In recent years, a growing number of states have taken legislative action to limit or prohibit student cellphone use during school hours. Florida’s law is among the most prominent examples, passing a statewide regulation in 2023 requiring public schools to ban student phone use during class time and to block access to social media on school Wi-Fi. Indiana followed in 2024 with a similar measure, mandating that students’ phones be put away during instructional time, though schools retain discretion during lunch or recess.
Other states have adopted variations of the same idea. Ohio passed legislation in 2024 requiring each district to create policies restricting phone use, with the default expectation that devices be kept out of reach during class. Oklahoma also enacted a statewide policy in 2025 requiring schools to ban or heavily restrict phones, citing both distraction and safety concerns. Louisiana passed a law requiring districts to implement restrictions on phones during instructional time, but left room for local boards to determine the severity of the ban.
These simple statutory bans are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the way that students are barred from accessing their phones. Across the US, many individual schools and districts require lockable pouches (commonly Yondr pouches) to prevent students from accessing their devices during the day. Along with this, many school districts developed detailed procedures and harsh disciplinary consequences to enforce their phone-free environments. In districts like Fort Wayne (Indiana) and Richardson ISD (Texas), students must bring a personally assigned pouch to school each day, turn off or put their phone in the pouch upon arrival, and keep it locked and with them throughout the school day, only unlocking it at dismissal stations in the afternoon. At Saugerties Jr/Sr High School in New York, for example, students in grades 7–12 are expected to bring their pouch, lock their phone inside it upon arrival, and carry the sealed pouch until dismissal, a process spelled out in school communications and FAQs provided to families.
When students fail to comply, schools typically apply escalating responses as part of their discipline codes. In some districts, if a student arrives without a pouch, the school confiscates the phone to be picked up at the end of the day; repeated noncompliance can lead to parent contact, after-school detentions, and even in-school suspension. For instance, one district with published Yondr pouch FAQs outlines a tiered consequence structure: a first offense results in a warning and confiscation until dismissal, a second offense adds parent contact and detention, a third doubles the detention, and further violations can trigger in-school suspension and temporary storage of the pouch under supervision. Refusing to pouch a device may result in immediate in-school suspension until the student agrees to comply. Students may also be held financially responsible for lost or damaged pouches.
Fundamental Flaws in Phone Ban Policies
Students and young people are citizens of this country just like anyone else. They deserve the same fundamental rights and freedoms that are afforded to everyone else. This includes their unalienable, constitutional rights.
The 4th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The government making laws to mandate phone bans is essentially mandating forced property seizure for an entire demographic of citizens based on nothing but their immutable factors. Students should not have their property taken from them, or locked up, just because the government deems that they are better off without it. Juveniles are already forced to attend school, under threat of their parents being punished for truancy. So if students are actively being forced into a location, under legal penalty, they should not also be forced to have their property seized from them against their will. A student accessing their phone within school does not impede on anyone else’s rights; it does not hurt anyone. The government realistically has no constitutional justification in mandating laws that require schools to seize property from their students. Phone bans in schools violate the constitutional rights of minors, and should be abolished from the law completely.
The main problem with phone ban policies is that the rationale believes that removing phones from students will just magically cause every student to prioritize their learning over any distraction. But realistically, students who prefer to use their devices as an escape from school work will oftentimes find another way to distract themselves, while the students who could use their phones and still complete their school work effectively are the only ones being punished. In punishing those with self discipline and personal responsibility, phone bans in schools perpetuate anti-intellectualism. By taking away freedoms and privileges from everyone with blanket regulations, the schools are showing students that their qualities necessary to success do not matter to the school. Therefore, phone bans in schools are actively showing students that these qualities are not important, since they will be punished either way. Schools should be focusing on positive reinforcement by teaching students that they are rewarded for good behavior, and therefore, their privileges and freedoms increase the more they demonstrate it. Simply put, maintaining an authoritarian system of property seizure through coercion is not a healthy environment for young people to grow up in.
Schools also need to address the reasons why certain students tend to be the source of disruptions in the classroom, or prefer distractions like their phones over completing their school work. Oftentimes, these problems within certain students can be rooted in other underlying causes such as neurodivergence, home life struggles, or bullying. In order for schools to be a supportive place for young people, they need to focus on addressing these issues, and actively trying to help vulnerable young people work through them. Schools should improve their counseling system, and have more ways to work one on one with troubled students who are in need of assistance. Along with that, schools should reinforce the importance of qualities necessary for success, such as previously mentioned personal responsibility and self discipline. Punishing students by removing their devices is only enforcing a cycle of negativity that will harm students further, by causing them to feel like the school system isn’t trying to address their needs, but is instead trying to control them and keep them oppressed.
