A University of Southern California published Monday surveyed roughly 1,700 parents and 364 students ages 13 to 17 last fall. Researchers used the annual to analyze students’ cellphone use and their , along with parents’ perceptions of the restrictions. At least have some form of ban or limitation on cellphones during instructional time.

About 98% of students attend schools with cell phone restrictions, according to the study. Some 76% of teens and 93% of parents said they support some type of ban. 

But the researchers found that students still use their cellphones in school. About two-thirds of teens at schools with complete phone bans said they use their device during the day, including in class, and more than half of students whose school restricts cellphones during instructional time don’t follow the rules.

“The results are pointing towards both parents and teens wanting to have at least some form of restrictions on cell phone use in classrooms — neither are reporting major downsides,” said Anna Saavedra, one of the study’s researchers. “(Students and parents) are really supportive of the restrictions and they even support making rules stronger. Part of the challenge has been that even though schools have these rules, teens are telling us that they’re breaking them.”

Most students reported two categories of cellphone bans: either prohibiting use for the entire day or only during instructional time. Nearly 75% of teens said that no matter the policy, their school still lets them keep their phones with them. Some 5% said their school doesn’t permit cellphones on school property. 

The study also found that teens use their phone in school for an average of 1.5 hours a day regardless of the type of ban. That matches other that found students ages 13 to 18 spend an average of 70 minutes on their smartphones during the school day, typically using social media or gaming apps. 

Restricting cellphone use only during class instruction is a rule that 68% of students and 53% of parents support. About 24% of teens and 7% of parents said they would prefer no restrictions.

Overall, 42% of teens and 76% of parents said their schools’ rules are “just right.” About 48% of students and 8% of parents thought they were too strict. Half of students said their school’s rules were different and stricter than the previous year’s. 

Most teachers enforce phone policies, according to the study. Nearly two-thirds of students said their teacher gives a verbal warning if someone breaks the rules. Other common consequences include taking the device away for the rest of class or for the entire day; notifying parents; giving detention; or requiring a parent to pick up the phone.

Though the rise of smartphones has been linked to negative student outcomes like poor academic achievement, the teens and adults surveyed by USC said they don’t believe cellphone policies have much of an effect. The majority said the rules had no impact in areas such as sense of community, relationships with teachers and bullying or fighting. The majority of students also said there was no effect on academic performance, making friends or their likelihood of attending school.

About 28% of the teens said the rules made the classroom learning environment better, while 26% said they made it worse. One-third of students said the policies improve academic integrity or reduce cheating, while 19% said the opposite.

A recent University of Pennsylvania of 20,000 educators found that stricter cell phone policies are associated with more positive outcomes reported by teachers. Nearly half of schools in the study have a “no show” rule — where students can have their phones if they keep them out of sight — but this policy isn’t as effective as more restrictive rules. 

“The stricter the policy, the happier the teacher and the less likely students are to be using their phones when they aren’t supposed to,” said University of Pennsylvania Professor Angela Duckworth about the data. “We’re also finding that focus on academics is higher in schools that do not permit students to keep their phones nearby, including in their backpacks or back pockets.”

Disclosure: The Overdeck Family Foundation provides financial support to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

SAN MATEO, Calif. – On a cool Friday morning in April, the halls of California’s San Mateo High School were full of students chatting, running to class or trying to find their friends.

But one common sight in high schools across the country was and always is absent from the halls of San Mateo: cellphones.

“When you look at the crowd, kids are not buried in their phone,” said Yvonne Shiu, the school’s principal. “They have grown to value being in the moment.”

Students at the public high school about 20 minutes south of San Francisco have been prohibited since 2019 from using their cellphones while in school — from bell to bell. Schools nationwide, including some in Maryland, are now increasingly imposing such bans, but San Mateo was one of the earliest and largest schools in the country to implement a complete ban on cellphones during school hours.

At the start of each day, each of the 1,600 students lock their phone in a magnetically sealed pouch, created by the San Francisco-based company Yondr, that won’t be opened until the school day ends.

