Next fall, every public elementary and middle school in Georgia will have to swim against the cultural tide by banishing cellphones.
It will be a major undertaking: nearly every teen in America has one, and they have grown up with addictive social media flashing across their screens.
Despite the size of the task, some schools have already checked it off their to-do list, and their experience can serve as an example for the rest of the state.
“It is going surprisingly better than we expected,” said John Pace, III, superintendent of the Henry County School District, which prohibited cellphone use in all schools when students returned from summer break a few weeks ago.
Pace’s district of 40,000 students south of Atlanta is a year ahead of the deadline set by a state law passed this year. Henry County also prohibited cellphone use in high schools even though the new law will not require it.
Pace said the only pushback he received was an email from a student who said she needed her phone to study even though the district gives students locked-down devices.
Henry County could have banned phones by fiat, but experts say that approach invites opposition, and Pace agrees, adding that his system is not even using the word “ban” to describe its new policy.
“Distraction-free learning environments. That’s what we like to call it,” he said.
Pace brought the community along through meetings with teachers, parents and students, where they discussed the consequences of cellphone distractions.
Last year, a teacher asked all students to turn on the notification sounds on their phones, then counted the rings, dings, beeps and buzzes. On average, there were 636 per 50-minute class period, the district reported in an online video.
At a forum on cellphones and teens at Emory University last week, public health professor Julie Gazmararian cited research that says it takes 23 minutes to refocus after disruptions like phone notifications.
“This is an issue that is considered a crisis in both health and educational arenas,” she said.
The lawmaker who introduced the cellphone legislation saidt he was inspired by observing his own family’s behavior.
“I have three children who are addicted to their cellphones,” state Rep. Scott Hilton, R-Peachtree Corners, said at the Emory conference. “And we need to change that.”
It will be a big task. There are more than 1.1 million students in Georgia’s public elementary and middle schools.
And, according to a 2023 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 95% of teenagers in the United States have a smartphone, almost all of them with daily internet access.
The report said social media is good and bad: it can foster connection, creative expression and learning while also encouraging unhealthy social comparisons and stealing time from exercise, sleep and study.
Older studies have measured the brain drain caused by phones, even when they are not in use. One published in 2017 found that university students who placed their smartphones on the desk in front of them performed worse on math and memory tests than peers who left their phones in a different room.
A year later, another study said participants who dined with friends or family enjoyed the interactions less when they put their phone on the table than when they stowed it.
Most districts have not yet implemented cellphone prohibitions.
In a collaboration with the Georgia Department of Education, Gazmararian surveyed superintendents across the state. Her preliminary results indicated 42% prohibit phones the entire day. The superintendents cited various barriers to implementation, with two-thirds saying their biggest challenge was parent resistance.
A high school in Brockton, Mass., overcame such resistance, in part because cellphones were being blamed for extreme violence.
Students were getting into so many fights at Brockton High School that members of the school’s leadership committee called for intervention by the National Guard.
Students were using their phones to antagonize each other and to schedule fights, one news outlet reported. Some parents said their kids were afraid of going to school.
The National Guard never actually came, but Kevin McCaskill, the school’s principal, leveraged the discontent to push for a prohibition on cellphones.
At evening community meetings, he and his staff emphasized the academic toll from phone-related distractions. They also addressed parents’ biggest concern: how would they reach their kids during an emergency?
The school would send accurate and timely information, McCaskill promised. He told them that if they relied on calls or texts from students, they would be more likely to receive and spread misinformation, causing hysteria.
The school’s case was convincing enough, and as of last fall students were no longer allowed to use their phones at Brockton High. Staff at eight entry points ensured that all 3,800 students put their phones into pouches that only the staff could unlock. Students could carry their phones around in these pouches made by a company called Yondr, but they could not access them.
The number of violent incidents dropped, and students began to engage with each other more, McCaskill said.
Instead of brooding over something they saw on social media or in a text message, they were making eye contact and talking — in the cafeteria, in the hallways and in classroom discussions.
“We brought back the art of conversation,” McCaskill said.
He said more students have been passing their Advanced Placement courses and earning dual enrollment credits.
Marietta City Schools, a small district north of Atlanta, implemented a Yondr pouch policy in middle school the same semester as Brockton High.
The district compared the students’ year-to-year responses on the Georgia Department of Education’s Student Health Survey.
“The kids reported a 22% improvement in their ability to focus in class,” Grant Rivera, the superintendent, said at the Emory conference.
In Henry County, students leave their phones in their lockers or place them in storage units in each class, then stow them in their backpacks while walking between classes. They face disciplinary action if they use them.
Gazmararian’s research indicates that nearly two-thirds of her survey respondents who have prohibited phone use are doing so with lockers and backpacks.
McCaskill said the main tool is cultural. At Brockton High, some students have tried putting a fake phone in their Yondr pouch, but other teens turned them in when they pulled out their real phone, he said. “Phones have gone underground.”
Some schools in the Savannah-Chatham County system have had a similar experience. A longstanding policy that outlined how students could bring their own devices to school and use them in classrooms also allowed school leaders to prohibit them. About half the schools that were surveyed as part of the district’s preparation for the new law had already done so, including some high schools, said Derrick Butler, the district’s chief administrative officer.
The schools used various methods to control phones, including portable lockers purchased on Amazon.
The district has not yet studied the effectiveness of the various tactics. What is more important, Butler said, is the norm that gets established. Some kids might hide their phone so they don’t have to put it in the teacher’s locker, but during classroom observations and through interviews with school staff they didn’t see or hear about students using their phones where they were not allowed, he said. “And ultimately, that is the goal, right? It’s not so much that we want to collect your phone. We want you to be actively engaged and not distracted.”
Pace, the Henry County superintendent, said he included high schools in the phone prohibition because the students themselves acknowledged their phones were distracting them.
He decided he should lead by example. He used to tour schools with his phone in hand, taking notes. Now, he jots on paper, though he still transfers the information to his phone later.
Pace likened his own experience to withdrawal from an addiction.
“The first two days, it was hard for me,” he said. “By the time I got to day five, it was easy.”
