It’s got a lot of support early on.
Rep. Caroline Fairly
Lawmakers want Texas to join a growing number of states in restricting public school students from using their cellphones during the school day, answering calls from educators who say the state needs to remove distractions from the classroom.
Under House Bill 1481, introduced by Rep. Caroline Fairly of Amarillo, K-12 public school students wouldn’t be allowed to use their cellphones during the regular school day. It comes as at least eight states have enacted similar bans in the past two years, including Democrat-led states like California and Republican-led states like Arkansas.
The bans come as parents have become more worried about the negative mental health impacts of cyberbullying and youths’ social media use.
The bill is co-sponsored by a majority of the Texas House, including both Democrats and Republicans. Fairly, a Republican and the only Gen Z member of the Texas Legislature, said she introduced the legislation because she was “born into these devices” and understands the distraction they can cause in the classroom.
“When you see what is being pushed on social media and the distraction it causes in the classroom, there is a need for our government to support our educators in this,” Fairly said in an interview with The Texas Tribune on Tuesday.
Fairly added she hopes the ban will help improve students’ mental health and academic outcomes.
A growing body of research in recent years has suggested that cellphone use in schools can cause students to have trouble engaging in the classroom and have shorter attention spans. Several Texas school districts already have cellphone bans in place. Rancier Middle School in Killeen ISD, about 75 miles north of Austin, is one school that did so recently.
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Some who testified Tuesday said that barring students from using their phones during the entire school day was too restrictive. An earlier version of the bill, filed in December, banned cellphone use during “instructional time” rather than the “school day,” meaning it left the door open for students to use their devices when they were outside the classroom.
Tricia Cave, a lobbyist for the Association of Texas Professional Educators, told committee members that while her organization backed the original version of the bill, they do not support the new language banning cellphone use throughout the entirety of the school day. She said while she still supports the purpose of the bill, the new language is “overly prescriptive.”
Rep. Alma Allen, D-Houston, said during Tuesday’s hearing that she worried a cellphone ban was a step too far and would make it more difficult for students to contact law enforcement or their parents in situations where their safety was threatened. She referenced the mass shooting at Uvalde Elementary School in 2022, when students called law enforcement to alert them.
Some who testified Tuesday also said the bill would create an “unfunded mandate” by forcing school districts to comply with a new policy while not being provided the funds to do so. Mary Lowe, co-founder of the nonprofit Families Engaged for Effective Education, said that by adding a new requirement for school districts without new funding, HB 1481 would also take away some local control from these districts to determine their own cellphone policies.
Fairly said she is open to adding new funding to the bill.
I’m not opposed to this, which you can file under “easy for you to say” since my youngest is about to graduate and I won’t need to worry about it. I can believe that cellphones are a distraction, and as someone who grew up well before they existed, I know the kids can make it through the day without them. I also understand the security objection, and I support giving schools some flexibility and all of the funding they might need to make this happen. I wish there were more research to show what the best practices were, but there’s going to need to be some experimentation to figure out what those are, so we may as well try. If this passes, it would go into effect in the fall of 2025, so we’ll get some data right away. I trust there will be plenty of research done as we go.
Leave it to the schools/districts. Doesn’t need to be a state law.
Funny, the districts say leave it to the schools. And the schools say leave it to the teachers or the parents.
And as a teacher, I say “help!” There is always a lower level of authority you can devolve policy making to. Unless there is, you know, one obviously right answer. Saying “leave it to the district” is the same as saying ” I fundamentally don’t recognize this as a society-wide problem.” Which sort of seems hard to imagine for anyone who has been in public at all in the past 15 years?
After all, what is government for if not to address an epidemic of debilitating behavior?