Florida wrestling with whether to ban phones in more schools

Close Up Of A Line Of High School Students Using Mobile Phones

Jack Hayes wasn’t looking for trouble. So, when an administrator from Boone High in Orlando caught the 17-year-old student on his phone — a restricted device on campus — Hayes handed it over.

He didn’t explain that he wasn’t doing anything inappropriate. He wasn’t on social media. He wasn’t sharing homework answers with a friend.

He was reading a message from fellow members of the student government who said they would be congregating in a different classroom for their meeting that day.

“I think that if I was a little more awake then,” Hayes said, “if that was later in the afternoon, I probably would have fought that a little bit harder.”

Instead, he waited until the end of the day to retrieve his phone, one of 25 devices collected belonging to students affected by a state law that has severely limited phone use in Florida schools for the past two years.

The law, a first for the U.S., requires phones to be tucked away during class time and mandates students receive instruction on the dangers of social media. It passed in 2023, just months before last school year, and has since been implemented across the state. Two of Florida’s largest school districts — Orange County and Broward County — have strengthened the restriction, banning phone use for the entire school day.

The intent of the policy is to return focus in school to learning. Since the pandemic, Florida students have progressively fallen behind in national rankings. In January, data released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed the lowest scores for both math and reading from Florida eighth graders in the last 25 years.

Some parents’ concerns about the restriction haven’t wavered.

Judi Hayes, mother of Jack Hayes, said one of her biggest issues with the policy is its impracticality. She pointed toward the need for communication for students who work jobs and students who care for a younger sibling or an elderly relative.

She also denounced the policy during Orange County School Board meetings last year because it didn’t account for students with disabilities, like her son who has Down syndrome.

“We know kids who use their phone to manage their hearing aids or their glucose meters or things like that,” she said, “and with a wholesale ban, those kids aren’t going to get the accommodations that their 504 plans would provide for. The board — their response was, ‘Oh, well, we didn’t mean those kids.’ But you did. The policy is so broad that it throws the baby out with the bathwater.”

The School District, the eighth largest in the nation, has since updated their policy to allow students with documented health conditions to access their phones during the day.

This year, lawmakers considered but did not pass a new proposal to require six counties — two each with small, medium and large populations — to limit phone use in their districts during the full school day for a full school year and report their experiences to the Legislature before December 2026.

The bill was sponsored by Sen. Danny Burgess, a Zephyrhills Republican. It died last month when the Senate Children, Families and Elder Affairs Committee didn’t take up the measure.

Burgess proposed studying how the bans would affect students with disabilities and students whose first language isn’t English, as well as how this policy could influence students during emergencies.

In Broward County, where the sixth-largest School District in the nation has already enforced a full-day phone restriction, communication during emergencies, including school shootings and medical situations, was one of the biggest complaints among parents and school staff, according to survey data from November.

“At the end of the day, parents want to know that their kids are safe,” said Broward School Board member Lori Alhadeff. “And I totally get that they want to hear from their child or communicate with their child, but in these emergency situations, we need to have the students’ full attention to be able to listen, to hear directions, to know what to do and say, like (in) a lockdown situation or a fire drill.”

Alhadeff, whose daughter was killed in the Parkland shooting, pointed to a policy Broward is enacting to subside parents’ safety concerns — a wearable panic button for faculty to press, alerting law enforcement during an emergency.

The Broward School Board has discussed in meetings walking back its heightened restriction for next school year, though it’s unclear whether Burgess’ new bill might influence that.

During one meeting, Broward student advisor Landyn Spellberg said there aren’t negatives to having this policy enforced during class but said that students are generally unhappy with the restriction during lunch. He pointed to one student who refrained from dual enrolling in courses because of the lack of extra time to work during lunch.

“It feels like this policy was pushed out without one, hearing from the student perspective, and two, recognizing the impact that phones have positively on the student experience,” Spellberg said.

Rep. Brad Yeager, a New Port Richey Republican, sponsored the bill that was signed into law. He said he’s heard positives from students who have paid more attention in class. He hasn’t pressed the issue to give the school districts time to implement the current policy.

“I try not to just do what I call mandates across the state,” Yeager said. “I try to give districts the autonomy to do some things on their own, but, again, if they don’t follow it and it starts getting loose, then that’s when you have to go back to the statewide and go, ‘Hey, look, we gave you a couple opportunities to do the right thing. We haven’t done it.’”

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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at [email protected]. You can donate to support our students here.