As students get ready to come back to school this week, several Tarrant County school districts are reminding them to put their phones away.
Over the past two weeks, school boards in the Keller , Grapevine-Colleyville and Northwest school districts have passed policies that ban students from using cell phones during class time. Other North Texas school districts, including Richardson and Mansfield, put similar policies into place last year.
As cell phones become a growing source of distraction at school, such policies are becoming widespread in districts and states across the country. But teachers and school leaders in districts that already have those policies agree: There are right ways and wrong ways to go about implementing them.
“You need to have a full-blown plan,” said Anna Fusco, an elementary school teacher in Broward County, Florida, where lawmakers passed a statewide school cell phone policy last year. “It needs to be across the district. It shouldn’t be, every school creates their own plan.”
Details of school cell phone bans vary
The details of cell phone policies vary by district and by grade level. In some cases, students aren’t allowed to use phones during school hours at all. In other cases, they’re only allowed to use them during lunch or between classes.
Students who break those rules are subject to a range of punishments, from having their phones confiscated for the rest of the day up to being suspended or placed in an alternative school after repeated violations.
During a June 29 board meeting, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD Superintendent Brad Schnautz said school leaders have a responsibility to maximize the amount of instructional time students get at school. By limiting the amount of time students can use their phones at school, district leaders can eliminate a big source of disruptions that teachers have to deal with, he said.
“I think we could all agree that these little devices here have become a major distraction,” Schnautz said, holding up his own cell phone.
Steven Poole, executive director of the United Educators Association, said cell phones are a major source of job stress for teachers. Phones not only distract students in class, they also lead to more serious problems, he said. Students sometimes use cell phones to organize fights or to get on social media to torment classmates, he said.
“You talk to any teacher long enough, and they bring that up,” he said.
But while the idea of a cell phone ban is almost universally popular among teachers, Poole said it matters how districts go about implementing those policies. He likened the idea to school dress codes. Some campuses have dress codes that are clearly and consistently enforced. At other campuses, the rules are vague and inconsistently enforced, so those policies only exist on paper, he said. If school leaders want the new cell phone bans to make a difference, they need to be clear about what the rules are and enforce them, he said.
It’s also important that school administrators don’t leave that enforcement up to teachers, Poole said. School principals set the standards for their campuses, he said, so they need to be the ones to enforce them, as well. When parents get angry after their student’s phone was confiscated at school, it’s critical that school leaders don’t leave teachers to deal with them on their own, he said.
Students spend hours on phones each day, research shows
Recent research indicates that most students say they use their phones at school — some for hours at a time. During a study released last year, researchers from Common Sense Media and the University of Michigan Medical School talked to 203 students aged 11-17 about cell phone usage at school. Of those, 97% said they used their cell phones at school. The length of time students reported using their phones during the school day ranged from less than a minute to six and a half hours per day, with the median being 43 minutes.
Students spent the largest share of that time on social media apps, on YouTube or playing games, researchers wrote. Students also reported playing movies, videos or music on their phones to provide “background buzz” while they were doing other things like homework.
Researchers described cell phones as a “constant companion” for students during the school day. Students received a median of 237 notifications per day, about a quarter of them coming during the school day. The most common sources of those notifications were Snapchat and the messaging app Discord, researchers wrote.
Students also described a broad spectrum of cell phone policies at their schools. Some told researchers their schools had outright bans that would land students in detention if they were caught using cell phones anytime. Others said they weren’t allowed to use their phones during class but were free to do so between classes or once they’d finished their assignments. Others said the rules seemed to vary from one teacher to another.
Florida, Indiana pass statewide cell phone bans
Last year, Florida became the first state to require all school districts to bar students from using cell phones in class. The policy was the first statewide school cell phone ban in the country, but it wasn’t the last. Lawmakers in Indiana passed a similar law last spring , and several other states, including Kentucky, Vermont and California have considered it.
Florida’s statewide ban requires districts to prohibit cell phone use during class time and block access to social media on district Wi-Fi networks. But it largely leaves it up to districts to figure out how to enforce those rules.
Michael Randolph, a high school principal in the Lake County School District , northwest of Orlando, said his campus is introducing cell phone restrictions in phases. The campus uses a “red light, yellow light, green light” system, he said: When classes are on red light, students must put their phones and district-issued Chromebooks away. When they’re on a yellow light, it means students can use their Chromebooks for instructional purposes only. When they’re on a green light, students are allowed to use either their Chromebooks or their phones, he said.
At the beginning of last year, classes went to green light when students were done with their work for the day. At the beginning of the second semester of last year, school leaders began only allowing students to use their phones during transition times between classes, Randolph said. When school starts this week, students won’t be able to use their phones anytime except during lunch, he said.
Randolph said he and other school leaders were already considering a campus cell phone ban before the state policy went into effect. Cell phones were a problem before the pandemic, he said, but they became a bigger issue when students came back after school shutdowns. Students became more reliant on cell phones while they were stuck at home with no other way to keep in touch with their friends, Randolph said, and in the years since then, many have struggled to break those habits. When students are on their phones during class, it eats into instructional time, he said.
“We’ve lost so many minutes due to cell phones,” Randolph said.
Randolph said any district looking to implement a cell phone ban should plan a transition period during which school leaders phase the new policy in. If district leaders try to roll a policy like that out overnight, they’ll end up spending a huge amount of time dealing with the implementation, he said.
It’s also important that any cell phone policy clearly states who’s responsible for enforcing the new rules, Randolph said. When his school’s new policy went into effect, Randolph wanted to make sure that responsibility, and the liability that goes along with it, didn’t fall on teachers. If a student has a cell phone out in class, teachers contact the school’s discipline team, and a member of that team takes the student’s phone for the rest of the day, he said.
Florida teacher: Cell phone bans must be consistent
Fusco, the Broward County teacher, said the flexibility built into Florida’s statewide policy left districts without a codified plan they were required to follow. Some districts, including Broward County, didn’t create plans of their own, but left it up to principals to figure out how to enforce the new rules on their campuses, she said.
Fusco, who serves as president of the Broward Teachers Union, said the lack of consistency from one campus to the next caused problems. Broward County is the sixth largest district in the country, covering Fort Lauderdale and the northern portion of the Miami metropolitan area. The district has 239 campuses, and last year, each had its own approach to cell phones. Parents could easily compare notes with parents of students at other schools and find out where the rules were stricter and where they were more lax, Fusco said. That lack of consistency made it more difficult for teachers and school administrators to enforce their policies, she said.
In many cases, school leaders discouraged teachers from confiscating phones from students, Fusco said, and when building administrators did so, they tended to back down when parents complained. In order for the policy to work, teachers, school administrators and parents all need to understand what the expectations are, she said. For campus leaders, that means enforcing those policies consistently so that teachers can do their jobs, she said. For parents, that means understanding that they can’t call or text their kids during school — a major source of classroom distractions, she said.
Starting this year, the Broward County school district will have tighter cell phone rules in place. Last month, the district’s school board passed a policy requiring students to have their phones either turned off or in airplane mode from the first bell to the last bell, with no allowances for students to use phones between classes or at lunch. Fusco said she’s hopeful that having a single policy for the entire district will help school administrators enforce the ban, which in turn will help teachers do their jobs and keep kids engaged with fewer distractions. But until students show up for the start of the school year, it’s hard to say for sure.
“We’re going to see starting Monday,” she said.
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