On the week of Jan. 6, students in the Iowa City Community School District returned from winter break. Upon their arrival, students were met with a now familiar announcement at the start of class: “Please put your phones, headphones and earbuds into your backpack or purse for the remainder of the period.”

This announcement, heard across the district, marked a major change in school atmosphere. Over the break, the ICCSD introduced an updated phone policy that banned cell phones and recreational electronic devices during instructional time. Staff were instructed to confiscate students’ phones for the school day in the case of a policy violation. Within a week of implementation, 434 phones had been confiscated across ICCSD high schools.

An update in policy for Iowa City students might have been a surprise, but on a larger scale, ICCSD was one datapoint in a larger movement for cell phone restrictions in schools nationwide. States across the U.S. have introduced legislation to reduce cellphone usage in class, ranging from individual district requirements to statewide bans during the school day. Currently, 35 states have passed legislation to regulate cellphone use during the school day, while six states have pending legislation. Two states — Michigan and Wyoming — voted down cellphone restrictions for classrooms this year in their state legislatures. Michigan Democrats and Michigan Republicans each proposed a policy regulating cellphone use, but neither bill became law.

Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” has influenced cellphone bans nationwide; at least nine states have cited Haidt’s work in cellphone policies, and many school districts, including the ICCSD, have too. Haidt advocates for limited internet access and full cellphone bans enforced by parents outside of school as a solution. To some, the dramatic measures found in the book are controversial. Critics of the book often suggest that, though the rise of social media in tandem with mental decline, one doesn’t necessarily cause the other.

Haidt’s writing is recognized globally as sentiments in his books are connected to phone bans nationwide. In New York, there is a full bell-to-bell, zero-tolerance phone policy, and the policy’s writing mirrors Haidt’s own. Across the state, students are mandated to contain their phones in school-provided pouches. At the beginning of the school day, students lock their phones inside the pouches using magnetic locks, and magnets placed at school exits allow them to unlock the pouches at the end of the day.

Sophie Ho ’27, a student at Bethlehem School District in upstate New York, explains how their phone policy is enforced.

“In the morning, we have to put our phones in [the pouches] and show proof that we have them locked up. If you’re ever caught without it being locked, it will be on your report card,” Ho said. “You’ll have to turn it into the front desk for a month every morning. And that goes for phones, AirPods, watches [and] any electronic device.”

Although phone limitations decrease distractions in the classroom, Ho notes the threat of cellphone bans on student safety measures.

“It’s not a very reassuring policy to a lot of people … Last year, we had a lot of shooting threats, and were locked down multiple times. Many people were thinking, ‘I don’t have my phone [and] I can’t contact my parents,’” Ho said.

As New York’s phone policies reflect a growing trend of restricted use nationwide, other states, like Iowa, are also implementing restrictions in their schools. On April 30, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed HF 782 into law, designed to limit cellphone usage during instructional time to “improve the learning environment for students” and benefit student interactions. Although the law prohibits cellphone use during instructional time with some exceptions, many school districts can create individual policies as long as they meet the bill’s standards.

Before the passage of the bill, the ICCSD created a no-tolerance policy adopted at the beginning of 2025 that prohibited cellphone use during school hours. ICCSD Director of Secondary Schools Lucas Ptacek notes how groups across the school district met to discuss creating the optimal policy for the ICCSD.

“Last fall, our board did a book study with ‘The Anxious Generation’ that looked at the mental health aspects of cellphones and how the negative pieces [affect] students’ progress academically,” Ptacek said. “We had building principals, our Teachers Association, the Iowa City Educators Association, myself, as well as some teacher leaders from each of the buildings, put together a work group.”

While national concern about phones in schools is on the rise, the ICCSD has developed more individualized and nuanced policies. Since statewide restrictions on cellphone use were implemented, ICCSD’s districtwide policy has remained the same, as it currently meets the requirements.

“One of the things I appreciate about the House bill was [that it] provided local control over how it was created and implemented. In a building like West, the students greatly outnumber the staff in the building, so policing students on their cellphones from bell-to-bell [would be] a challenge. Our main job [is] protecting instructional time, [so it] lets [us] protect class time.”

While creating district policy means balancing instructional time and student freedom, its success relies on staff members, like School Facilitator Brennan Swayzer. Swayzer’s duties at West High include enforcing the ordinances by confiscating phones from students violating the restrictions. When Swayzer is alerted to a cellphone policy violation, he explains that he has a set routine for collecting cellphones and letting students know when and how they can get them back.

Swayzer also noted how the policy’s blowback affected him as a staff member.

“I don’t get to do the fun stuff or say hi… [so] I’m known as the bad guy. When they see me coming in the door, it’s ooh and ah. Everybody turns and looks, so for me as a facilitator, [it] affects me negatively,” Swayzer said.

When confiscating cell phones, Swayzer has a certain procedure which he follows for each student violating the policy.

“I let [students] know why I’m there, what classroom the situation was reported from, and then I let them know what the process is,” Swayzer said. “If it’s half a day [or] a full day, [and then] I let them know that at no point can I reach and take their property.”

Ptacek believes that one benefit of the cellphone ban is that students are less engrossed in social media, which benefits the teacher and the entire class.

“All of us are becoming so fixated, because we have the world at our hands, and it’s become such a valuable tool educationally, but it’s also [a] valuable tool socially,” Ptacek said. “One of the things that we’ve heard from students [is that] it wasn’t popular at first. Students said that [the ban]allows them to be totally free from their phones and not have to worry about that ‘ding.’”

Ptacek notes that in order for the bill to be successful, implementation must be consistent across the district and schools.

“[Reliability] was one of the things we heard from the student survey… It’s really difficult for a student when things aren’t enforced consistently. That was why we were very explicit with everybody’s role within the process. We didn’t want to put teachers in a spot to not only [have to] tell a student that they had their cellphone out, but then have to take the cellphone and do everything from there,” Ptacek said.

Swayzer believes the policy will help prepare students for life after high school, as in the workforce many employees will not appreciate those who are consistently on their phones.

“The way that the world works, you’re going to continue to [grow],” Swayzer said. “You’re going to go into a job setting someday, and your boss is not going to allow you to have that phone out nonstop, and they [will] tell you not to do it.”

This story was originally published on West Side Story on October 11, 2025.