Allowing Phones in Schools Supports Student Safety
Allowing students to have their phones while in school is extremely important not just for their constitutional rights, but also for their safety. There have been many situations where teachers and staff members within a school exhibited dangerous behavior towards students, which ended up being caught on camera by fellow students using their phones to record. For example, Gregory Salcido, a teacher in El Rancho, was recorded by a student making disparaging remarks about military service members. That video went viral, leading to protests and his dismissal by the district. In a more severe instance, in Hillsborough County, Florida, a teacher was filmed putting a student in a chokehold in class. The video led to the arrest of the teacher, along with the vice principal for not reporting the incident. In this specific instance, the backlash against the teacher came not from the school, but from the student recording the incident on their own device, and reporting it themselves. In fact, the vice principal actively chose not to report the incident. If this incident occurred under the new Florida school phone ban, that student wouldn’t have been able to take video of the incident, which could have easily allowed the teacher to get away with his heinous crime.
Those in favor of the phone bans may argue that schools have cameras, and therefore can capture this behavior without the need for a student’s intervention. However, this is assuming that all schools have a robust surveillance system that can reliably record all of these instances of a teacher’s conduct. That is simply not the case, especially in rural school districts, where the schools are not funded to the same level as richer districts. Along with this, most schools even in well funded districts chose not to have cameras within the classrooms themselves, citing privacy violations, and instead opt to only have cameras in common areas such as hallways and the cafeteria. This leads to crucial blind spots in the school’s security system, that wouldn’t be able to capture most instances of these teachers’ behavior and how it threatened the safety of students.
Depending on the schools themselves to do the right thing with the footage also assumes that the schools are reliable, and actively will pursue justice, prioritizing students’ safety over their own image. This, oftentimes is not the case, as the schools will actually take measures to cover up controversies, to avoid the bad press. This was seen clearly during an instance in Mercer Island Highschool in Washington, where a teacher was accused of sexual misconduct twice. Investigative reporting shows administrators had knowledge of earlier complaints going back to 2016. One anonymous call alleged that the teacher had been exchanging inappropriate messages and showing favoritism in student relationships. The fact that the district knew of the situation, and actively ignored it, shows how you simply cannot trust schools to bring evidence to light when it involves one of their staff members.
In fact, it can even be argued that the phone bans we are seeing in schools are not actually made for the purpose of supposedly benefiting a student’s learning environment, but are instead active ways that districts are trying to let their staff get away with inappropriate and criminal behavior. In another instance, at Glendale High School in Springfield, Missouri, a 15-year-old student recorded a geometry teacher repeatedly using a racial slur. However, when the video was posted by the student, and the district caught wind of it, the student was suspended from school for violating their recording policy. This isn’t an exaggeration. The school in this case blatantly punished a student for using their phone to record the vile behavior of one of their staff. Although the teacher ended up being fired, this only occurred after public backlash for the school’s reaction. This case just goes to show how it is up to the public, and students in particular, to hold schools and teachers accountable for their behavior. This is especially important considering the fact that schools hold near total power and control over students, and have basically free reign with how they choose to discipline them. Using this control, schools have been empowered with the ability to cover up incidents which may show them in a bad light. Phone bans are just another way to prevent any unwanted footage from escaping into the public eye. That is the purpose of these phone bans—to oppress students.
These instances clearly show how pivotal it is for student safety to allow students to have their own recording devices in order to capture dangerous behavior by the school’s staff. In the absence of this ability, students have to rely on the schools to take action against their own staff, which unfortunately may not always happen. Allowing phones in classrooms is a matter of student safety, and school accountability, and removing that right from students is a way for schools to monopolize evidence against themselves, protecting their corrupt staff members, and ensuring that their dangerous behavior remains clean from controversy.
