With a new school year, push to ban cellphones takes center stage

Student cellphone bans are quickly becoming the buzziest back-to-school topic as more states work to keep phones away from kids from "bell to bell" or throughout the school day.

Virginia is one of the latest states to propose a cellphone ban after Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order in July to address "the alarming mental health crisis and chronic health conditions affecting adolescents." The momentum is continuing in California, with the nation's second-largest school district in Los Angeles voting to ban cellphones and social media use for over 420,000 K-12 students by the spring semester of the 2024-2025 school year.

The move comes as parents debate when or even whether to give their kids cellphones in the first place and experts like "The Anxious Generation" author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argue more children are being harmed by cellphone use instead of benefiting from it.

Scientific research suggests increased phone and social media use among children and teens has led to an increase in psychological impacts and mental health issues, leading the U.S. surgeon general to call for health warnings for younger users on social media platforms. A March 2024 study published in JAMA Network Open focused on children 5 and under and also found that just one extra hour of screen time, from one to two hours or more, led to lower psychological well-being scores.

A renewed focus on cellphones

School staffers and teachers say more students turned to phones and computers in the last four years since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 led to more remote learning , and the increase in screen time has persisted since then.

The recent push for no phones in classrooms comes as teachers and administrators say students now tend to be more distracted when they use cellphones and social media excessively throughout the day.

At a June meeting of the Los Angeles Unified School District board, where the vote to ban phones passed, high school math teacher Jessica Quindel described the fight to keep students off phones as an "uphill battle."

"Managing student use of smartphones as a classroom teacher is now more like running a nonstop marathon. It takes a lot of energy, and it's really hard to keep up," Quindel said.

A majority of schools already have some type of cellphone ban in place so far. According to data from a National Center for Education Statistics survey of approximately 4,800 public elementary and secondary schools, 76% have prohibited the use of cellphones outside of academic use during school hours, and more younger students in elementary and middle schools are subject to bans than high schoolers.

At least eight states so far are considering legislation to ban phones in clasrooms, following in the footsteps of Florida, which became the first state in 2023 to ban cellphones in public school classrooms, and Indiana, whose school cellphone ban kicked off July 1.

Despite this, not everyone is on board with blanket student cellphone bans.

Another high school math teacher took to TikTok and cited safety as the main reason why they didn't agree with not letting students have access to their phones.

"As teachers, we have absolutely no right to deny students the ability to communicate with their family at any time," they said. "And cellphones are the mechanism in which that happens for the vast majority of people."

Enforcing phone bans

Within the Clovis Unified School District, which serves nearly 43,000 students in California, students have been subject to a cellphone-free policy in classrooms for over a decade. Its implementation, however, has fallen on individual schools and teachers over the years and has varied widely. Teachers have had to share the district policy with students and come up with their own tactics for enforcement, if necessary, whether that means asking students to put phones away in their bags or lockers or putting up signs.

"Post-COVID, as we were seeing a rise in the dependence of our kids on their mobile devices … we really returned to that policy and said, 'We need to be better at enforcing it and being consistent in our expectation across all of our schools," Kelly Avants, Clovis' chief communications officer, told "Good Morning America."

Avants said the drive to ban phones more consistently is welcomed by some teachers and parents, who say there is power in numbers when the policy is a sea change, rather than an individual ask.

"For parents -- and I've heard from some staff members -- being able to tell a student, 'It's not just you, it's an entire district,' helps," Avants added. "Some parents have said, 'When I'm the only one saying this, it's really hard to have my child not feel isolated from others but when I know that it's something that's happening across all of the schools in your district, it's really freeing for my child.'"

It's a sentiment experts like Haidt say they've heard from individual parents, too.

Speaking with "GMA" back in March, Haidt said for individual parents, trying to keep a child from using a smartphone or being on social media can feel like trying to "hold back the tide."

"We're having trouble because we don't want to be the only one who doesn't give our kid a phone," he said at the time.

A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson told "GMA" the department plans to issue "resources for school districts on the use of personal devices in schools" but will continue to lean on regional education leaders to come up with policies to address students' cellphone use on a local level.