One afternoon last month, hundreds of students at Timber Creek High School in Orlando descended on the campus’ sprawling central quad to hang out and eat lunch. For members of an extremely online generation, their activities were decidedly analog.
Dozens of people sat in small groups and talked animatedly among themselves. Others played pickleball on makeshift courts at lunchtime. There was no cell phone in sight, and it was no coincidence.
In May, Florida passed a law requiring public school districts to impose rules prohibiting student use of cell phones during class time. This fall, Orange County Public Schools, which includes Timber Creek High, went even further, banning students from using cell phones throughout the school day.
In interviews, a dozen Orange County parents and students said they supported the no-phone-during-school rules. But they opposed the stricter day-long ban in their district.
Parents said their children should be able to contact them directly during free periods, while students described the all-day ban as unfair and childish.
“They expect us to take responsibility for our own decisions.” said Sophia Ferrara, a 12th-grade student at Timber Creek who needs to use mobile devices during free periods to take online college classes. “But then they are taking away our ability to make decisions and learn to be responsible.”
Like many exasperated parents, America’s public schools are taking increasingly drastic measures to try to wean young people off their cell phones. Tougher restrictions are needed, lawmakers and district leaders argue, because rampant social media use during school is threatening students’ education, well-being and physical safety.
In some schools, young people have planned and They filmed attacks on fellow students and then uploaded the videos to platforms like Tik Tok and instagram. Teachers and principals warn that social apps like Snapchat have also become a major distraction, leading some students to continue messaging their friends during class.
As a result, many individual districts (including south portlandMaine and City of Charlottesville, Goes. – have banned the use of cell phones by students throughout the day. Now Florida has instituted a more comprehensive offense at the state level.
Florida’s new law requires public schools to ban student use of cell phones during instructional time and block students’ access to social media on district Wi-Fi. It also requires schools to teach students about “how to Social networks manipulate behavior..”
Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has introduced a series of controversial rules for public schools, including restricting instruction on gender identity. But the mobile phone law has found support across the political spectrum.
“This is a step to help protect our youth and our children from the clutches of social media,” the state representative said. Brad Yeager, a Republican who sponsored the bill. “It will also create a less distracting classroom and a better learning environment.”
snapchat, instagram and Tik Tok Each has policies prohibiting harassment, as well as systems for reporting harassment on their platforms. In a statement, Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, said it supported efforts by parents and educators to foster a healthy academic environment, including “limiting students’ access to personal devices during school hours.”
In a statement, TikTok said activities such as posting videos of bullying and violence “violate our community guidelines and we remove them when we find them.” Meta, Instagram’s parent company, declined to comment.
The forced TikTok detox for students in Florida amounts to a massive experiment to control young people’s personal technology habits. The law has led districts that once gave teachers some latitude over cellphone use in their classrooms to introduce stricter rules.
TO new cell phone policy this year at Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa, for example, warns students: “We see it, we take it.”
More restrictive rules on cell phones in schools could have benefits, such as increasing students’ concentration on learning. But they could also increase student surveillance or hinder crucial communications for teens with family responsibilities or extracurricular jobs.
It is unclear how many other schools ban students from using cell phones. Statistics from the US Department of Education, released in 2021, reported that about 77 percent of schools Non-academic use of cell phones during school hours is prohibited.
The new rules this fall in Orange County Public Schools, the the eighth largest school system in the countryshow how (and why) some districts are stepping up their crackdown on cell phones.
During the pandemic, Orange County educators say, many students’ attachment to their phones seemed to deepen. Students rarely looked up from their devices as they walked through the school hallways. Some teenagers secretly filmed their classmates and spread the videos on apps like Snapchat.
“We saw a lot of bullying,” said Marc Wasko, principal at Timber Creek, which serves about 3,600 students. “We had a lot of issues with students posting or trying to record things that happened during school hours.”
Orange County educators, like high school teacher Lisa Rodriguez-Davis, were also increasingly exasperated by students’ continued use of their phones during class.
“It was getting out of hand,” Rodriguez-Davis said, describing how students would text each other during class to arrange meetings in the bathroom, where they filmed dance videos. “I call them ‘bathroom TikToks’.”
To show what the teachers were up against, Ms. Rodríguez-Davis published their own TikToks parodying their struggles with students and their phones.
After Florida’s law went into effect in July, Orange County decided to impose even stricter rules. The blanket ban prohibits students from using cell phones throughout the school day, including between classes.
In September, the first day the ban went into effect, Timber Creek administrators confiscated more than 100 phones from students, Wasko said. After that, confiscations decreased rapidly. Phone-related school incidents, such as bullying, have also decreased, he said.
Prohibition has made the atmosphere in Timber Creek more pastoral and more carceral.
Wasko said students now make eye contact and respond when he greets them. Teachers said students seemed more engaged in class.
“Oh, I love it,” said Nikita McCaskill, a government teacher at Timber Creek. “Students are more communicative and collaborative.”
Some students said the ban had made interacting with their peers more authentic.
“Now people can’t really say, ‘Oh, look at me on Instagram.’ This is who I am,’” said Peyton Stanley, a 12th grader at Timber Creek. “It’s helped people be who they are, rather than who they are online, in school.”
Ms. Stanley added that she also found the ban problematic, saying she would feel safer at school if she could carry her cell phone in her pocket and be able to text her mother immediately if necessary.
Other students said the school felt more like a prison. They noted that to call their parents, students must now go to the main office and ask permission to use the phone.
Surveillance has also been intensified. To enforce the ban, Lyle Lake, a Timber Creek security officer, now patrols lunchtime in a golf cart, catching students who violate the ban and taking them to the main office, where they must place their phones in a locked cabinet for the rest of the day. on the school day.
“I usually end up with a cart full of students,” Lake said as he sat behind the wheel of a black Yamaha golf cart during his lunch hour, “because I pick up more on the way to the office.”
Lake said he also monitored feeds from the school’s security cameras for students using cellphones in hallways and other spaces. Students who are caught may be removed from class. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
It is not yet known whether the potential benefits of banning cell phones outweigh the costs of limiting students’ limited freedom. What is clear is that such bans are disrupting the academic and social norms of a generation raised on cell phones.
Orange County students described the ban as regressive, noting that they could no longer use their phones to check their class schedules during school, take photos of their projects in art class, meet their friends during lunch, or even Add phone numbers of new classmates. to your contact lists.
“Imagine that the device you use daily to communicate with other people has completely disappeared,” said Catalina, 13, an eighth-grade student at a local middle school. (She and her mother asked that her last name not be used for privacy reasons.) “It feels completely isolated.”
