Who’s Against Banning Cellphones in Schools?

Well before political leaders were taking action against cellphones in the classroom, the superintendent of schools in Schoharie, N.Y., a rural district about 40 miles west of Albany, was well along on his crusade against Big Tech’s commandeering of the adolescent mind. By the beginning of the school year in 2022, David Blanchard, who had been appointed as superintendent seven years earlier, had implemented a bell-to-bell policy. This meant that students could not use phones (or smart watches or earbuds) at any point during the school day — not during lunch or study halls or periods of transition from one class to another.

The effort certainly seemed extreme. This was before Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” spurred consensus about the destructive impact phones were having on teenage mental health, before the former surgeon general’s call for warning labels on social media platforms. Mr. Blanchard was troubled by all the disconnection he was seeing. His experiment yielded benefits right away.

“We found a transformative environment,” he told me recently. “We expected kids to be in tears, breaking down. Immediately we saw them talking to each other, engaged in conversation in the lunchroom.”

One unanticipated outcome was that students flooded counselors’ offices looking for help on how to resolve conflicts that were now happening in person. Previously, if they found themselves in some sort of fight with someone online, they would have called or texted a parent for advice on how to deal with it, Mr. Blanchard told me. “Now students were realizing that their friends were right there in front of them and not the people on social, a few towns away, that they had never met.” Enrollment in elective classes also went up when the option to scroll your way through a 40-minute free period was eliminated.

The success in Schoharie has been a showpiece in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s recent campaign to ban cellphones in schools across New York. At least eight other states, including Florida and Louisiana, have instituted restrictions of varying kinds. In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Phone-Free School Act requiring every school district in California to devise a policy limiting the use of smartphones by July 2026. This week a suggested cellphone ban was the subject of a public hearing in the Texas State Legislature, where a bill was introduced with bipartisan support a few months ago by a young member of the House who lamented that she had been “born into these devices.”

Governor Hochul’s proposal follows the Schoharie bell-to-bell approach. In a rare instance of agreement between labor and government, it is supported by the United Federation of Teachers, the union representing New York City schoolteachers. As Michael Mulgrew, the president of the U.F.T., put it, “It is simple, and everyone knows what the expectation is.”