The decision to introduce Yondr pouches was the school’s attempt to tackle the increasingly pervasive effects of cellphone and social media overuse on its student body: cyberbullying, loss of sleep, self-esteem issues and endless distractions in class.

Teachers and administrators quickly embraced the program, saying it restored their grasp on students’ attention in class. Some even said if the school were to end the program, they’d leave.

As schools around the country implement similar cellphone bans, San Mateo offers a six-year track record of how a cellphone ban can force young people to focus and, in many cases, feel better.

“If schools can help alleviate some of those expectations and pressures about appearance and performance and embarrassment, and take away some of those elements that a lot of kids really struggle with and are confronted with, that is a benefit to them and to the school community and the school culture,” said Casey Teague, a longtime world history teacher at the school.

A slow start

The decision to implement the Yondr program at San Mateo began with observation and a trial run.

One of its faculty members, Alicia Gorgani, observed a similar cellphone ban at San Lorenzo High School, a smaller school in the area, and brought the idea to San Mateo’s teachers and administrators.

Adam Gelb, San Mateo’s assistant principal at the time, said seeing the cellphone ban in action at San Lorenzo “blew [his] mind.”

“Students were engaged with one another,” he said. “They were interacting. They were playing card games. They were playing out on the yard. They were goofing around. They were in circles, talking to each other.”

Gelb helped bring the program to San Mateo, which tested Yondr pouches in a few classrooms in spring 2019.

Teague, who’s worked at the school for more than 20 years, was one of those first instructors to pilot the program. He said he decided to try out the Yondr pouches in his class after noticing students’ smartphones were constantly bombarding them with notifications.

“By 2018, every kid had a phone. That wasn’t anything new,” Teague said. “But the distracting nature of the phone was becoming more and more obvious.”

Health education teacher Brittany Dybdahl said leading up to the ban, the school was seeing an increase in cyberbullying and drama stemming from online activities.

Embarrassing moments or conflicts among students had the risk of getting captured on video and being immortalized online.

“It basically created way more opportunities for students to be emotionally impacted throughout the school day,” Dybdahl said. “And that would, of course, affect their academics and learning.”

After the pilot program, and many discussions with students and their parents, San Mateo implemented the program schoolwide beginning in the 2019-20 academic year.

Some teachers were apprehensive about the cellphone ban, thinking it would create more work for first-period teachers to check that each student had their phones sealed away.

But those checks quickly became part of the daily routine, said physics teacher Patrick Thrasher.

And after seeing the impact the program had on their students, most faculty members got on board, Thrasher said.

“There was such a pretty clear, drastic difference in the classroom,” he said. “It was just night and day.”

San Mateo’s cellphone ban was not even a year old when the COVID-19 pandemic moved all learning online for a year starting in March 2020. But the school decided to continue the cellphone ban when students returned to the classroom in 2021.

“They do spend enough time already on screens that, you know, seven hours a day here at school [without screen time] is not going to kill them,” Shiu said.

The student reaction

Enforcement of the ban hasn’t been entirely without issues.

San Mateo faculty members said some students — albeit a small percentage — are determined to bypass the Yondr pouches and keep their phones on them. Some put calculators, hard drives or other phone-shaped objects in their Yondr pouches. Others put old, unused “burner phones” in their pouches while keeping their personal phone on them.

But many San Mateo students, like junior Lulu Bertolina, embraced the program. She said the Yondr program was one of the reasons she enrolled at San Mateo.

“Having our phones [in Yondr pouches] made it easier to make friends, because I can’t go off on my phone and not make conversation with people,” she said. “It almost forced it — in a really good way.”

For San Mateo senior Siddharth Gogi, the absence of phones made the school feel more welcoming. He said students aren’t glued to their phones playing video games at lunch or distracted on social media in class.

“Conversations move past surface level when you have that time to talk to one another,” said Gogi, San Mateo’s three-time class president who graduated this spring.

