{"id":567200,"date":"2026-02-05T03:55:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T03:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/567200\/"},"modified":"2026-02-05T03:55:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T03:55:11","slug":"as-school-cellphone-bans-gain-in-popularity-lawmakers-say-its-time-to-go-bell-to-bell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/567200\/","title":{"rendered":"As school cellphone bans gain in popularity, lawmakers say it\u2019s time to go bell-to-bell"},"content":{"rendered":"

DES MOINES, Iowa (IOWA CAPITAL DISPATCH<\/a>) – The momentum behind cellphone bans in schools has reached more than half the states, as teachers, superintendents and education experts praise these policies as a way to boost student achievement and mental health, and to rebuild a sense of community that many believe has been diminished by students\u2019 addiction to screens.<\/p>\n

Now, the question for many states and school districts isn\u2019t whether to remove distracting devices from students each day, but for how long.<\/p>\n

States that have passed laws requiring some kind of cellphone policy now are considering going further and mandating daylong bans, even for high schoolers. The idea has gotten some pushback from students, but also from teachers and parents who say strict bell-to-bell bans aren\u2019t necessary. Some say they worry about safety in the event of a school shooting or other emergency.<\/p>\n

Education experts say the modern push for school phone bans accelerated after the pandemic reshaped how students use technology and interrupted crucial in-person experiences in a classroom. Kara Stern, director of education and engagement for SchoolStatus, a data-collecting firm that assists K-12 districts with attendance and other school issues, said smartphones shifted from being tools of connection during remote learning to sources of isolation once students returned to classrooms.<\/p>\n

Iowa\u2019s school cellphone law<\/p>\n

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed legislation last spring that required\u00a0school districts to ban cellphones<\/a>\u00a0during class time, but offered schools flexibility at other times during the school day.<\/p>\n

Reynolds proposed the ban during her 2025 Condition of the State message as one of her priorities, but also said she only wanted to set a minimum standard for cellphone restrictions that districts.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring remote learning, phones became a primary way kids entertained themselves and stayed connected,\u201d Stern said. \u201cBut once schools reopened, phones stopped being a connection tool and started creating disconnection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Currently, 38 states and Washington, D.C., have enacted some form of statewide restriction or requirement for districts to limit student phone use. Of those, roughly 18 states and the district have full-day bans or comprehensive statewide restrictions (including during classroom and noninstructional time).<\/p>\n

Despite widespread adoption of school cellphone restrictions and support for them, compliance remains uneven, according to a 2025 University of Southern California\u00a0study<\/a>. Most students continue to use phones during the school day regardless of restrictions, the researchers found.<\/p>\n

Still, more than half of teens surveyed said enforcement this school year is stricter than it was the previous year.<\/p>\n

\u201cTeaching a class where students are on their phones is like trying to teach at Disney World over a loudspeaker,\u201d Stern said. \u201cThe environment just isn\u2019t designed for learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pushing for broader bans<\/p>\n

Georgia is among the states\u00a0considering<\/a>\u00a0a bell-to-bell policy for all public high schools. This comes a year after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a ban for K-8 grades.<\/p>\n

Students are paying attention. At East Paulding High School in Dallas, Georgia, students and teachers\u00a0offered mixed views<\/a>\u00a0on cellphone bans. On a student-run news broadcast aired last fall, some students expressed concern over their safety, while some teachers were bullish on the idea that a ban would be effective at the high school level.<\/p>\n

Republican state Rep. Scott Hilton, who proposed the new law,\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0the Georgia Recorder that the ban for younger students helped families get used to a bell-to-bell ban.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve just been blown away at the positive reaction across the board from all different constituencies, teachers, administrators, parents and even in a lot of cases, students who have experienced a difference and said, \u2018Oh, wow, I kind of like this,\u2019\u201d Hilton said.<\/p>\n

Several states focus their bans on prohibiting cellphone use \u201cduring instructional time,\u201d which wouldn\u2019t necessarily include free time such as lunch. Kansas lawmakers are\u00a0pushing ahead<\/a>\u00a0on a ban on use during instructional time; it would supersede previous action that allowed local district discretion on cellphone use in schools. Michigan legislators passed a similar bill last month; it was\u00a0sent<\/a>\u00a0to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Monday.<\/p>\n

Similar instruction time bills passed in Iowa, North Carolina and Wisconsin last year. In Oregon, Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek issued an executive order in July requiring every district to adopt bell-to-bell cellphone bans by Jan. 1. Several districts have said the mandate has gone\u00a0better than expected<\/a>, with some superintendents saying they\u2019ve seen more interaction among students.<\/p>\n

