By Nicolas Gutteridge and Jaden Edison, The Texas Tribune.

School officials say that in the wake of Texas’ new cellphone ban in public K-12 schools, students have become more engaged in and outside of classrooms.

The ban on cellphones, laptops and tablets has prompted Texas’ more than 1,200 school districts to adopt policies ranging from secure device pouches to increased monitoring as the academic year has begun. While some officials were concerned that schools would face pushback from students and parents, administrators from across the state said that hasn’t happened.

Instead, school officials say they’re seeing signs of positive change after years of concerns that cellphones and addictive social media apps distracted students during instructional time.

“At one of our campuses, for example, they had to get some Uno cards and other things for students to do during lunch because they wanted that engagement, so there’s a lot more face-to-face conversation going on,” said John Khun, the superintendent at Abilene ISD. “I've had teachers telling me they’ve noticed students are doing a better job making eye contact and just engaging in conversation than they were before.”

The ban was authored by Rep. Caroline Fairly and passed with bipartisan support as House Bill 1481 in May. It adds Texas to the growing list of more than 30 states that have passed similar legislation, which has quickly spread across the U.S. after Florida became the first to codify a ban two years ago. Every state that doesn’t have a cellphone ban on the books has a bill in the legislature that would enact one.

House Bill 1481 went into effect on Sept. 1, but many school districts adopted the policy when classes began in August. Schools have taken different approaches to implementing the new law, largely depending on administrators’ priorities and the resources available.

At Abilene ISD, Khun said teachers didn’t want to be enforcers in the classroom so the district purchased small pouches that seal devices away during school hours.

Each day, students are filtered through a few entrances where their devices are locked inside the pouch with a magnetic key. They keep the pouch on them until it gets unlocked once the day’s classes are over. The district, which enrolls more than 14,000 students at 20 schools, spent about $120,000 implementing the measure, Khun said. He added that much of that cost was covered by security grants offered by the state.

At Lago Vista ISD west of Austin, which pursued a similar policy, administrators surveyed teachers and found that 92% favored the signal-blocking pouches the district purchased, Superintendent Suzy Lofton-Bullis said, adding that she’s noticed a difference in classrooms: Kids are talking to each other more.

Not every district has the budget to buy special pouches, though. At smaller districts like Caldwell ISD, a Central Texas district where educators serve fewer than 2,000 mostly rural students, many schools have adopted “out of sight, out of mind” policies, where students keep their devices on them either powered off or on silent. That’s also the new policy at Laredo ISD, said Doranette Morin, assistant principal at Joseph W. Nixon High School.

“It’s just not something that we wanted to spend our money on either,” Morin said. “We would rather make better choices and use it for educational resources than something, like you know, to lock away phones.”

The lack of state funding attached to the ban is one of the complaints that schools have about the law, said Brian Woods, deputy executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators. Many districts have relied on separate state or federal grants to implement the policy, and some have reached into their own coffers to fill the gaps.

HB 1481 has also faced sporadic pushback in some districts. Andrew Cobb, a 15-year-old student at Brazosport ISD south of Houston, told The Texas Tribune that many schools’ policies would leave students unable to contact law enforcement and medical services during an emergency.

Cobb wrote a letter in June to the governor and every member of the Legislature, hoping to convince them to oppose the law. His district has more than 11,000 students and administrators require devices be powered off in students’ backpacks.

“It is much, much safer if a student is able to call 911 about the active shooter rather than having to unlock their pouch or go to the office or pull it out and power it from their backpack,” Cobb said.

Cobb said he believes students’ lack of focus in classrooms isn’t due to personal devices but rather school curricula that fail to engage them.

One 2024 survey from the National Parents Union found that 78% of parents nationally wanted their child to have their phone in case of an emergency at school. A Pew Research Center survey conducted that same year, meanwhile, found that 68% of U.S. adults support a ban on middle and high school students using cellphones during class time, but only 36% support a cellphone ban for the entire school day — the policy Texas uses.

But security concerns related to cellphone bans remain speculative, said Woods, deputy executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators.

“In my experience, schools are full of phones that aren’t necessarily mobile devices,” Woods said. “Their classrooms have phones. There’re certainly phones in every teacher’s bag. I've heard that [concern], but I’ve yet to hear a compelling argument that it would actually pose a safety concern. I think that some of that honestly is a reaction to wanting the ability to use the cellphone whenever … you want.”

Khun, Abilene ISD’s superintendent, added that while teachers must design engaging lessons, educators don’t have an even playing field against modern-day technology and social media.

“To expect first-year teachers to be able to develop a lesson that is more engaging than a telephone application that literally has spent a decade plus in development in cooperation with companies that make casino games that are designed to keep people from leaving the casino — I think that's a pretty high bar to set for a 24-year-old with bachelors degree teaching English lessons,” Khun said.

Still, some schools have chosen to work around the ban. HB 1481 requires that phones be banned the entire school day, but the Texas Education Agency allows schools to define what constitutes a school day.

As a result, North East and Alamo Heights ISDs in San Antonio re-classified their school days to only include classroom instructional time, which allows students to use their devices during lunchtime and in the hallways. In a statement to the San Antonio Express-News , the law’s author, Fairly, said such policies ignored the “clear intent” of the ban.

Woods, the Texas Association of School Administrators deputy executive director, said he expects support for the ban to grow in the coming years.

“If a year from now we look up and we see student data that shows improvement from previous years, whether that be discipline data or academic performance data, that even further reinforces that these bans were perhaps successful in, at least in part, improving student performance,” Woods said.

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