He acknowledged, though, that some students are concerned about not having quick access to their phones in case of an emergency.

In the early 2000s, many schools repealed their cellphone restrictions after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.

But Shiu said it’s better if students don’t have access to their phones during an emergency. The pouches prevent students and family members from sharing misinformation or flooding 911 with calls overwhelming first responders and the cellphone network.

“In any emergency, we want students to be focused on the adult giving the information,” Shiu said.

The experts

To hear the experts tell it, there’s an overriding good reason for schools to ban cellphones. Cellphone use and social media sites can both have a serious impact on young peoples’ well-being.

Extensive cellphone use during the day has a “direct correlation with a decline in mental health,” said Annette Anderson, the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Safe and Healthy Schools.

“We also know that cellphone use late into the evening has a disruptive factor in our young people getting enough sleep and then being attentive enough in the morning,” Anderson said.

Young people are grappling with the reality that the phone in their hand could be doing them harm. A Pew Research Survey released in April found almost half of U.S. teens age 13 to 17 agreed social media sites have a mostly negative impact on kids their age.

San Mateo wellness counselor Helen Citrin said a cellphone ban can provide students a much-needed break from their phones.

For students who are highly anxious or struggle managing their emotions, Citrin said, not having access to a cellphone can help as it prevents them from constantly texting their parents.

“That pouch offers a boundary,” she said.

One recent study echoed this sentiment. Independent research on school cellphone bans is limited, but a 2024 study conducted by Yondr found that students saw a 15% increase in the likelihood they received a passing grade after their school implemented Yondr pouches. The report also found a 44% decrease in behavioral referrals after implementation.

Data from San Mateo paints a mixed picture of the school’s performance since implementation of the cellphone ban. Math and English test scores declined from 2019 through 2024, but both the graduation rate and preparedness for college and careers have inched upward. Meanwhile, the suspension rate increased.

Gelb offered an explanation for the rise: “Everybody was forced to communicate in person, so you had more people talking, and there’s more chance for someone to say the wrong thing or be in the wrong place.”

But, he added, the premeditated incidents and cyberbullying disappeared from the school day.

A growing trend

Although San Mateo might have been early to the cellphone ban movement, it’s among growing company now.

State and local governments and school districts across the country are now considering — or have already passed — policies on cellphone use in school. Yondr boasts that millions of students from all 50 states are now using its pouches.

While there is no statewide ban in Maryland, more than a third of its public schools prohibit cellphone use, . Several school districts, including Howard and Baltimore counties, have passed a total ban.

About 30% of U.S. schools now have a ban on cellphone use throughout the school day, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

That percentage is likely to rise. In the nation’s largest state, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed legislation last year requiring all public and charter schools in California to create a policy to reduce or ban cellphone use during school hours by July 1, 2026, but left each school or school district to decide the specifics of their policy.

And recently, New York joined the more than two dozen other states instituting a complete ban on cellphones during school hours.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said the decision comes as part of the state’s efforts to protect youth mental health.

“Our young people succeed when they’re learning and growing, not clicking and scrolling,” Hochul said in a statement in May.

A model to follow?

San Mateo faculty and staff said the school’s careful implementation of the Yondr program and the conversations it had with families and educators led to its success.

But several San Mateo faculty members said Yondr alone can’t solve youth mental health issues stemming from social media and personal devices.

The second students leave school grounds, they once again have access to their phones and can browse as much as they want. Citrin, the school’s wellness counselor, said many of the students she deals with stay up late into the night doomscrolling, or texting or video chatting with friends.

That being the case, Gelb said schools should also teach students how to develop a healthy relationship with their phone and social media.

The pouches also carry a financial impact on schools.

Each student at San Mateo receives a free Yondr pouch at the beginning of the school year, but each replacement costs $15. In total, Shiu estimated the school spends about $20,000 a year on Yondr pouches.

However, San Mateo teachers and administrators said the program’s benefits outweigh its costs.

