SC lawmakers ban student phones in schools, making the right call the wrong way | Opinion
Any parent who has received a prayer hands emoji-filled text from a teenager about the possibility of a Starbucks run after school — let alone seen or sent a terrified text during a school lockdown — knows a cellphone is never far from any student during the school day. But that’s changing in South Carolina and a growing number of states where school teachers and officials are successfully arguing to ban the one student possession more common than a backpack.
Oft-cited studies show about half of U.S. children have a smartphone by age 11 — 43% of kids aged 8 to 12 do, and 88%-95% of kids aged 13 to 18 do.
Now, one of the last adjustments to the South Carolina state budget will force school districts to limit smartphone use next school year or lose their state funding.
The General Assembly included a proviso in the budget it sent to the governor this week that requires the state Board of Education to draft a major new policy, get buy-in from every school district and settle on appropriate punishment for hundreds of thousands of kids used to picking up their smartphones all day long.
When Gov. Henry McMaster signs the budget around its July 1 start date, the conversation about cellphones will be moved with little debate from “Should they be restricted?” to “How, exactly, should they be restricted when phones come in so handy as calculators or as quick, creative ways to see or share school work or as the lifelines to loved ones in the face of the unimaginable: a school shooting?”
The stakes are high, not just for the schools but, if you read the research, for students themselves. And more and more people are reading the research.
Governors in red states like Florida and South Carolina and blue states like New York and California increasingly agree: Cellphone use among adolescents contributes to problems from cyberbullying to school safety, and that has to stop.
Just last week, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a warning label on social media platforms in a commentary in The New York Times, noting that adolescents “who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms.” In 2023, Gallup reported the average daily use in this age group was well past that: 4.8 hours a day.
Cellphone bans have come and gone — New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg enacted one in 2006 in the nation’s largest school district and Mayor Bill di Blasio eliminated it in 2015 — but they are en vogue again nationally now.
Florida banned cellphones during class time in July, and Kansas, Oklahoma and Vermont have since introduced bills of their own. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, is moving toward an all-day ban in January, and New York schools may boomerang back to a ban next year in legislation supported by the state’s governor. Here, Gov. Henry McMaster sought to ban phones during “direct classroom instructional time” in his initial budget this year.
The devil is in the details, of course. Kids routinely get around all kinds of bans.
In a commentary in the Post and Courier in May, South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver called curtailing phone use “the No. 1 most practical step we could take to refocus student learning, address student mental health needs, increase school safety and help teachers enforce classroom discipline.”
She ended her essay, “And you can bet my department is eager to aid schools around our state in making this policy work effectively.” She’s getting her chance.
There will no doubt be some disruptions enforcing this mandate in a state with 60,000 teachers and 790,000 students. It would’ve been an easier transition if state officials weren’t rushing to devise and distribute a policy that affects so many families with so little public input so hastily. But that argument for a slower, more methodical approach with legislative hearings is irrelevant now. It’s up to the school officials to do right by our kids.
In the end, the students will adjust before the adults do. And our kids will still be on their phones when we call them for dinner.