Cell phones should be out of classrooms

Ask any educator, superintendent, etc., what they think about cell phones in the classroom. We venture all of them (OK there’s always an outlier) will tell you they are a distraction and need to go away. More and more schools, and school districts, are doing just that.
A couple of weeks ago the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education voted to ban student use of cell phones and social media platforms during the entire school day. The LA school district joined a long list of districts going on the offensive to take phones out of the classrooms as they have become a nonstop distraction to students and too many teachers are spending far too much time corraling students who are playing on Snapchat, TikTok or whatever else instead of paying attention to their studies and actually participating in society. The move also is designed to improve students’ mental health, as countless studies continue to pour in showing social media is bad for mental health, in particular young, developing brains. K-12 teachers in the U.S. have increasingly faced challenges over students’ cell phone use, with one-third saying phone distraction is a “major problem in their classroom,” according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in fall 2023.
In the Custer School District, no cell phones are allowed during the school day for K-8 students. They are allowed for high school students to carry, but they are not to be on or used during class. Superintendent Mark Naugle said he anticipates the South Dakota Department of Education to bring a bill in the 2025 Legislative session allowing schools to ban phones K-12.
“There are schools in South Dakota where phones are forbidden K-12, and the policy has worked well,” Naugle said. “I think not allowing cell phones during the day would be an improvement for our students as they would have to engage and communicate with the people around them during the day.”
In Hot Springs the school district banned cell phones in the classroom in grades K-8 starting its second semester of last year. In an article in the Fall River County Herald-Star, assistant secondary principal Eric Reynolds gave a conservative estimate of at least 100 man-hours so far (at nearly the end of the first semester) were spent having to manage cell phone issues related to students, which equates to three weeks of just doing phone managment.
For a cell phone ban to work, parents have to get behind it. We know we live in an age where parents won’t send their children to the corner without a GPS tracker, EpiPen and a helmet, but not having cell phones in classrooms won’t mean you can’t communicate with your children. They can call/text you at lunch and after school.  Schools aren’t 15th-century castles with no forms of communication. The offices have phones. The classrooms have phones. They are ways to get ahold of children in case of emergency. Fido needs you to pick up some dog food after school isn’t an emergency.
Let’s allow teachers to focus on teaching during school hours, and allow children to focus on learning. It looks like it’s coming, anyway. Cell phones should stay out of classrooms, permanently.