Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is on board with banning students’ cellphone use in schools.
The secretary, in a March 20 interview with “Fox & Friends,” applauded the states with restrictions on when students can use their personal devices while in school, saying cellphones have a negative effect on students’ mental health and academic performance.
“Cellphone use and social media use on the cellphone has been directly connected with depression, with poor performance in schools, with suicidal ideation, with substance abuse,” Kennedy said.
At least 19 states have laws or policies that ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools statewide or recommend local districts enact their own bans or restrictive policies, according to an Education Week analysis. Lawmakers in six additional states have passed bills restricting cellphone use in schools and are awaiting signatures from their governors.
Districts have met these directives in a variety of ways. Some require students to lock up their phones in specially designed pouches at the start of the school day. Others allow students to use their cellphones between classes and during lunch periods, but they must be stowed away during class time. Still others have left cellphone policies up to teachers to create for their individual classrooms.
A spokesperson for HHS did not immediately respond to questions about whether this will be a top priority for the secretary.
Cellphone-use restrictions have gained strong momentum as a policy solution to widespread concerns about students’ academic, social-emotional, and mental well-being.
Growing number of analyses link cellphone use to poor academic performance
Indeed, a growing number of studies have linked children’s use of smartphones and social media with mental health challenges and poor academic performance.
A 2023 systematic review published in the journal BMC Psychology found that screen time was associated with problems in teens’ mental well-being, and that social media was linked to an increased risk of depression in girls. A 2025 meta-analysis published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found a negative association between smartphone use, social media use, video game playing, and students’ academic performance.
Some experts say, however, that there isn’t enough research on whether cellphone bans are effective. And others say a ban on students’ cellphone use might not be the cure to the worsening mental health of young people.
“You can actually treat the consequences or treat the symptoms of what’s happening with a total cellphone ban, but you’re not treating the cause,” said Lisa Strohman, a clinical psychologist who specializes in technology overuse. “That’s because we don’t [educate] ... our kids” about healthy cellphone use.
Schools and families should be educating their kids on how to have better relationships with their personal devices and providing support for them to be able to do that, Strohman added. Otherwise, the kids get their phones back at the end of the school day if there is a ban and then use them in unhealthy ways when they are not in school.
Kennedy sees positive effect of a cellphone ban in a Virginia district
Still, school and district leaders have told Education Week that the initial student-discipline data recorded after these bans or restrictions were put in place are encouraging. An informal poll of school leaders in Education Week’s The Savvy Principal newsletter indicated that more than half of principals say student behavior has improved after their school put cellphone restrictions in place.
“The states that are doing this have found that it is a much healthier environment when kids are not using cellphones in schools,” Kennedy said in the Fox interview.
Kennedy visited Louisa County High School in Mineral, Va., on March 17 with Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and the HHS secretary said he was “shocked” by how supportive students, parents, and teachers were of the cellphone ban there.
The students told him that the ban “helped them increase their socialization and help them do better homework,” Kennedy said.
Along with citing established links between cellphone use, mental health, and academic performance, the secretary also promoted unfounded claims that cellphones “produce electromagnetic radiation” and “cause cellular damage and even cancer.”
While cellphones do emit low-frequency, low-energy radiation, research has found no associations between cellphone use and cancer or cellular damage. Studies have not found significant changes in the number of new cancer cases during the time that cellphone use increased dramatically, according to the National Cancer Institute. Four different epidemiologic studies have also not found associations between cellphone use and cancer, according to the institute.
