is limited during school hours actually reported enduring more cyberbullying than children at schools with less restrictive policies. This result persisted even after we considered smartphone ownership and numerous demographics as possible explanations.

We are not necessarily saying that cellphone bans cause an increase in cyberbullying. What could be at play here is that at schools where cyberbullying has been particularly bad, phones have been banned or are confiscated, and online bullying still occurs.

But based on our survey results, it does not appear that school phone bans prevent cyberbullying.

Overall, our findings suggest that banning phones in schools may not be an easy fix for students’ mental health problems, poor academic performance or cyberbullying.

That said, kids might benefit from phone-free schools in ways that we have not explored, like increased attention spans or reduced eyestrain.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

On the surface, it seems like a simple solution: remove the distraction, and students will focus. But as someone who has spent decades in public education at the K-12 and college level, I see a far more complex issue at play.

Distraction in the classroom is not just about phones—it’s about engagement. The truth is, many students aren’t glued to their screens because they’re addicted. They’re disengaged. 

If a student finds their coursework relevant, meaningful, and motivating, they won’t be on their phone. The best teachers — the ones who truly engage their students —don’t have phone problems in their classrooms.

One of my greatest concerns with this ban is that it applies a one-size-fits-all solution to a diverse population. Schools are not factories; every student is different, and every learning environment is unique. There are schools in New York that have embraced technology in innovative ways — using phones to enhance instruction, conduct research, and facilitate real-world learning. This policy could strip those schools of a valuable tool rather than supporting effective teaching practices.

We should be asking: What are the schools that don’t struggle with phone distractions doing right? What can we learn from their engagement strategies? Instead, we’re resorting to blanket restrictions that fail to address the root of the problem.

The idea that taking away phones will somehow fix students’ mental health struggles is both misguided and oversimplified. Mental health is about relationships, support, and the ability to feel safe and heard. Strong school communities provide students with counseling, peer support, and environments where they can openly discuss their challenges. A policy that removes phones without addressing these fundamental issues is unlikely to yield the results its proponents hope for.

In fact, when I asked students in my college classrooms what they would say to Gov. Hochul or other leaders about this policy, their top concern was safety. The announcement came shortly after the Nashville school shooting, and they told me: “Until schools are truly safe, we need our phones.”

For many students, phones aren’t just a social tool; they’re a lifeline in uncertain situations.

Others brought up an interesting point: Some students use their phones in class to double-check their answers before speaking up. In classrooms where participation can feel intimidating, a phone can be a confidence booster — allowing students to verify information before contributing to discussions.

And then, of course, there’s the practical reality that students will always find a way around bans. My students laughed when I brought up the idea of strict enforcement and shared all the creative ways they already sneak phones into classrooms. Simply banning devices won’t eliminate the behavior — it will just push it underground.

The bottom line is this: Students in highly engaging classrooms aren’t on their phones. They are immersed in project-based learning, tackling real-world problems, conducting research, and developing solutions. They are in environments where they feel seen, where their voices matter, and where their education is relevant to their lives.

We need to focus on these types of classrooms. Let’s study what the most effective teachers are doing and bring those practices into more schools. Let’s invest in instructional design that excites students rather than assuming that taking away a device will force engagement.

A cellphone ban is an easy policy to announce, but a much harder one to enforce. And more importantly, it doesn’t solve the real issue. If we want students off their phones, we need to give them a reason to put them down—not by force, but by making their education something they want to engage in.

After years of trying to keep students from using their phones during the school day, Kihei Charter School has invested roughly $9,000 in what administrators hope will be a foolproof way to keep mobile devices out of classrooms. 

The Maui school purchased 300 pouches this year that magnetically lock when students place their phones inside, said Head of School Michael Stubbs. High school students put their phones in the pouches at the start of the day and can only open them in the afternoon using a special unlocking station teachers store in their rooms.

So far the effort appears to be working. Teachers are reporting fewer distractions in class this year and more social interactions among students, Stubbs said. The school also purchased games like Connect 4 and Jenga for students to play during their free time.

“There’s less isolation,” he said.

Many schools in Hawaii are grappling with how to reduce students’ reliance on cell phones, citing concerns about unnecessary distractions in class and the toll social media can take on teenagers’ mental health.

 have passed laws restricting cell phone use during class time, and another 12 have introduced legislation to curb phone use on campuses. In Hawaii, guidelines from the  state that students can only use electronic devices with teacher approval.

