As students across the country head back to class, one thing won’t be coming with many of them: their cell phones. This year more states than ever are banning students’ devices during school hours.
In Texas, every public and charter school student will be without their phones during the school day this fall. Brigette Whaley, an associate professor of education at West Texas A&M University, expects to see “a more equitable environment” in classrooms with higher student engagement.
Last year, she tracked the success of a cell phone ban in one west Texas high school by surveying teachers throughout the year. They reported more participation by students, and also said they saw student anxiety plummet – mainly because students weren’t afraid of being filmed at any moment and embarrassing themselves.
“They could relax in the classroom and participate,” she said. “And not be so anxious about what other students were doing.”
The findings in west Texas align with results from many of the states and districts that are heading back to school without phones: Students learn better in a phone-free environment. Getting cell phones out of the classroom is a rare issue with significant bipartisan support, allowing a rapid adoption of policies across red and blue states alike.
Some 31 states and the District of Columbia now restrict students’ use of cell phones in schools, according to Education Week.
Not everyone is on board
The rapid adoption of these policies, Whaley says, can sometimes make for uneven enforcement. While most teachers at the school she studied supported the ban, there was one teacher who refused, which caused problems for other teachers.
Alex Stegner, a social studies and geography teacher in Portland, Ore., said his school saw similar results when it adopted a ban during the 2024-25 school year. Their old policy had each teacher at Lincoln High School collect phones at the start of class in a lock box.
He says some teachers left the boxes open, others closed them but did not lock them. And he, along with some of his colleagues, locked the phones up: “I was committed to kind of going all in with it and I liked it.”
He said last school year was the first year in a decade he didn’t spend class time chasing cell phones around the room.
Now, as the cell phone restriction goes statewide this school year, Lincoln enters into its second year with some kind of ban, things are changing a bit.
This year students’ phones will be locked away for the entire day, not just class time.
Stegner thinks it will be a learning curve not just for teachers and students. His school has already been fielding calls from anxious parents worried about not being able to contact their kids throughout the day.
Even so, he expects parents to relax as the school year goes on: “I do think that there seems to be this kind of collective understanding that we’ve got to do something different.”
The cost of going phone-free
Like a lot of schools, Lincoln High School will be distributing individual locked bags, called Yondr pouches, to students this year. The same ones that were used in the district Whaley studied in Texas, and for about 2 million students nationwide.
Stegner worries about transitioning the responsibility of holding on to phones from teachers to students: “I heard stories last year about Yondr pouches that were like … cut open, destroyed.”
The pouches cost about $30 each, so for a school like Lincoln with more than 1,500 students, this year’s policy comes with a high price tag.
Other states have anticipated the high cost and set aside money for districts to make the transition. In Delaware, Rosalie Morales oversees the state’s pilot program for cell phone bans and the $250,000 attached to it. As the program enters its second year, she’s surveyed the schools that participated last year.
“The response from teachers is definitely supportive,” Morales says. “You’ll see a different response from students.”
They’re not wild about it
When asked if the ban should continue, 83% of the participating Delaware teachers said yes, while only 11% of students agreed. Morales hopes that as time passes, that will change as students see the benefits.
Zoë George, a student at Bard High School Early College in New York City, is not quite there yet. For now, she sees her state’s ban as “annoying” especially as she starts her last year of high school.
“I wish that they would hear us out more,” she says.
She’s worried about the implications for homework and school work during free periods, and says often students use their phones to get work done. Her school also typically allows students to leave campus for lunch, but with a bell-to-bell cell phone policy, that gets harder.
“It’s not the worst because it’s my last year,” George says. “But at the same time it’s my last year.”
She’s sad she won’t get to take pictures and videos of her friends throughout the day, it feels like she won’t have memories like she does from her other years of school.
Next year she hopes to be at college and is looking forward to the freedom.