“From a school perspective, it keeps kids off of their phone during class time,” Citrin said. “Because the main focus here is education, that’s what the purpose is, and that’s what the use is benefiting.”

Capital News Service is a student-staffed reporting service operated by the University of Maryland’s Phillip Merrill College of Journalism. Stories are available at the  and may be reprinted as long as credit is given to Capital News Service and, most importantly, to the students who produced the work.

When I asked families on my 4,000-plus-member how they felt about the new restriction, I received answers ranging from enthusiasm to concern. 

“Phones and smartwatches in classrooms and school hallways are more than just a distraction — they’re a barrier to learning, focus and social development,” according to Manhattan’s Arwynn H.J. 

“Bring on the ban,” cheered Bronx parent and teacher Jackie Marashlian. “My high school students were ready to air-scroll me toward the ceiling with their fingers, so bored with whatever it was I was trying to impart to them. One day we had a WiFi glitch and I saw my students’ beautiful eyes for the very first time. Bring kids back to face-to-face interaction and socializing during lunch breaks.” 

“As a middle school teacher in the Bronx and parent of an eighth grader, I think the cellphone ban is fantastic,” agreed Debra. “While my son is ‘devastated’ he can’t have his phone, it scares me that he’s said he doesn’t know what to do at lunch/recess without a phone. Kids have become so reliant on technology, even when they are with their peers, that often they are not really WITH their peers; they are all just staring at their phones. I hope the cellphone ban leads more students to be both physically and mentally present.”

For mom Elaine Daly, the phone ban affects her more than her special-needs daughter. “My child is 11 and knows she is not to use the phone in school. My parental controls blocks, locks and limits access. But I need her phone to be on so I can also track her, since the NYCSchools bus app always says: Driver offline.”

Jen C., who reported the ban has been going well with her child in elementary school, sees a bigger issue for her high school-age son. “He has homework online and likes to get started during his free periods. However, he’s not allowed to use his laptop, and there are not enough school issued laptops. I feel that teachers should give off-line work, or the school needs to give access to laptops.”

Parents of older students were the ones most likely to be against the blanket edict.

“You can’t have the same policy for kids 6 years old and for 17 years old,” mom Pilar Ruiz Cobo raged. “This policy is crazy for seniors. Yesterday, my daughter had her first college adviser class, and only five kids could work because the rest didn’t remember their passwords to Naviance and the Common App. The verification code was sent only to their phones. Children who don’t study, don’t study with and without phones, now the children who actually work have to work double at home.”

A Queens mom pinpointed another problem. “Many high school students leave the premises for lunch, and my son’s school is one of those. He said they’re not allowed to take their phones. Children need to use phones outside of school for various reasons; to use phone pay, to contact their parents for lunch money or any updates, etc…”

The policy varies from school to school. At some, students are allowed to request their phones back when temporarily leaving the premises. However, the larger the school, the less likely it is to have enough staff to handle such exchanges.

“An interesting aspect of this policy is that although it was presented as a smartphone ban, it’s actually much more expansive, including tablets and laptops,” pointed out dad Adam C. “This presents a challenge for high school students who rely on laptops for receiving, completing and submitting assignments through Google Classroom.”

“They say parents have to provide their own laptop pouch (there are none similar to Yonder), and they can’t store laptops in backpacks,” confirmed Queens mom Y.N. “My son has afterschool sports activities and likes to do his homework on his laptop in between. I think he’ll have to take it with him and hope they don’t confiscate.”

“While I’m not opposed to keeping students off platforms like Snapchat during school hours,” Adam continued, “They should be able to connect a laptop to a school-managed Wi-Fi network for school-related purposes, and the current policy doesn’t provide the schools with much leeway around this.”

But Y.N. doesn’t believe that’s accurate. “I already voiced my concern to the Student Leadership Team (SLT). At the , they said these rules are fluid. Because the regulations came after the SLTs were done for the year, the chancellor said they should be able to change them. She said a plan had to be made before Day One, but it doesn’t mean that adjustments can’t be made at the school level. ‘Tinkering’ was the word they kept using.”