Principals have the freedom to create policies around cell phone use and can empower teachers to decide how students use personal electronics during class. Often schools resort to confiscating phones and holding parent conferences when students repeatedly ignore their teacher’s rules.

In 2005, the Hawaii Board of Education debated banning cell phones in public schools statewide but opted not to after members voiced concern about students being able to access phones during an emergency. The board has not discussed any similar proposals since.

Teachers and administrators say restricting cell phone use during the day can reduce students’ attachment to their devices and help them develop healthier habits. But many agree that cell phone bans can only go so far, and schools and families need to do more to teach students how to use technology and social media responsibly when they are off-campus.  

“Policy can help,” said Ilima Intermediate School teacher Sarah Milianta-Laffin. “But we also need to teach kids how to use these devices.”  

Piloting New Cell Phone Policies

At Nanakuli High and Intermediate School, students started the year with a new rule: no phones out during class. Cell phone policies previously varied by classroom, said teacher Chloe Kitsu, who allowed students to keep their phones face down on their desks or use their devices once they finished assignments.

Kitsu initially worried that she would have to constantly remind students to put away their devices or ask administrators to come and confiscate phones from her classroom. But most students have respected the new rules so far, Kitsu said, especially since they are still allowed to use their phones during lunch and passing periods.

“I think if you told me one year ago that I wouldn’t have as many problems with cell phones and getting them to put it away, I don’t know if I would believe you,” Kitsu said. “But really, I’ve had nothing but positive experiences from it.”

Even at the elementary school level, many students are comfortable using cell phones and sharing their devices with friends, said Kaiulani Elementary School Principal Bebi Davis. She makes students keep phones in their backpacks and will confiscate devices if kids repeatedly ignore their teachers’ warnings. 

Sometimes, parents and students are frustrated that they can’t text each other during the school day, Davis added, but she reassures families that they can communicate with their children by calling the front office.

Iolani School, a private school in Honolulu, is also strengthening its policies around cell phones for older students. For the first time this year, seventh through ninth graders are required to keep phones in their bags or lockers until the final bell, although students in grades 10 through 12 are still allowed to use their personal devices throughout the day.   

The school already made students in grades kindergarten through six put their phones away during the day, said Head of School Timothy Cottrell.

Cottrell said student mental health was one of the greatest factors driving the school’s new policy this year. Students often spend less time interacting with friends and more time comparing themselves to others while they’re on their phones and using social media, he added. 

 has found that excessive use of social media and cell phones can negatively affect students’ physical and mental health, contributing to sleep deprivation and poor self-esteem.

The school can’t regulate how students use their phones off-campus, but he hopes the new policy will help teens understand how they can use electronics while also prioritizing in-person interactions and physical activities in their daily lives. 

“It’s introducing moderation to help them have a healthy relationship with the device,” Cottrell said.

Education May Be Needed More Than Bans

While many schools are cracking down on cell phone use, others are loosening cell phone restrictions in response to student feedback and staff frustration. 

In past years, students at Ilima Intermediate weren’t allowed to use their phones in common spaces like the library or cafeteria, said Milianta-Laffin. The school’s security team spent a lot of time confiscating phones, the teacher said, and some students were still checking notifications during class.

The school is now letting students use their phones during lunch and recess with the hope that they’ll keep their devices away during class. 

The new policy has helped, but some kids still try to hide their phones behind their bags or under their desks during class, Milianta-Laffin said. Administrators will occasionally confiscate devices at teachers’ requests, but it’s hard to break students of a bad habit.

“It is a lot like Whac-A-Mole sometimes,” Milianta-Laffin said. 

During a recent family event on cell phones at Punahou School, parents grappled with a series of questions about how to monitor social media use and set family rules around using phones at home.

Most parents supported the school’s decision this year to ban phone high schoolers from using their phones during class, said President Michael Latham. But the school is also working with families to teach kids about the impact of social media on their mental health and how to use their phones responsibly outside of campus, Latham added. 

“Even if you do an outright ban, you have no ability to control what happens once the school day is over,” Latham said. “If you don’t take the time to actually teach these social and emotional impacts and ways to regulate your own use and behavior, then I don’t think we’re serving the students very well.”

Deborah Bond-Upson, president of and interim director of the Hui for Excellence in Education, said she would support a statewide policy preventing students from using cell phones during class time. But, she said, teachers would need more support to implement this ban, and schools need to pair these rules with more lessons about how students can use devices for learning, instead of harm. 

“We need to think smarter about technology,” she said.

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.