The primary reason parents want their kids to have cellphones at school is so they can reach them in an emergency.
More than three-quarters of parents whose children have cellphones said so in a new survey from the National Parents Union, a nonprofit parent advocacy organization that seeks to raise the influence of parents’ voices in K-12 decisionmaking.
It’s an issue that is top of mind for many families following the school shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, Ga., that left two students and two teachers dead. Frantic text messages between students and their parents were circulated widely in the media, evoking in visceral detail many parents’ worst nightmares.
And it highlighted the tension between educators’ desires to ban the distracting devices from classrooms and parents’ emotional need to have direct contact with their children should the worst-case scenario take place, whether it be school violence, a natural disaster or some other emergency.
But daily practical concerns over scheduling rides, and medical or dental appointment reminders are also important considerations for parents when they send their kids off to school with their cellphones, according to the National Parents Union survey.
More than half of parents said they want their children to have their phones so they can reach their kids or find out where they are during the day, when needed.
“Despite what so-called ‘experts’ might think, we aren’t texting our kids memes or asking them what the latest TikTok trend is,” National Parents Union president Keri Rodrigues said in a statement. “Cellphone bans fail to take into consideration the tragic, real-life scenarios that unfortunately play out all too often in schools. And schools have yet to improve communication with us.”
There have been instances in which first responders were contacted more quickly in an emergency because students had their cellphones, school safety expert Kenneth S. Trump recently told Education Week.
But at least in the case of school shootings, he said, it can be less safe for students to have their cellphones on them. Students may fail to follow important directions from adults because they are distracted by messaging their family, the dings from notifications could alert a shooter to where someone is hiding, and terrified parents flocking to the school to find their children can make it harder for school and emergency personnel to manage an already chaotic situation.
Cellphone restrictions vary widely among states and districts
The survey also asked parents about the cellphone policies in their children’s schools. Nearly half, 46 percent, said their children are banned from using their phones in school unless they have a medical condition or disability. Forty-two percent said their students are sometimes allowed to use their cellphones at school, and 4 percent said there were no restrictions.
But the survey found that the definition of a ban was somewhat spongy. Of the parents who said phones were banned in their kids’ schools, 38 percent said there was a “complete” ban while 62 percent said cellphone use was restricted in class but not during other times of the school day.
When it comes to seeking parents’ input on cellphone policies, the survey findings suggest schools might want to be more collaborative: 70 percent said that their school had not done so. Even so, 7 in 10 parents also said that they felt that the cellphone policies in their children’s schools were “about right.”
Cellphone restrictions in schools are happening in response to students’ growing behavioral and mental health challenges, which many educators believe emanate from—or at least are exacerbated by—their cellphone use. Teachers consistently tell the EdWeek Research Center in its regular polling of educators that cellphones have become major sources of distraction and social friction in their classrooms.
Common Sense Media, a nonprofit focused on the impact of technology on young people, tracked the devices of 200 11- to 17-year-olds as part of a 2023 study. It found that, on average, teens received 237 notifications per day, and that kids spent a median of 43 minutes on their cellphones during school hours, or the equivalent of about one class period.
Restricting students’ cellphone use during the school day is becoming an increasingly popular approach to tackling those problems, said Merve Lapus, Common Sense Media’s vice president of education outreach and engagement. But he said that cellphone bans should be paired with teaching students digital and media literacy skills and healthy tech-use habits.
“We just know that in the short term, it has been very much helpful for schools to have these bans because of one less thing to have to juggle,” Lapus said. “How do we build transferable skills so that when you get that phone back, you’re making healthy decisions in the way that you use it?”
At least 13 states have laws or policies that restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools statewide or recommend that local districts enact their own policies, according to an Education Week analysis. More states are considering similar steps, and many individual districts and schools have taken action to restrict cellphones.
But states and schools are diving into cellphone restrictions with very little systematic evidence on what policies work best, said Lucía Magis-Weinberg, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington, who is preparing to study different cellphone restriction policies in Washington schools.
Just as important as asking whether cellphone bans work, she said, is for policymakers and educators to determine how to help kids develop better habits in how they use technology.
“As much as I think that digital media has tremendous benefits for youth, we know that it can be incredibly distracting,” she said. “We know children and adolescents need these caregiving figures who are parents or teachers to help self-regulate, and part of self-regulation is controlling the bad habits we have developed around technology.”
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