Faculty at Schoharie Junior/Senior High School in New York knew something had to change when students began texting during a history class presentation by a Holocaust survivor.
“This was an opportunity that the students were missing out on to check out what’s on Instagram,” said David Russell, principal of Schoharie, a school for grades six through 12 in upstate New York. “These people weren’t going to be around forever.”
The phones weren’t just a distraction. Teachers were exhausted from constantly policing the phone use, cyberbullying cases were on the rise, and instead of talking to each other during recess, students were glued to their phones.
In response, the Schoharie Central School District began to take action. It surveyed teachers and parents, held community forums and after months of vibrant and sometimes heated discussions, reached a district-wide consensus to ban phones throughout the full school day — ”bell to bell.”
During the 2022–2023 school year, when the school rolled out the policy, the school communicated the purpose behind the policy: “It’s not just about taking phones away,” he said. “It’s about showing students what they gain when the phone isn’t in their hand.”
Schoharie is part of a growing national movement to curb phone use during the school day. At least 17 states have passed policies to limit or ban cellphones in class. Some states — Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia and South Carolina — have already implemented bell-to-bell phone bans, and others are considering similar policies.
In January, New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed a statewide phone restriction plan, backed by $13.5 million in funding, proposing banning cellphones in schools bell to bell. Last week, she announced that she’s come to an agreement with state lawmakers on the ban and expects it to go into effect next school year.
Some states are opting for more flexible restrictions, allowing school districts to choose how they want to implement the restrictions. In April, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill prohibiting cellphone use during “classroom hours” in the state’s public schools as well as restricting smartwatches and other “emerging technologies.” Cox expressed hope that the state would continue working toward the full-day phone ban, including lunchtime and passing periods.
“Phones have become a major distraction, and this bill thoughtfully resets the default to encourage healthier, more connected learning environments — while still leaving room for local decision-making,” Cox said. The law is set to take effect this summer.
While Americans across both blue and red states support phone restrictions in schools, opinions differ on how strict those limits should be. About 7 in 10 Americans favor a ban during class time, but only a third support a bell-to-bell ban, according to the Pew Research Center.
As consensus builds around the need to limit phone use, educators and administrators are still figuring out what those rules should look like in practice — and how to make sure they’re consistently enforced.
At a recent meeting on school phone policies in Florida, state Rep. Fiona McFarland described the need for effectively applying the policies this way: “We can make the greatest law in the world, which is meaningless if it’s not executed and enforced properly.”
The underlying ‘why’
The debate over phone use in schools — and how to best regulate it — has gained renewed urgency following last year’s release of Jonathan Haidt’s buzzed-about book “The Anxious Generation,” which links early smartphone use to rising mental health risks and advocates for a play-based, phone-free childhood. Public officials, too, have been sounding the alarm about the impact of phones and social media. In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a public advisory on social media and youth mental health, and the following year, called for warning labels on social media platforms — drawing parallels to tobacco and firearms. “The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor,” Murthy wrote in The New York Times.
The movement is gaining traction beyond the U.S., too. In November of 2024, Australia enacted one of the strictest measures yet, banning social media access for children under 16.
The first few days of the no-phone policy were rocky at New York’s Schoharie Junior/Senior High School. In the mornings, students lined up at the school’s entrance to receive their magnet-sealed pouches, where they’d lock up their phones for the day. “For the first three days of the school week, it was a long line to get the kids in just to verify the process,” Russell told me.
While the younger kids adapted smoothly to the new rules, the transition was rougher for the older high school students. Some even tried to game the system, smuggling in burner phones, slicing pouches, or using magnets to break the locks. The school worked closely with social workers and counselors, and within a few weeks, the resistance from the students subsided.
The transition turned out to be smoother than the administrators expected at Timber Creek High School in Orlando, Florida, where the school implemented a district-wide bell-to-bell policy in 2023 following the state’s legislation. Florida was the first state to pass the bill restricting phone use and Orange County District, which includes Timber Creek High School, was the first district to adopt a full-day ban.
“We were nervous at first,” said Marc Wasko, principal of Timber Creek High School. The idea that a team of about 10 administrators could manage nearly 3,400 students during lunch and passing periods seemed impossible, he said.