If that’s the case, perhaps NYC can pull back from its traditional one-size-fits-all approach and allow individual schools to “tinker” and set limitations based on the needs and feedback of their community, adjusting policy based on grade level, academic requirements and a multitude of other factors.

Their reactions were followed by a sigh of relief at the next question: How has life changed since your schools implemented phone bans?

A huge change, they both said, in their classrooms and throughout their schools. Where once TikTok videos were being filmed in school hallways and Instagram Reels watched during instruction, teachers now feel like they “actually have the whole attention of the class,” Corletta said.

“It’s like night and day. It’s so different,” said Corletta, comparing his experience as an English language arts teacher at MS 137 in South Ozone Park Queens, which began using magnetically locked phone pouches about five years ago, to his previous experience at a Bronx school with no restrictions. “I don’t touch [the phones]. I don’t hold them. I don’t see them, I don’t do anything like that and it’s really really nice.”

Once silent cafeterias now have kids yelling, gossiping and playing cards – a refreshing sight for many educators like Corletta and Leston, who teach in middle and high schools respectively. Lunchtime, for many school leaders, used to feel like phone time. 

But now, “students are playing Uno again in the cafeteria,” said New York City Department of Education Deputy Chancellor Danika Rux in an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. 

New York City schools have had of phone restriction policies, with an outright ban in the early 2000s that was reversed about . Individual schools, like the ones where Corletta and Leston teach, have had the their own restrictions. 

That will change again in the new academic year as all schools in New York state will implement a bell-to-bell ban — one of the strictest among dozens of other states that — barring students from access to personal devices that can connect to the internet for the entire school day. Schools will be required to provide storage for the devices. 

But with such new policies, many being implemented for the first time this school year or in effect for less than two years, no one knows what the perfect model looks like. 

Researchers are moving cautiously as they grapple with uncertainty about the effectiveness of in-school phone bans on mental health. Data yields — and there’s growing a sentiment that more has to be done outside of schools to get kids off their phones and back into the world. 

A recent Pew Research survey found that nearly restrictive phone use in schools, up six percentage points since last year — but many are also unsure how far the bans should go. About 44% of respondents supported all day bans, with others split on whether students should have access to their phones between classes or at lunch. 

“We do have some emerging evidence from the research that shows that phone bans can have pretty substantial positive effects,” said Katie Rybakova, an associate professor and chair at the Lunder School of Education at Thomas College in Waterville, Maine. 

But studies are limited and “really small from the researcher lens.” Inconsistencies in how bans are implemented from state to state, district to district, school to school and classroom to classroom make it hard to measure, she said. 

“You can’t compare a rural district in Alabama to a suburban district in New York,” Rybakova said. “It’s going to look very different, depending on the place and space, and the students that you’re working with, the teachers, how it’s monitored and what kind of accountability measures are in place.” 

With the ban in New York about to take effect, some schools have had to scrap policies that have worked for them to now adhere to new legislation, while others are implementing digital bans for the first time.

“Implementation is daunting,” Leston said. “When I heard of the [state] ban, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s great!’ My school already had one, but then I thought about it for a minute, and I said, ‘Oh, this is going to be a big deal for a lot of schools, especially large comprehensive high schools.’ … It’s going to be a very hard norm to create cellphone free schools.”

Growing support across the country

Annette Campbell Anderson, an associate professor at John Hopkins School of Education, said increasing legislation calling for cellphone bans in schools nationwide has come from a “perfect storm” of push and pull between district leaders, teachers and parents.

The COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning pushed students into an unprecedented dependency on technology use for school, socialization and entertainment. 

“There was this overwhelming desire for kids to get their education online, and so because schools were closed, … everyone thought, ‘Well, we’ve got these phones. We’ve got this access to technology. Why don’t we use that?’ ” Anderson said.

