South Carolina education officials release statewide cell phone policy

SOUTH CAROLINA (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — Starting January 2025, school districts will put students’ cell phones away after state education officials released the statewide policy encouraging no phone usage during class time.

Officials call it “Free to Focus”.

Kimberly Long, a parent and Fort Mill teacher, has supported the initiative since the beginning.

“I think anything that’s going to promote student engagement is a positive thing,” Long said.

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The new approach is already receiving praise from one local teacher saying “it made a world of difference”. The policy was passed as a budget proviso —  if districts do not adhere to it, they’d risk losing state funding.

Sherry East, President of the South Carolina Education Association says it would be detrimental to any district to lose money over the policy.

“However, we agree that cell phones are a huge distraction in class. We have heard from many teachers for years,” East said.

56 percent of the nearly 10,000 South Carolina teachers surveyed say cell phones cause a distraction in most or all of their classes and 9th through 11th grades lose about 4 hours of instruction time due to the distractions.

“We’re not here to watch Netflix movies or play games or get on social media or you know, we saw last year a lot of really disturbing, disruptive, and violent things that went on with the TikTok challenges,” East said.

During the school day, students won’t have their phones unless authorized including smartwatches.

Guidelines say the devices must be stored in lockers, backpacks, or otherwise as directed by the school district during the school day. The policy doesn’t provide any safety precautions in case of an emergency like the Wednesday school shooting in Georgia.

“That is a huge and fair concern for parents. However, I think that we have to consider that we have to look instruction overall and consider that the schools have many things in place for those kind of emergency situations,” Long said.

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