'That is breaking an addiction.' NC education leaders talk how to restrict cellphones in school

Cellphone restrictions are helping to reduce discipline problems in many schools that are taking stronger approaches to enforcing them, leaders at those schools told the State Board of Education on Tuesday.

The State Board of Education is considering whether to make recommendations to the General Assembly on whether and how to restrict cellphone use in schools.

The leaders said Tuesday that schools need to more effectively restrict cellphone use in schools, but acknowledged cellphones have a time and place to be used that school personnel may disagree on.

Educators have long complained that cellphones are a distraction in class, though some also have students use them during math or other lessons. Schools also often use social media and other electronic messaging to communicate updates and extracurricular activity schedules to students.

Parents often oppose cellphone restrictions in school because they want to be able to readily communicate with their children, but a growing movement of educators and parents are pushing back on children having unfettered access to cellphones and social media that they worry is damaging to children’s development.

Limiting cellphone use in schools can help at school but won’t make those worries disappear, Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt said. Issues that have arisen with social media “to be honest will probably not go away if we ban cellphones in school. Parents do have trouble keeping their kids off of cellphones at home.”

Many school leaders will also say that bullying and other troubles that trickle over into the schooldays often happen at night, when kids are on their phones at home, she said.

Kimberly Jones, an elementary school teacher in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and a state board adviser, said schools need to have conversations with families about how device use at home affects children at school.

Teachers have to train kids to work without tablets even as young as kindergarten, and many children are attached to tablets, she said.

“That is breaking an addiction,” she said.

The large majority of schools across the United States already restrict cellphone use by policy, according to federal survey data.

But restricting cellphone use in practice is a different situation. Teachers have told WRAL News they often tire of enforcing cellphone bans during class time and give up. Many say they fear being held liable if they take a students’ cellphone away and something happened to it, so they won’t take the cellphones away.

Education leaders say they’ve heard the same from teachers. Having a ban in policy doesn’t mean it’s faithfully enforced.

Education leaders echoed that sentiment Tuesday.

Brunswick County Schools Superintendent Dale Cole said few district administrators — just 17.5% — believe that their cellphone policies are consistently and effectively enforced by teachers at their school.

“People generally don’t like inconsistency when it comes to policy,” Cole said. That’s when students and parents complain.

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About 84% of Brunswick administrators also said they believed teachers spent five to 15 minutes each day addressing cellphone use in the classroom.

Now, Brunswick County Schools uses phone pouches that lock for students to place their phones — and earbuds, headphone and other accessories — in throughout the day. Children with medical needs, such as those who check their glucose levels on a phone app, can use Velcro pouches for their phones to make them easier to access.

The school system is piloting the project at two middle schools this school year. There, in a survey of teachers, 93% of teachers said the pouches are minimizing distractions and that they support continuing to use them. The large majority of teachers said students are more engaged and better behaved.

At one of the middle schools, where no phone storage procedures were in place last year, total principal’s office referrals from August through November are down from 277 referrals in 2023 to 163 referrals this year.

A common approach among schools that don’t have pouches is to make violations of the no-cellphones-in-class policy automatic office referrals, to either discipline the student or turn in the device.

While office referrals may rise as a result of that approach, the approach can also reduce worse behaviors that result from conflicts or other behavior that cellphones facilitate, leaders said. They noted that when they read the details of disciplinary reports, they often found cellphones to be a part of the instigation of the problem, such as bullying or meeting up to exchange drugs.

Suspensions are down by 15% so far this year in Granville County Schools, Superintendent Stan Winborne said, something he thinks could be related to the new approach to enforcing the cellphone policy.

Rep. Jim Burgin, R-Harnett, and Rep. Jay Chaudhuri, D-Wake, plan to re-introduce a bill, along with Sen. Micheal Lee, R-New Hanover, that would call for a study of cellphone use and restrictions in school, including the effect on learning, cyberbullying and safety. The two state representatives filed a bill to do that during last year’s legislative session, but it never had a committee hearing.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are now studying the before-and-after effects of cellphone restrictions at various schools in the state — part of a larger research project on teens, their development, and social media use. Schools working with those researchers are looking at changes in behaviors that warrant disciplinary action, among other things.

But a study is just the start, leaders said Tuesday.

School boards and the state need to look at ways to enforce cellphone restrictions within reason or support schools trying to do that, they said.

Problems that have arisen with enforcing cellphone restrictions could be helped with the pouches that Brunswick County Schools has been able to buy, said Winborne, the Granville County Schools superintendent. That’s something the state could help pay for, he said, noting he’s not sure his district can afford them. Pouches can cost $26 per student and many will need to be replaced before the end of their lifespan.

But leaders should also be looking ahead to address all of the technologies that aren’t yet common or popular but that are likely to take off in the next three to seven years, he said.

“I don’t think it’s too big of a leap for us to start thinking about Neuralinks,” he said, referring to implantable chips that allow brains to communicate directly with computers. “This is not too distant in our future.”