By Carolyn Jones, CalMatters

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Until last month, California was poised to join nearly a dozen other states that ban cell phones in K-12 schools. But under pressure from school boards and administrators, lawmakers scaled back a bill that would have required such a blanket ban.

“I was disappointed, but I take the long view on this,” said Torrance Democratic Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, an author of the bill. “There’s still a growing global concern that too much cell phone use has detrimental effects on students.”

The bill, AB 1644, builds on an existing law in California that requires schools to limit, if not outright ban, students’ cell phone use during the school day. A slew of studies have shown that cell phone use is a serious distraction for students that affects their mental health, social-emotional development and ability to concentrate in class.

Confusing and unnecessary legislation?

Muratsuchi’s bill would have required all schools to draw up policies banning students from using cell phones while they’re on campus or on a school-related trip. School board and school administrator groups opposed the bill because they said a “one-size-fits-all” policy undermines districts’ ability to enact their own rules suited to their own specific students’ needs. 

They also argued that the bill conflicts with the existing law that requires schools to come up with policies limiting cell phones on campus. Those policies are supposed to go into effect in July. Having two laws on the issue would be confusing for school staff and may invalidate the policies they’d already been working on, they said.

“AB 1644 creates a ‘do-over’ just one year (after the previous law passed), creating unnecessary frustration and confusion,” the Association of California School Administrators wrote to the Assembly Education Committee. 

In response to those complaints, lawmakers removed high schools from the ban.

Outcomes in Contra Costa and Los Angeles

Many school districts in California, including Los Angeles Unified, have already banned cell phones. A recent study cast doubt on whether cell phone bans have any impact on test scores, attendance or other measures of student success, but individual districts say the policies have made a difference.

Mount Diablo Unified, in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Contra Costa County, has seen improvements since banning cell phones. In a presentation to the school board, teachers said students are more focused in the classroom, have livelier discussions and conversations, fight less and don’t get “riled up” about social media posts.

At Northgate High School in Walnut Creek, reports of harassment fell 33% and bullying dropped 50% since the district banned cell phones.

The only complaints, according to the presentation, were that students didn’t have access to their phone cameras to take pictures of assignments and that locking up students’ phones cut into classroom time. The authors of the report also said some students found ways around the ban.

‘All these zombies’

Rishaan Marwaha, a high school freshman from Newport Beach, was so fed up with cell phones he testified at the Assembly Education Committee hearing last month to urge lawmakers to pass AB 1644.

“Tech companies are making all this money off students’ phone addiction,” he said. “It’s not a fair fight because students are a vulnerable population. … School should be a place for learning.”

Marwaha said he was a phone addict himself. He would spend hours scrolling through Instagram reels, “when I could have been doing things I actually like, like playing basketball or going to the gym.”

He eventually removed Instagram from his phone, but saw his classmates suffering from the same addiction. 

“I’d walk through school and it felt like all these zombies,” he said. “Some people were so addicted, they’d make up excuses to go to the bathroom just so they could look at their phones.”

He was disappointed the bill got scaled back, but he’s hopeful the state will enact a high school cell phone ban at some point. After all, he said, “in the past people managed without cell phones  OK. I think we’ll be fine.”

This is Muratsuchi’s third bill related to schools and cell phones, each inching closer to a total ban. The previous two cell-phone-related bills were enacted into law, and he believes this one will pass, as well, now that it’s been amended.

“I hope this is part of an ongoing movement to recognize that technology can provide benefits as well as harms,” said Muratsuchi, a candidate for California schools superintendent. “We need to have responsible regulations to make sure we’re helping students navigate technology successfully.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.