But to Wasko’s surprise, the students adapted quickly. The school had a six-week grace period filled with constant reminders about the new policy. To ease the adjustment, teachers offered games during lunch to help restless teens unplug: spikeball, cornhole, and two newly painted pickleball courts in the courtyard.
“They’re starting to find other avenues to talk to each other, hit the library, read books, and begin to not be so preoccupied with their phones,” said Wasko.
Timber Creek opted not to use locking pouches. Instead, students are simply asked to keep phones out of sight. Some teachers, however, have adopted their own “phone jails,” as students call them — everything from phone locker cases to wall-mounted shoe organizers for storing devices during class. If the phone makes an appearance, it’s confiscated. After four warnings, disciplinary consequences follow.
Parents not always happy about it
For districts considering stricter phone policies, much of the resistance comes from parents, who are often reluctant to lose a direct line of communication with their children. Since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 and the attacks of 9/11, there’s been a growing sense that danger looms over children at all times, said Katey McPherson, a former educator who is now a director of community partnerships at Bark Technologies, a company that offers parental controls for families. The instinct to hand kids smartphones — sometimes as early as third grade — with the goal of keeping them safe, she argues, may do more harm than good. “It’s sort of a backwards message about safety,” said McPherson, who travels around the country speaking to school communities and parents.
Experts say that student phone use during emergencies can actually hinder crisis response efforts. “Student use of cellphones during an unfolding emergency can distract their attention from safety and emergency response directions being given by school staff,” according to the National School Safety and Security Services, a national school safety consulting firm.
At Schoharie Junior/Senior High School in New York, each classroom is equipped with an internal phone system, and parents can contact their children through the main office at any time. The school also has a resource officer on-site for emergencies. “We don’t want the cellphone lines flooded with miscommunication about something that’s taking place in the building,” said David Russell.
Still, some educators and advocates argue that banning phones outright may overlook a critical opportunity. For many students, especially in under-resourced schools, smartphones double as essential learning tools — serving as calculators, translators and research aids, wrote Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, a former public school principal and education adviser, in Education Week. English language learners and students with disabilities may also rely on apps and translation tools to help them navigate schoolwork, raising questions about how blanket bans might unintentionally disadvantage certain groups.
Schools that have implemented phone restrictions successfully, McPherson said, have done so by including students, teachers, administrators, parents and board members in the process. “You need to have all the voices at the table so you have the buy-in and you don’t have the backlash,” she said.
A grieving process
Enforcing a no-phone policy was accompanied by a kind of “grieving process” for students at Riverton High School in Utah. “They go through denial, then bargaining — then into many stages, where the teacher has to have a little bit of a backbone in order to continue to maintain that policy throughout the school,” Adrian Ramjoue, an English teacher at Riverton, said. Before the district-wide mandate took effect earlier this year, Ramjoue took a more hands-off approach, allowing students to self-manage their phone use.
But once the rule was in place, he quickly noticed a shift: Students were more engaged, less anxious and better able to finish their work during class. “It became a collective sentiment, rather than one person being punished or one teacher being stricter than another,” he said. Still, Ramjoue believes a full-day ban would go even further — freeing teachers from the role of daily enforcer.
Russell, Schoharie’s principal, noticed a similar shift on his campus. “I used to walk into the cafeteria and see everyone in headphones,” he said. “Now it’s loud with conversation, kids are talking again.”
Even so, some educators caution that schools are only one piece of a larger puzzle. “It’s easy to make schools the focal point, when the bigger problem is phone use outside of school hours,” said Shari Camhi, superintendent of the Baldwin Union Free School District in New York. Some kids stay up late on their devices, which affects sleep and learning. “I’m not sure a pouch is going to help that,” she said, while still acknowledging that a focused, phone-free classroom supports better learning. In her district, phones aren’t allowed from bell to bell for grades K–8, but high schoolers have more flexibility.
Camhi isn’t firmly for or against school phone bans, but she’d like the conversation to go deeper: “What exactly are we trying to accomplish?” Rather than focusing solely on schools, she advocates for stronger parental involvement and cultivating healthy media habits at home. “Banning phones in schools — or even passing a law — isn’t really dealing with the source of the problem, which is just being addicted to phones in the first place,” she said.
In Florida, Principal Marc Wasko says his school’s success with phone restrictions comes down to clarity and consistency. “I think it’s because it’s across the board and everybody knows the expectation,” he said. “There was no wavering in it.”