Bell-to-bell cellphone restrictions are being considered or advanced in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and were recently enacted in New York. The Massachusetts bill goes further than most, adding smartphones, tablets and Bluetooth devices to its list of banned electronic devices.<\/p>\n

\u201cTeaching a class where students are on their phones is like trying to teach at Disney World over a loudspeaker. The environment just isn\u2019t designed for learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013 Kara Stern, director of education and engagement for SchoolStatus, a data collection firm<\/b><\/p>\n

Most legislation reviewed by Stateline includes exceptions to the bans for students with special needs and in cases of emergency.<\/p>\n

School shootings in 2025 fell to the lowest number since 2020, according to a\u00a0review<\/a>\u00a0by Education Week. Still, there were 18 shootings that left seven people dead last year, the review found.<\/p>\n

In Georgia, state Superintendent Richard Woods, a Republican, told reporters he\u2019s heard firsthand from survivors of a shooting there about the importance of having cellphones on hand for safety reasons.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo I support this? Absolutely,\u201d Woods\u00a0said<\/a>, referring to the cellphone ban. \u201cBut I think we have to find a sweet spot and not move to the extremes.\u201d<\/p>\n

What works best?<\/p>\n

According to a Pew Research Center\u00a0poll<\/a>\u00a0released last summer, 74% of U.S. adults support banning cellphones during class for middle and high school students, up from 68% in fall 2024. Far fewer adults (19%) oppose classroom bans, and 7% are unsure, the poll found.<\/p>\n

For advocates of a phone-free education, the gold standard of cellphone policies is a bell-to-bell restriction with inaccessible storage for the device.<\/p>\n

A 2025 article in JAMA Pediatrics reported that teens ages 13-18 spend an average of 90 minutes on their phones during school, but that little has been written about what students are doing during that time.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough 99.7% of US public school principals report their school has a smartphone policy, few studies have objectively examined smartphone app usage during school,\u201d an abstract of the study reads.<\/p>\n

Stern said she saw the effects of a \u201cconsistent bell-to-bell\u201d policy firsthand with her own son. When his phone broke in eighth grade, he dreaded going to school without it. But after his first day, he came home and told Stern that he played soccer at recess, met new classmates and had \u201ca really good day\u201d \u2014 one he said was better than usual.<\/p>\n

Kim Whitman, a co-head of Smartphone Free Childhood US, and other education experts believe cellphone bans will mirror past public health reversals \u2014\u00a0like banning smoking in schools<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and possibly redefine what it means to be in a classroom post-pandemic.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday we can\u2019t imagine allowing smoking in schools,\u201d Whitman said. \u201cI think in five to 10 years we\u2019ll say the same thing about cellphones \u2014 wondering how we ever allowed them into classrooms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitman, who has examined and graded states according to the efficacy of their cellphone bans, said that North Dakota and Rhode Island are the only states warranting high marks for their adoption and enforcement of bell-to-bell policies.<\/p>\n

Despite claims from adults who love the phone-free policies, students aren\u2019t as convinced. Only 41% of teens support cellphone bans in middle and high school classrooms, according to\u00a0polling<\/a>\u00a0by Pew Research Center released in January.<\/p>\n

The largest share of teens who like certain phone-free policies are in schools where the policy allows phones during noninstructional time throughout the day, according to the USC study.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 IOWA CAPITAL DISPATCH. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DES MOINES, Iowa (IOWA CAPITAL DISPATCH) – The momentum behind cellphone bans in schools has reached more than…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":567201,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[17],"tags":[1911,85755,205235,97257,23541,122238,104349,247055,124165,22023,247051,247054,247056,28963,3230,611,247053,247049,23880,11645,213141,247052,247050,122930,158,6620,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-567200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-as","tag-bans","tag-bell-to-bell","tag-cellphone","tag-cellphone-ban","tag-cellphone-bans","tag-cellphone-policy","tag-condition-of-the-state","tag-gain","tag-go","tag-iowa-cellphone-school-ban","tag-iowa-phone-ban","tag-iowas-school-cellphone-law","tag-kim-reynolds","tag-lawmakers","tag-mobile","tag-phone-bans","tag-popularity","tag-say","tag-school","tag-school-cellphone-ban","tag-school-phone-policy","tag-school-superintendent","tag-student-achievement","tag-technology","tag-time","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116016009939710856","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}