This Florida school district has banned cell phones. This is what happened.

One afternoon last month, hundreds of students from Orlando’s Timber Creek High School poured into the campus’ expansive 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, chatting animatedly with each other. Others played pickleball on makeshift lunch courts. There was no cell phone in sight – and that was no coincidence.

In May, Florida passed a law requiring public school districts to impose rules banning students’ use of cellphones during class. This fall, Orange County Public Schools — which includes Timber Creek High — went even further, banning students from using cell phones throughout the 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 the stricter, days-long ban in their district.

Parents believe their children should be able to contact them directly during free periods, while students see the all-day ban as unfair and infantilizing.

‘They expect us to take responsibility for our own choices’ said Sophia Ferrara, a 12th grader from Timber Creek, who has to use mobile devices during free periods to take online college classes. “But then they take away the opportunity to make a choice and learn responsibility.”

Like many exasperated parents, public schools across the United States are taking increasingly drastic measures to keep young people off their cell phones. Tighter restrictions are needed, lawmakers and district leaders say, because rampant use of social media during school threatens students’ education, well-being and physical safety.

At some schools, young people have made plans and filmed attacks on fellow students and then uploaded the videos to platforms such as TikTok And Instagram. Teachers and principals warn that social apps such as Snapchat have also become a major distraction, leaving some students texting their friends during class.

As a result, many individual districts, including South PortlandMaine, and Charlottesville city, Va. – have banned the use of mobile phones by students throughout the day. Now, Florida has instituted a more comprehensive statewide crackdown.

Florida’s new law requires public schools to ban students’ use of cellphones during class hours and block students’ access to social media on district WiFi. It also requires schools to teach students about ‘how’ Social media manipulates behavior.”

Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has implemented a slew of controversial rules for public schools, including limiting instruction on gender identity. But the cell phone bill has found support across the political spectrum.

“This is a step to help protect our youth and our children from the grip of social media,” the state representative said Brad Yeager, a Republican who sponsored the bill. “It will also create a less distracted classroom and a better learning environment.”

Snapchat, Instagram And TikTok They all have policies that prohibit bullying, as well as systems to report bullying on their platforms. In a statement, Snapchat’s parent company Snap said it supports parents’ and teachers’ efforts to promote a healthy academic environment, including “limiting student access to personal devices during school hours.”

In a statement, TikTok said activities such as posting videos of bullying and violence at school “go against our community guidelines, and we remove them as soon as we encounter them.” Meta, Instagram’s parent company, declined to comment.

Florida’s mandated TikTok detox for students amounts to a mass experiment to control young people’s personal technology habits. The law has prompted districts, which once gave teachers some leeway over the use of cellphones in their classrooms, to implement stricter rules.

a new mobile phone policy This year, for example, Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa is warning students: “We see it – we take it.”

Stricter cell phone rules at school could have benefits, such as increasing students’ focus on learning. But they can also increase student scrutiny or hinder crucial communication for teens with family responsibilities or after-school jobs.

It is unclear how many other schools ban cell phone use by students. This is evident from statistics from the US Department of Education, published in 2021 approximately 77 percent of schools prohibited non-academic use of cell phones during school hours.

The new rules this fall in Orange County Public Schools, the the eighth largest school system in the countryshow how – and why – some districts are intensifying crackdowns on cellphones.

During the pandemic, Orange County teachers say, many students’ attachment to their phones seemed to deepen. Students rarely looked up from their devices as they walked through the school hallways. Some teens secretly filmed their classmates and distributed the videos on apps like Snapchat.

“We’ve seen a lot of bullying,” said Marc Wasko, director of Timber Creek, which serves about 3,600 students. “We had a lot of problems with students posting or trying to record things that happened during school hours.”

Orange County educators like Lisa Rodriguez-Davis, a high school teacher, also became irritated by students’ continued use of their phones during class.

“It got out of hand,” Ms. Rodriguez-Davis said, describing how students texted each other during class to arrange meetups in the bathroom, where they filmed dance videos. “I call them ‘Toilet TikToks.’”

To show what teachers were dealing with, Ms. Rodriguez-Davis posted her own TikToks parodying her struggles with students and their phones.

After the Florida law went into effect in July, Orange County decided to impose even stricter rules. The blanket ban prohibits students from using cell phones throughout the school day, even between classes.

In September, on the first day the ban went into effect, Timber Creek administrators seized more than 100 phones from students, Mr. Wasko said. After that, seizures declined rapidly. Phone-related school incidents, such as bullying, have also decreased, he said.

The ban has made the atmosphere in Timber Creek both pastoral and more carceral.

Mr. Wasko said students now make eye contact and respond when he greets them. Teachers said students seemed more engaged in class.

“Oh, I love it,” said Nikita McCaskill, a government teacher at Timber Creek. “Students are more talkative and collaborate more.”

Some students said the ban had made interactions with their classmates more authentic.

“Now people can’t really say, ‘Oh, look at me on Instagram. This is who I am,” said Peyton Stanley, a 12th grader from Timber Creek. “It has helped people be who they are – rather than who they are online – at school.”

Ms Stanley added that she also found the ban problematic. She said she would feel safer at school if she could carry her cell phone in her pocket and text her mother immediately when necessary.

Other students said school was more like a prison. To call their parents, they noted, students must now go to the front desk and ask permission to use the phone.

Supervision has also been intensified. To enforce the ban, Lyle Lake, a Timber Creek security guard, now patrols on a golf cart during lunch, picking up students who violate the ban and taking them to the front desk, where they leave their phones in a safe place the rest of the time. must install a closed cupboard. the school day.

“I usually end up with a cart full of students,” Mr. Lake said as he sat behind the wheel of a black Yamaha golf cart at lunch, “because I pick up more on the way to the office.”

Mr. Lake said he also checked school security camera feeds for students using cellphones in hallways and other areas. Students who are caught may be removed from class. Repeat offenders may be suspended.

Whether the potential benefits of banning cell phones outweigh the costs of restricting students’ limited freedom is not yet known. What is clear is that such bans are upending the academic and social norms of a generation raised on cell phones.

Orange County students described the ban as regressive, noting that they could no longer use their phones to check their schedules during school, take pictures of their projects in art class, find their friends at lunch — or even find their phone numbers. of adding new classmates. to their contact lists.

“Imagine if the device you use every day to communicate with other people is completely gone,” says Catalina, 13, an eighth-grader at a local high school. (She and her mother asked that her last name not be used for privacy reasons.) “It feels completely isolating.”