Students, parents and educators navigate school smartphone restrictions

April 30, 2025 – New York is poised to become the latest state to restrict access to smartphones during the school day, based on a state budget deal announced Monday from the Capitol by Gov. Kathy Hochul.

“Starting this September, all public schools in New York will implement policies that free students from smartphones and other devices bell-to-bell,” Hochul said in her budget announcement. “We’ve protected our kids before. From cigarettes, alcohol and drunk driving, and now we’re protecting them from addictive technology designed to hijack their attention.” 

The “bell-to-bell” ban is expected to go into effect at the start of the 2025-2026 school year and require the state’s more than 700 school districts to prohibit smartphone use during the entire school day, with exemptions for students who need their devices for medical or educational purposes. The governor said the state budget will include $13.5 million for school districts to purchase pouches, lockers and other storage equipment to implement the restrictions. 

At least eight states have enacted laws over the past two years limiting cellphone access in K-12 schools, with more states considering restrictions this year, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Bipartisan legislation was also introduced in Congress last year that would provide federal funds for school districts to implement smartphone bans.      

Jax Sherer, a senior in the Schoharie Central School District in the Capital Region, said she supports the plan because she knows how addicting smartphones can be.

“If I was walking past a group of kids I thought were cool, I would pretend to scroll on my phone so they wouldn’t think I was a loser,” she said. “I would get a single notification during class, and even if I didn’t check it, I would spend the rest of that class period wondering, ‘What was that about? Who is that from? Am I missing something?’ Even if it wasn’t my phone, if someone else got a notification, I would start wondering, ‘What did they get? Was it about me? Is there something going on that I’m missing right now?’” 

Schoharie Central School District, a small, rural district that implemented a smartphone ban in 2022, requires students to place their devices in a district-provided, magnetically-sealed pouch that can be opened by a staff member at the end of the school day. Although Sherer was initially against the policy, she said it significantly improved her learning and mental health in school.

“Kids were way less anxious, heads were up, kids talked to each other, kids talked to their teachers,” Sherer said. “I know my librarian’s name, which wasn’t something I had before, and at my old school, where it took me maybe a year to form a steady group of friends, at Schoharie it took me maybe a month.”

More than 60% of New York voters support “bell-to-bell” restrictions on smartphones in K-12 schools, according to polling released by Siena College earlier this month. Additionally, nearly three-quarters of high school teachers and one-third of middle school teachers nationwide consider cell phone usage to be a major distraction for students, according to a Pew Research report from 2024.

The statewide teachers union, New York State United Teachers, a Capitol Pressroom underwriter, has aggressively pushed the bell-to-bell ban. Natalie McKay, a NYSUT board director and the Schoharie Teachers Association president, said a bell-to-bell approach is more effective than prohibiting devices solely during class time.

“I can tell you that our old policy was you can’t have your phone out, and we would lose a great deal of instructional minutes at each 40 minute period being the cell phone police,” McKay said. “‘Put your phone away. Do I see the phone?’ Phones would go off in class. I am not more interesting than TikTok and Netflix, so having this policy has changed the culture of our school.” 

However, groups representing school boards and superintendents have called for lawmakers to give school districts more flexibility with restrictions. State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa favors letting school districts create their own cellphones policies.

“I’m in a place where local control, making sure that we have input from communities, students, everybody that’s impacted, parents, because remember, some of these parents are the parents from 9/11 if you think about it, right? So you’ve got to pull them in,” Rosa said. “And finally, I would say that we are clearly interested in making sure that schools and districts really have a sense of ownership about this process.”    

The parents’ rights group National Parents Union surveyed more than 1,500 parents of public school students nationally last year and found nearly 70% of respondents oppose cellphone bans in schools. Respondents were most concerned that they wouldn’t be able to get in touch with their children to coordinate transportation or in cases of emergency.  

Ashara Baker, the group’s State Director, said she shares those concerns as a mother. 

“I can’t name one parent who doesn’t think of a school emergency whether it’s as minute as pickup has changed. ‘I’m not going to pick you up, you need to take the late bus or grandma’s going to pick you up.’ Or, at the very worst of what we’ve seen across the country with school shootings, of course, that definitely comes to mind as a parent.”   

Andrea Funez and Lisseth Hernandez, two high school students in the Central Islip Union Free School District on Long Island, said banning cellphones would be an ineffective way to reduce classroom distractions. Their district issues every student a Chromebook to use for educational purposes but Funez said her classmates often misuse them to communicate with friends or explore the internet. 

Hernandez believes the $13.5 million earmarked for this policy could be better spent elsewhere. 

“Our school district, for example, does not have the money in our budget to provide air conditioning in the summer,” she said. “And I find this isn’t the only district in our area who has this issue. Why are we focusing on an issue that has to prevent students from being on their phones, taking away resources? Teachers, at times, do actually teach tutorials on how to use the phone calculator, because it is different than the calculator that we use in class. It just seems kind of redundant to really restrict phone usage with $13.5 million that could really be the saving grace for students that need that air conditioning.”

Hochul and other advocates of a bell-to-bell ban argue that parents who need to reach their children during school hours can contact the main office instead of relying on smartphones. However, Hernandez said this solution wouldn’t work for every school district.  

“We don’t even have the luxury of the main office because not every main office has a translator,” she said. “Not every main office can accommodate per se, our district that has a majority Hispanic, Black and Asian population. There aren’t even just school shooting issues right now, our main issue is ICE raids and deportations. There are students who may mistakenly be searched for in these classrooms that might need to reach their parents to ask for documents that they may need to show and present, and instead are taken into custody.” 

However, banning smartphones hasn’t created language issues in other ethnically diverse districts like the Poughkeepsie City School District, according to Superintendent Eric Rosser. 

Similar to Schoharie, Poughkeepsie High School requires students to keep their phones in a magnetically-sealed pouch throughout the school day. Rosser said the policy was so successful that it’s now being implemented in the middle school this school year.  

“What we found, particularly at our high school, was that students were less engaged in the schooling process and more engaged with their cell phones,” he said. “What we found very quickly is that student attendance increased. What we found very quickly is that students’ attentiveness in the classroom increased. And what we found long term is that student academic attainment has also improved greatly.” 

Schoharie and Poughkeepsie are among the thousands of school districts globally that use pouches from Yondr, a company that specializes in creating “distraction-free experiences” in schools, workplaces and entertainment venues.

Rosser said it cost his district just over $20,000 to provide Yondr pouches to the district’s about 2,000 high school and middle school students.  

For students like Sherer, a Schoharie High School senior, a smartphone ban can have educational and social benefits that last far beyond graduation.     

“I think it’s crucial to help these students fight our phone addictions, because we can’t do it ourselves,” she said. “But I think it’s so important for schools not just to discuss this with each other at an administration level, but also discuss with students and make it clear to them that a phone ban is not collective punishment, it is collective protection.”

J.T. Stone is a senior studying journalism at the University at Albany. He previously interned with WAMC Northeast Public Radio and Spotlight News covering New York’s capital region.