School cellphone bans complicated by logistics, politics and violence

NEW YORK — New York City once led the nation in curtailing the use of electronic devices in classrooms. Two decades later, the country’s largest school system is having trouble catching up.

What appeared over the summer as a simple pledge to prohibit the use of cellphones in classrooms has, for New York Mayor Eric Adams, become mired in both logistical complications and concerns from wary parents and a powerful teachers union — all as the moderate Democrat faces reelection in 2025.

As a result, Adams last month walked back his administration’s earlier comments with the aim of giving city officials more time to hash out the particulars.

States and school districts across the country — like California and Ohio — are enacting smartphone restrictions as elected officials and education leaders worry about lagging test scores and social media’s effect on young brains. Yet even with broad, bipartisan support, policymakers have struggled to strike the right balance.

And incidents like this week’s Georgia high school shooting, which left two teachers and two students dead, keep rekindling the debate over student safety.

Nowhere is that high-wire act more precarious than in New York City, where the sheer size of the school system, the political might of organized labor and the number of opinionated parents have thrown the issues facing school districts nationwide into stark relief.

“We want to do it right,” Adams said during an August television interview. “It happened before: Previous administrations attempted to ban cellphones. They failed.”

Parents have long had a beef with the ban, owing largely to concerns over public safety.

In New York City, the specter of 9/11 still looms large. Elsewhere in the country, school shootings have rattled communities coast to coast, including Wednesday’s Georgia school shooting allegedly carried out by a 14-year-old.

While the shooter roamed the building there, students at Apalachee High School texted their parents as they hid . They wrote to their families that they heard gunshots and were scared. They gave their parents live updates about the lockdown. Many sent three simple words: I love you.

Andy McGill, a middle school principal in rural western Ohio, recounted a 2017 school shooting in his district’s high school — a tale that exemplifies parents’ worst nightmare and explains their hesitancy to nix phone use wholesale.

“In our incident, we had multiple 911 calls out from our building — several of which came from our student body,” McGill said in an interview earlier this summer. “It was an important thing that students had their cellphones on them that day.”

All told, an estimated 44 percent of American adults with a child in kindergarten through grade 12 said they feared for their child's personal safety at school, according to a Gallup survey last month.

Another national survey found lukewarm support for a strict cellphone ban: About 60 percent of surveyed elementary and high school parents said students should always or sometimes be allowed to use phones during the school day, according to a February poll commissioned by the National Parents Union organization .

Only about a third of surveyed parents supported school bans that offered limited exceptions, though parents did express considerable concern about their children’s use of social media.

National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues argued the philosophy behind government bans conflates smartphone use with social media use — and misunderstands how parents and families see mobile devices as critical communication tools.

“We have grown accustomed to having these open lines of communications with kids, not to mention the fact that we have not addressed the fact that we live in a society that remains really comfortable with the mass murder of children in classrooms,” she said in an interview over the summer. “This leads folks to just being really disconnected in terms of what their gut reaction is to this stuff.”

Despite these concerns, mounting evidence that electronic devices can stunt learning and facilitate bullying has spurred lawmakers into action.

Roughly three-quarters of public schools already prohibited non-academic phone use during school hours over the 2021-22 school year, according to federal data released early this year . But those restrictions were most concentrated in early grades.

While broad majorities of elementary and middle schools reported having cellphone prohibitions, only an estimated 43 percent of high schools did so at the time.

Like Adams in New York, California also appears to be taking a more deliberate approach.

Last month, lawmakers there approved bipartisan legislation , expected to be signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, that requires schools to enact policies that limit or prohibit student smartphone use at school by July 2026. Ahead of that deadline, the Los Angeles Unified School District — the country’s second largest — voted in June to enact a phone ban policy that will take effect early next year.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, signed a bipartisan-backed law in May requiring schools establish cellphone policies that emphasize phone limits during school hours and reduce classroom distractions. Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee also have similar laws on the books.

And in Washington, federal lawmakers including Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) have backed legislation that would, in part, task the Education Department with completing a study on cellphone usage so local officials can make better-informed decisions about their own policies.

Next month, the Education Department is also expected to issue model policies and voluntary practices on the use of internet-enabled devices in elementary and high schools — a move the Biden administration previewed last year .

Even conservative parental rights groups appear largely supportive of some restrictions, despite their general distaste for government-imposed rules.

“[Phone use is] a distraction, and I feel like they need to get back to focusing and learning,” said Meg Rudnick, a Gwinett County, Georgia representative for conservative education reform group Moms for Liberty. “They don’t need to be on social media all day long while they’re at school.”

New York is its own unique test case when it comes to restrictions.

Early in his 12-year run as mayor, Michael Bloomberg forbade cellphones on New York City school grounds. The policy was an early recognition of the deleterious effect electronic devices can have on learning — as well as a cautionary tale of the backlash that can ensue from banning them.

The edict was overturned in 2015 by Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio. He heeded the demands of outraged parents, who said they wanted to stay in close touch with their children, but was unable to come up with a replacement policy owing to some of the same sticking points that have stymied Adams.

Now, the United Federation of Teachers — an influential union currently in a detente with Adams — is worried about the cost of items like lockable phone pouches, which could eventually be part of a citywide mandate. Saddling individual schools with the tab, UFT spokesperson Alison Gendar argued, would be unfair.

Educators are similarly uneasy about how any eventual ban will be enforced and whether teachers themselves will need to police the classroom at the expense of instruction time.

With that in mind, the labor powerhouse praised the administration for pumping the brakes.

"Educators know the impact cellphones have on their students and their classrooms,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said in a statement. “Taking time to get a ban right, though, makes sense."

In New York City, nearly half of the city’s 1,600 schools either already have a cellphone ban in place or are planning to implement one, according to David Banks, the city’s schools chancellor, who incidentally had his own cellphone seized by federal authorities as part of a new probe into the Adams administration.

That patchwork of rules is how the city plans to manage the issue before landing on a uniform mandate, with prohibitions running the gamut from requiring devices be kept in school bags to phones being placed in special pouches that can only be unlocked at certain locations.

“Multiple approaches,” Banks said last week. “We’ll study them all, and then we’ll be in a better position to give more guidance to the system.”

Katelyn Cordero contributed to this report.