For the first time in the smartphone era, most K-12 students will start the school year in a state that has a policy restricting cellphones in school on the books.
A wave of bills passed into law this year, and now 31 states either already limit or ban students from using their personal devices in school or plan to do so for the 2025-26 or 2026-27 school years.
This moment marks a major shift from this time last year, when barely a handful of states had initiated laws to curb students’ use of their personal electronic devices on school grounds.
But will these laws achieve their goal of improving students’ learning and mental health? Will students find workarounds that render the laws useless? And will these new policies win over some of their toughest critics—parents—in the following school year?
Keri Rodrigues, the president of the National Parents Union and a mother of school-age children, is among the skeptics of school cellphone restrictions.
“I look at what parents are saying, and they are saying, ‘pass whatever you want; not my kid,’” she said. On social media, in surveys, and in private conversations, Rodrigues hears the same theme from parents: “‘I don’t care if we have to hide it, I don’t care if we have to have a decoy phone that can be put in some place, I don’t trust schools, you can pass whatever you want, but I’m not doing it.’”
States take different approaches to school cellphone restrictions
While there are still states that allow districts to make decisions about whether or not to have student cellphone policies, the majority have enacted statewide policies or require districts to adopt policies that limit cellphone use. Smartwatches and other personal, wireless and Bluetooth-capable messaging devices are often lumped in with cellphones in these laws.
“It’s getting more and more prescriptive than it has in the past,” said Claus von Zastrow, the senior policy director for the Education Commission of the States. The trend has also caught on “more quickly than one typically sees movement in education policy.”
Florida, which passed its school cellphone law in 2023, sparked a domino effect, von Zastrow said. And the policy movement has become a rare point of bipartisan agreement, he said, with both Republicans and Democrats sponsoring legislation.
As of July 18, 27 states and the District of Columbia require that school districts develop their own cellphone restriction policies that meet certain parameters outlined in their laws, such as banning cellphones during class time and passing periods, according to an Education Week tally. Four states—Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Utah—have a single, statewide policy for restricting cellphones that all schools must follow.
Five states recommend that school districts adopt policies restricting students’ access to cellphones during the school day, and two states—Delaware and Pennsylvania—have policies that incentivize districts to adopt such policies.
Exemptions from the policy rules for some students are common
These new school cellphone laws are as varied as the states they hail from. However, there are several trends that have emerged.
Most states include exemptions for students in special education who need cellphones for their Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs, or for students with health challenges, such as those with diabetes.
Several states say that students can use their cellphones in class for educational purposes with teachers’ permission or in the case of emergencies—Kentucky, for example, allows for both exemptions. Other states, like Georgia, dictate that schools must have policies to store or lock up students’ devices during the school day and establish procedures for communicating with parents in the case of an emergency. And a number of states require their departments of education to create model policies for districts to reference and to gather data on the effectiveness of the cellphone restrictions.
Some states have diverged from the more common approaches.
For example, most states’ laws only apply to public schools. But Vermont is one exception, because most of the state’s private schools are also included in the law.
Rhode Island’s law includes language recommended by the ACLU to protect students’ personal privacy, and school employees are not allowed to search students’ phones while holding them during the school day. North Carolina’s new law requires that all K-12 schools teach digital literacy in addition to making students turn their phones off for class.
Goal is to improve student learning and mental health
For many state lawmakers, the goal is simple: remove distractions to improve student learning and address students’ mental health challenges.
Angela Arsenault, a Democrat state representative from Vermont, championed the Green Mountain State’s cellphone ban that passed into law in June.
Arsenault, a former school board member, said districts in her state that had passed their own cellphone restrictions were reporting positive results in school climate and student achievement. But she heard from other school administrators who wanted a state-level policy because they lacked the capacity to enforce and handle the potential pushback to a district-level ban.
“I was hearing that so many people, especially parents, are acutely aware of the mental health crisis among teens and youth,” she said. “So many of them, myself included, connect that crisis to the rise of smartphones and social media. That’s not the only reason, but it’s a contributing factor.”
The new Vermont law goes a step further. It prohibits school staff from using social media to communicate directly with students or requiring students to open social media accounts, such as for class assignments or for communicating about sports practices.
What people think about banning student cellphones from school depends on who you ask.
