Fla. school grapples with cellphone ban
Most oppose rule, but some see changes
ORLANDO — One afternoon in late September, hundreds of students at Timber Creek High School in Orlando poured into the campus’s sprawling central courtyard to hang out and eat lunch. For members of an extremely online generation, their activities were decidedly analog.
Dozens sat in small groups, animatedly talking with one another. Others played pickleball on makeshift lunchtime courts. There was not a cellphone in sight — and that was no accident.
In May, Florida passed a law requiring public school districts to impose rules barring student cellphone use during class time. This fall, Orange County Public Schools — which includes Timber Creek High — went even further, barring students from using cellphones during the entire school day.
In interviews, a dozen Orange County parents and students all said they supported the no-phone rules during class. But they objected to their district’s stricter, daylong ban.
Parents said their children should be able to contact them directly during free periods, while students described the allday ban as unfair and infantilizing.
“They expect us to take responsibility for our own choices,” said Sophia Ferrara, a 12th grader at Timber Creek who needs to use mobile devices during free periods to take online college classes. “But then they are taking away the ability for us to make a choice and to learn responsibility.”
Like many exasperated parents, public schools across the United States are adopting increasingly drastic measures to try to pry young people away from their cellphones. Tougher constraints are needed, lawmakers and district leaders argue, because rampant social media use during school is threatening students’ education, well-being, and physical safety.
As a result, many individual districts — among them, South Portland, Maine, and Charlottesville City, Va. — have banned student cellphone use throughout the day.
The new Florida law requires public schools to prohibit student cellphone use during instructional time and block students’ access to social media on district Wi-Fi. It also requires schools to teach students about “how social media manipulates behavior.”
Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok each have policies barring bullying, as well as systems to report bullying on their platforms. In a statement, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, said it supported efforts by parents and educators to foster a healthy academic environment.
It is unclear how many other schools ban student cellphone use. Statistics from the Department of Education, published in 2021, reported that about 77 percent of schools prohibited nonacademic cellphone use during school hours.
The new rules this fall in Orange County Public Schools, the nation’s eighth-largest school system, show how — and why — some districts are intensifying their cellphone crackdowns.
During the pandemic, Orange County educators say, many students’ attachment to their phones seemed to deepen. Students rarely looked up from their devices as they walked down school hallways. Some teenagers covertly filmed their classmates and spread the videos on apps.
“We saw a lot of bullying,” said Marc Wasko, the principal of Timber Creek, which serves about 3,600 students.
In September, on the first day the ban took effect, Timber Creek administrators confiscated more than 100 phones from students, Wasko said. After that, the confiscations quickly dropped. Phone-related school incidents, like bullying, have also decreased, he said.
Wasko said students now make eye contact and respond when he greets them. Teachers said students seemed more engaged in class.
Some students said the ban had made interacting with their classmates more authentic.