Kids & Screens Part 3: Phone bans spread across US schools

ERIC SCICCHITANO, The Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, N.Y.

Tyler McBride walked about his middle school classroom in rural Arkansas years ago during a period of silent reading as students sat in quiet, fixated on the texts before them.

But hunched behind one book propped upright on a desk was a student fixated on something else, a smartphone positioned just so that it was hidden. It wasn’t hidden quite well enough.

“I can remember the first few years I taught eighth grade and a lot of my students did not have cell phones,” said McBride, now a sixth-grade teacher and the senior policy fellow with Teach Plus Arkansas, who began his career in 2012. “Now, I taught eighth grade a couple of years ago, and there were maybe five eighth-graders out of 90 who did not have a smartphone.”

Long gone are the days when few students had smartphones and their internet-capable counterparts in school, such as smartwatches and tablets. The devices have become as commonplace inside classrooms as pencils and paper.

And, with some measure of majority agreement, they’ve become a major distraction. It spurred action beyond policy implementation at individual school buildings and districts; many state governments adopted phone laws with bipartisan support.

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