At the same time, parents also had unparalleled access to the classroom during the pandemic where they got to see what and how their children were being educated. When students returned to their physical campuses, parents wanted to “keep a bird’s eye view on what was happening in school,” and tried to remain in close communication with their children, Anderson said, also acknowledging growing fears of school shootings and school safety.

The result? “We pushed the phones into the hands of our young people,” Anderson said.

In schools, students remained mentally checked out and educators grew frustrated.

“Before we instituted a ban, kids were preoccupied with their cellphones. They were on their social media. … They were creating TikToks in the hallway,” Leston said. “It contributed to conflict in the building. Kids couldn’t communicate with each other. They were distracted in the classroom.”

Mental health issues , hitting a breaking point for everyone.

“All these things were coalescing into this perfect storm of a moment,” Anderson said. “What you have [now] is a bunch of people who have the instinct that we’ve gone too far.”

Extent of cell bans triggers split response

Around 31 states across the country have implemented or recommended some type of school-based technology ban, according to tracking from . 

There’s some argument that New York’s policy may be too restrictive and left some superintendents across the state feeling like their hands were tied when their schools had bans that were working.

“We’ve seen districts which had adopted very thoughtful policies, and in some cases, with student engagement, they were accepted,” said Robert Lowry, deputy director for advocacy, research and communications for the New York State Council of School Superintendents. “They seemed to be working well, so [the new legislation] was a point of contention.” 

One New York district, for example, allowed students access to personal devices in certain areas of their schools buildings and with permission, which was popular with students, parents and educators, Lowry said. 

But with the state ban going into effect, that policy will quickly have to be revised with limited time and community input. 

“If you want to try and engage parents, teachers and others in developing a policy – hopefully building a consensus – summer is not the best time,” Lowry said.

New York State allocated in its latest budget toward implementation, which is expected to help purchase storage options. New York City has also added an to its budget to help support the shift for the upcoming school year.

“We’ve given them templates of what a policy could look like, so that they can customize for their school community. We’ve given them sample communication to families,” Rux said.

More work to be done, in and out of school buildings

For researchers, cellphone bans raise concerns if parents and educators are going to see the outcomes they’re hoping for — with many researchers saying there needs to be more proactive measures outside of school to see an improvement in children’s mental health.   

“I feel like the bans don’t go far enough, and if we just check the box to say we’ve banned it in school, we’ve basically pushed this responsibility on to teachers and administrators to be responsible for this and then we’ve also said that we don’t care what happens after school,” John Hopkins’ Anderson said.

Researchers suggested reform may begin with better educating parents on the effects of screen-time and a push toward better modeling of behavior, but it may also be a call for more legislative action on social media use as a whole.

“What we really need is a digital code of conduct for our young people to understand what they should be doing,” Anderson said. “We’ve got warnings on nicotine, we’ve got warnings on alcohol, but the device that’s actually in a kid’s hand more times than not – we don’t have any guardrails around any of that.”

A quarter of the 13-18 year olds in the study used devices for two hours each school day, which lasts around seven hours. The averages outnumber minutes allotted for lunch and period breaks combined, showing youth are distracted by phones throughout huge chunks of class time. 

, is the first to accurately paint a picture of adolescent phone behavior by using a third party app to monitor usage over four months in 2023. Previous studies have relied on parent surveys or self-reported estimates. 

“That’s pretty alarming … It’s too much, not only because of the missed learning opportunity in the classroom,” said researcher Lauren Hale, sleep expert and professor at Stony Brook’s Renaissance School of Medicine. 

“They’re missing out on real life social interaction with peers, which is just as valuable for growth during a critical period of one’s life,” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. 

Hale and the other researchers’ early findings come from 117 teens for which they had school data, just one slice of a pool from over 300 participants, which will be analyzed and used to consider how phone usage impacts sleep, obesity, depression and other outcomes. 