All adults in the United States are warming to the idea of cellphone bans in schools, a new Pew Research Center poll found. Three-quarters of adults say they support banning middle and high school students from having their phones in class, up from 68% who said so last fall.
Support for all-day restrictions is also rising: 44% of adults are in favor of them compared with 36% last fall. Around two-thirds of survey respondents said that bell-to-bell cellphone bans would improve students’ grades, social skills, and classroom behavior.
Many parents still push back against phone-free schools
However, many parents are not on board with cellphone restrictions, according to surveys conducted by the National Parents Union, said Rodrigues. Cellphone policies made at the state level often don’t address the challenges and concerns that parents have, she said, such as school safety and digital literacy.
“We don’t want [students] to be distracted in class. And we’re very compelled by the data that says our kids are impacted negatively by the apps that exist on cellphones,” she said. “However, there is also a deep concern around school safety. Schools and classrooms are still not safe from gun violence, and bullying, and a number of other things.”
Parents are also worried that students will lose out on learning how to responsibly manage and utilize their devices so they’re prepared for the workforce, Rodrigues said.
Students tend to dislike cellphone restrictions too.
Saanvi Khara, an incoming 7th grader at St. Joseph School in Danville, Pa., said her school doesn’t allow students to use their phones during the school day (even though that’s not required by Pennsylvania law); the devices must be put away and turned off.
She’d prefer a policy that allows limited use, like during lunch or between classes. She understands phones can be distracting, but thinks blanket bans don’t always work.
“When the policy is more strict, our brains are like, ‘Oh, I might want to take my phone out,’” Saanvi said. She believes her school’s policy would get more buy-in if students could use their phones during passing periods or at lunch.
A statewide student cellphone restriction, which Pennsylvania doesn’t currently have, isn’t necessary, Saanvi said.
“I think each school should have its own opinion about it,” she said. “If some schools have a worse problem, they can tend to it, and if some schools don’t have a problem with that, they can keep their rules as it is.”
Most teachers support measures to curb classroom distractions
Cellphone restrictions are much more popular with teachers. They have indicated in EdWeek Research Center surveys that parents messaging their kids on their cellphones during the school day are among some of the biggest distractions they deal with in class.
Mykel Estes, an 8th grade reading/language arts teacher in Dallas, said Texas’s new law gives him leverage.
“This is like a ‘don’t blame me—it’s a state law,’ kind of thing,” he said. A Texas law that took effect in June requires schools to implement policies prohibiting students from using their phones during the school day.
In the Dallas district, there’s been a bell-to-bell cellphone-use restriction in place even before the law was passed, but its enforcement became more prevalent last school year, said Estes, who teaches at the Henry W. Longfellow Career Exploration Academy.
Estes, who has taught for six years, said he hasn’t had too much trouble enforcing the cellphone policy. That’s because he ensures his class is engaging enough that the students won’t have time to think about their phones.
But enforcement can be a challenge when some teachers are more lenient than others—students will say things like, “‘If I can do it in someone’s classroom, why can’t I do it here?’”
Still, Estes likes having the restriction in place because it teaches kids that there’s a time and place for the use of certain digital tools. And students like unplugging, too, even if they don’t want to admit it, Estes said.
“I think, hopefully, if there’s a silver lining in all this, we’ll learn how to communicate again,” he said.
Research on the effectiveness of school cellphone restrictions is limited
Research on the effectiveness of cellphone bans is emerging and mixed, largely because these policies are so new that there hasn’t been much time to study them in a systematic way.
In many states, it will likely be a couple of years before schools develop and implement their policies and then collect enough data to be able to report on the effects of the policies, said Caroline Kistin, an associate professor at the Hassenfeld Child Health Innovation Institute at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
In the meantime, in states where school districts are required to create their own cellphone restriction policies, Kistin urges administrators to seek feedback from students and parents.
Plus, she points out that cellphone bans can only achieve so much. If policymakers and education leaders want students off their devices, they need to invest in activities and clubs where students can hang out in person, Kistin said.
“But those programs are always the ones that we cut,” she said. “If we really want kids to experience the joy of in-person community, it can’t just be during lesson time. Just getting rid of the phones during the day, I think it’s an important step, but it’s not going to get kids thriving just by itself.”