Along with these safety concerns, another major issue with phone bans is how they hinder students’ ability to communicate during emergencies like school shootings. An unfortunate fact about living in America is that school shootings are a part of reality for students and parents. It is a real concern that they have to be prepared for. However, if schools ban students’ from having access to their phones, it poses a major risk to their safety, as contacting 911 and emergency services becomes delayed. Hypothetically, if a student sees an intruder with a gun, instead of being able to call 911 themselves, they would have to get a staff member to do it for them. Every second that the student is having to access emergency services through a middleman of the school, precious time to prevent the attack is being wasted.
Now, while it is true that some schools have security precautions in place such as panic buttons which are available through hallways, and let students instantly contact 911, not all schools have this type of technology. Along with that concern, students should also be able to contact their parents in the event of a hypothetical shooting or other emergency scenario. If a student does not have access to their phone- they have no way of informing their parents that they are safe, and they have no way of communicating the status of the situation. In the Apalachee High School shooting, some students did text or call parents during the shooting. The event has been referenced in critiques of phone bans as proof that students rely on their phones in emergencies.
“The fact of the matter is parents and families cannot rely on schools to effectively communicate with us in times of emergency, and this has happened time and again,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, an education advocacy group. “There’s a whole host of reasons why parents are deeply concerned about whether or not they’re going to get timely information about whether or not their kids are safe.”
Because of this issue, it is no wonder that many parents are not in support of phone bans in schools, believing it can hinder the communication between them and their child. If their children were unable to reach out to them, they would have to rely on the schools for any amount of communication during these emergencies. However, just like schools cannot be trusted to relay information about the inappropriate behavior by their teachers, they can also not be trusted to properly respond to times of emergency. One of the most tragic examples of this is the disaster of the Uvalde shooting in Texas.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s critical-incident review said families “deserved more than incomplete, inaccurate, and conflicting communications” during and after the attack. DOJ found failures “in leadership, in tactics, in communication,” and noted some families were initially told loved ones had survived when they had not.
Along with this, the police and school’s response to the incident was horribly executed. One of the most consequential errors was how the incident was framed by command. Rather than treating it as an active shooter event, where the priority is to immediately confront the threat and rescue victims, commanders treated it as a barricade situation, and responded much slower than they should have. That mindset delayed intervention for a deadly amount of time. District officials and student families later said that school communications to parents were delayed; many parents waited for hours without clear direction.
In fact, the ones doing the clear communicating during the situation were the students inside the classrooms. Law enforcement had credible intelligence that children were alive and wounded inside the classrooms (through 911 calls from students trapped in the rooms) but they delayed breaching for over an hour.
In this horrible circumstance, the children were reaching out using their phones, desperately begging for help. The school and law enforcement failed them the entire time. So imagine how much worse things would be if the students had no way of communicating, if they had no way of informing the police of the current situation. Taking away that ability would only lead to more death, more tragedy, and worse responses from law enforcement. The point being, school authority and police are unreliable when it comes to communication. In fact, in some circumstances they can be considered completely incompetent. This incompetence puts students’ lives at risk, and those risks are only heightened if students cannot readily access 911 and other emergency services during a time of crisis due to phone bans.
Adding onto this, there are also many other circumstances that may be less severe, but still necessary for students to have phones on them for communication. For example, if there is an emergency that happens within a family, and a parent or other family member needs to urgently reach out to a student, they cannot do so. Now, people in support of phone bans may argue that the members of the family could reach out to school administrators to pass along important messages to students. However, they shouldn’t have to do that. Sometimes, there are extremely personal and private situations going on within families that require students to regularly communicate with their parents. And oftentimes, these circumstances do not need to be the business of the school. Families deserve the ability to constantly and privately communicate with each other, even if they are in school. Restricting that freedom will only lead to negative impacts on the lives of everyone involved.
All in all, phone bans are a blatant attack on youth rights and student safety. They directly violate the constitutional rights of minors, by unlawfully seizing their property. School phone bans also perpetuate the idea that everyone should have their privileges removed from them, regardless of their personal responsibility and self discipline. On top of that, phone bans impede on student safety, by preventing students from recording instances of teacher misbehavior, further empowering school districts to cover up their misdoings. Finally, phone bans in school pose a major risk to student well being, and communication between families, especially in emergency situations like school shootings, which are a common reality in America. Phone bans have no place in schools, and youth should be given the same fundamental rights under our constitution that adults are. No exceptions.
The National Youth Rights Association
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The text of Why Phone Bans in Schools Threaten Student Safety and Violate Constitutional Rights © 2026 by Xillion is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