Teens most often used messaging, Instagram and video streaming platforms. While most spent about 26 minutes on Instagram, in one extreme case, a student was on the app for 269 minutes — nearly 5 hours — during the school day.

Data reveal particular groups of students are using their phones more than their peers: Girls and older kids, aged 16 to 18, spent a half hour above the average 1.5 hours; and Latino and multiracial students spent on average 15 minutes above average. 

Additionally, though researchers cannot hypothesize as to why based on the descriptive data, kids who have one or more parents with a college degree used smartphones less during the school day. 

The findings are particularly concerning given young people missed key social years with peers during the pandemic, the impact of which is felt in ways big and small, like being hesitant to work with peers in groups.

Teachers in contact with Hale since research went public in early February say of the 1.5 hour average, “that’s too low an estimate. They think we underestimated.”

is among several districts with plans to institute a cellphone ban, though such bans are inconsistently implemented and new research from the UK suggests bans alone .

“These results are consistent, supportive evidence of anecdotal stories from across the country about kids missing out on learning and social opportunities. [They] can help justify efforts to provide a coherent smartphone policy for schools,” said Hale, adding that such policy should not be left up to individual teachers to enforce.

COLUMBIA — South Carolina school districts must ban students from using their cellphones during the entire school day, but exactly how they go about it is up to district officials, according to the state Board of Education passed Tuesday.

At the very least, districts must require students to keep their phones and connected devices, such as smartwatches, turned off and in their backpacks or lockers from the time the first bell rings in the morning until the dismissal bell in the afternoon, according to the state policy.

But the state board said districts can decide whether to enact sterner rules, as well as the consequences for violating them.

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Districts that do not put a policy in place that is at least as strict as the one the state board passed Tuesday could lose their state funding.

“We’re saying, ‘This is what state law says, and so you’ve got to implement it,’ but we are leaving a lot of discretion, a lot of latitude, to districts on how exactly they do it,” board member Christian Hanley said.

The decision follows a clause the Legislature included in the state spending plan requiring the state board to create a policy prohibiting cellphones for K-12 students in the state’s public schools. The specifics, legislators left up to the board, which in turn left many of the details to local school boards.

Although state board members supported the idea of banning cellphones in schools, they said they worried about unintended consequences of the new policy, such as putting another task on overworked teachers, increasing the number of out-of-school suspensions or cutting students off from their parents during emergencies.

“Implementation of such a policy over a school day scares me,” said board chair David O’Shields. “Why? Because once we create this policy, it is the requirement of every district to follow suit, and there is the law of unintended consequences, and it frightens me.”

School boards will to put in place a policy at least as strict as the one the state board enacted, according to a memo the department sent to superintendents in June. District must submit those policies to the department to ensure compliance.

The state board, which passed the policy 15-1, added a stipulation that districts must report back about how implementation went in case the board finds a need to adjust its policy ahead of next school year.

“All of these things look good, but just because it looks good doesn’t mean it is good.” O’Shields said.

The policy

In the state policy, the board did decide lunch and other breaks should be considered part of the school day, meaning students must leave their cell phones stowed away during those times.

Districts may choose to take it further telling students not to bring their devices to school at all. Or they can buy lockable pouches to store them. Some may also decide to include bus rides, field trips or athletic events as times when students can not access their phones, according to the policy.

The policy also leaves room for exceptions.

If students have an assignment they cannot complete on school-provided devices, districts can allow students to keep their phones with them to use as part of their classwork.

Students with disabilities who need access to phones or tablets to learn would still be allowed to use the devices. And students with certain outside jobs, such as volunteer firefighters, can seek a written exception from their superintendent to use their phone during the day, according to the policy.

Enforcement also will largely be up to school districts. The policy requires “disciplinary enforcement procedures,” with increasing consequences for repeat offenders, but it doesn’t specify what that means.

State board members did discourage using out-of-school suspension as punishment for violating the policy. Taking a student out of school because they are breaking a rule meant to keep them focused on their classwork feels counterintuitive, said state Superintendent Ellen Weaver.

