Their consensus: limiting young Ohioans’ smartphone use not only helps them learn but makes them happier as well.
Speaking at a roundtable discussion, superintendents spoke about how lunchrooms and playgrounds have been falling silent as students focus on their phones instead of each other. Kids use their phones to harass other students, set up fights, or skip class.
After setting up phone limits, they said, their lunchrooms are becoming noisy again, suicide assessments are down, and test scores are up (though cell phones are one of many factors influencing the latter).
“I think our students are happier without that cell phone,” said Diana Rigby, a Dublin School Board member. “They may not know it, and it’s our job to show them that we can get back to a point where classrooms are conducive to learning, students are active, lunchrooms are active, playgrounds are active.”
School smartphone bans have been around for decades, but they’ve become particularly popular in the last few years. Nearly 77 percent of U.S. schools banned the use of cell phones for non-academic purposes in 2020, up from 65 percent in 2015, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Ohio leaves it to each school district to decide whether to limit students’ phone use on school grounds, and what those limits should be. Some schools require students to lock their phones in pouches, or keep them in their backpacks and lockers. Others only prohibit students from checking phones during lunch or passing periods.
Gene Lolli, superintendent of Fairborn City Schools, in suburban Dayton, said that phone use among students in his district not only made it more difficult for them to learn, but it led to students harassing each other, setting up fights, and skipping class. Of Fairborn High School’s 1,000 or so students, he said, 500 had referrals with phone-related issues.
Lolli said when his district decided last year to prohibit students from using their phones during the school day, he was expecting a backlash from parents and a possible student walkout.
But instead, Lolli said, he didn’t get a single angry phone call or pushback, aside from some grumbling on social media. And many people told him how appreciative they were of the new policy.
“It was such a great decision, they told us I could have run for governor,” Lolli joked to DeWine.
However, there is little research so far about the long-term effects of school phone bans, and school phone bans are not universally supported. Educators at Thursday’s roundtable also said that it’s time-consuming for their teachers and school employees to enforce a phone ban, and that some parents have complained that they want their kids to have access to a phone in case of a school shooting or some other sort of emergency.
But DeWine, speaking to reporters after the roundtable, said he thinks there’s a consensus that school phone bans are beneficial.
“With the gain in students’ mental health and gain in students’ ability to learn, it’s certainly worth the effort to get this done,” said DeWine, adding that he set up the event to “shine a spotlight” on the issue of phones in schools.
The governor said there is no current effort to pass a law creating statewide limits or a ban on phone use at schools.
“I think that we should let the system work,” he said. “And the way you let the system work is that a good idea catches on. I think what you saw today is our effort to get good ideas [to] be adopted across the state.
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