Should Washington's public schools ban students from using cellphones? [View all]

Smartphones gripping people’s attention isn’t anything new. But following the pandemic, Kris Hagel recalls seeing a troubling rise in public school students distracted by their phones during class.

“I would walk through classrooms last year and kids have absolutely no attention to the teacher that’s presenting a lesson in front of them because they’re so engrossed in what’s going on with their cellphones,” said Hagel, executive director of learning and innovation at Peninsula School District, which has 17 schools and serves about 9,000 students in the Gig Harbor area.

“We struggled for a long time on what to do,” Hagel said. Then, late last school year, one high school in the district decided to try a cellphone ban. It went “surprisingly well,” according to Hagel. “We started hearing from more and more parents who said, ‘Hey, we want this everywhere, we want the district to do the exact same thing.’”

So it did. “We are not a district that says you can’t have the device anywhere in school,” Hagel explained Thursday during a webinar the League of Education Voters held to discuss smartphone use in schools. “We’re just saying it needs to be put away,” he added. “It should not be in classrooms.”

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/05/02/should-washingtons-public-schools-ban-students-from-using-cell-phones/