“The whole idea behind this policy is that we want students in classrooms getting instruction,” Weaver told reporters. “Taking students out of that instructional space really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as far as I’m concerned.”

Still, different situations may warrant different punishments, so board members wanted to leave that decision up to the districts, said board member David Mathis.

Timing

Some board members felt they did not have enough time to create the policy.

Board member Beverly Frierson was the sole “no” vote, not because she disagreed with it but because she thought the board was too rushed to give the policy the consideration it needed, she said.

O’Shields, the board chair, worried teachers may have to spend too much time policing cellphones. Still, he agreed some kind of action was necessary.

“I know we need control, and there is an addiction, no doubt,” O’Shields said.

The policy has support from legislators, teachers’ advocates and Gov. Henry McMaster. Since 2020, McMaster has included this clause in his state budget recommendations. This was the first time legislators agreed to put it in the final plan.

“The research is clear,” McMaster wrote in a letter to the board Tuesday. “Removing access to personal electronic devices during the school day improves student academic performance and removes distractions that exacerbate anxiety among our adolescents.”

“Our responsibility is to create an environment where teachers can teach, and students can learn,” the letter continued.

In a statewide survey the education department conducted, 55% of teachers and administrators who responded said they supported a total ban on cellphones during the school day. Another 37% said they wanted students to have limited access during class time, with the chance to check their phones between classes or at lunch.

Along with being distracting while students are trying to learn, phones can erode their social skills and encourage bullying, Weaver said.

“I think the dividend that we will see this pay for schools and for our students’ future will be worth it in the end,” Weaver said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

COLUMBIA — A model policy requiring South Carolina’s K-12 students to stash their cellphones during the entire school day received initial approval Tuesday from the State Board of Education, which wanted to get more feedback before finalizing minimum guidelines for school districts.

The unanimous vote comes six weeks after the state budget mandated school districts to adopt a policy banning cellphones during the school day or risk state funding. But the State Board of Education must first adopt a model policy for them to follow.

The goal is for all districts to have a policy in place before January, according to a memo the state agency sent school administrators over the summer.

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The board was considering a , which would require phones, smart watches and other devices to be turned off and stashed through the entire school day, not just during class time. It would allow exceptions for students with particular medical or educational needs, for specific educational purposes and for high schoolers who volunteer as local firefighters or other emergency responders.

It allows for school districts to set more restrictive rules, but not less.

It also gives school districts flexibility on setting rules outside the school day, such as whether to allow devices on bus rides. Districts could also decide where students would be required to keep their phones from the opening to closing bells — whether in a locker, a backpack or somewhere else.

Board Chairman David O’Shields said he wanted to take some additional time on such an important policy to gather feedback, including from parents.

“I do think without equivocation there needs to be a serious reigning in of cellphone use and proliferation because it’s negative consequences, especially for adolescents, can be quite harmful,” said O’Shields, superintendent of Laurens County School District 56 (Clinton).

While board members wanted more time, they were enthusiastic about the underlying idea.

“It’s not just about the discipline in the schools,” said Christian Hanley Jr. of Berkeley County. “The discipline is important, but it’s ruining our kids.”

Hanley noted the board put a lot of work into that bars books in schools that describe “sexual conduct.”

“You can get a whole lot more porn on these phones than you’re going to get in those library books,” he said.

Matthew Ferguson, deputy superintendent for the Department of Education, said the agency has already received a lot of feedback in creating the model rules.

More than 9,000 teachers responded to a survey on banning phones. Teachers reported that phones were taking up hours of their teaching time, and they asked for support from school administrators so they don’t have to be the phone police, he said.

“When we first sent the survey out … our survey platform thought we had been hacked and spoofed because the responses were coming in so quickly,” Ferguson told the board.

State Superintendent Ellen Weaver said her agency can also help school officials educate parents on the policies.

“The districts are very hungry for us as the department to help create communication tools and resources,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .