On September 23, 2024, The Phone-Free School Act was passed in California, and is supposed to be set all over the state by July 1, 2026. 

In LOHS this act was put into place a semester before it was supposed to be implemented next year. 

The question is, has the phone ban truly helped? 

Since the first phone ban, there has been a  large increase of Ipads seen in classes, because of the fact that their Ipads are the same thing as big phones, and they won’t get in trouble for having them.

Before the ban, Ipads were seen as technology that could help promote productivity in the classroom because of the fact it could be used as a laptop or computer. 

Now, since the ban, Ipads are used more for non-educational purposes because they can be used to message, use social media, and play games, rather than do online work. 

(Add quote there)

Students may be banned from using their phones, but they are still connected to their screens during the “no cell bell to bell”, just on a larger device.

The truth is, students aren’t only bringing their own Ipads, some students are even buying new Ipads in order to replace the same phone functions that were supposed to be banned. 

The law was aiming to reduce “blue light” exposure and “digital eye strain”, but the shift to Ipads exposes children to the same amount of screen time. 

(Add quote here)

A lot of students agree that the banning of certain things will just push people to try to work around the rule, rather than just listen to the rule, which makes devices even more tempting to use.

Even though teachers and schools believe Ipads can be used as a “school device”, unlike school issued chromebooks that have security blocks such as “GoGuardian”, Ipads use VPNs to get around the blocks, which adds onto the issue of why the phone ban does not help if people will just gravitate to Ipads. 

Some students genuinely enjoy having an Ipad instead of a chromebook, and have used it for educational purposes before the ban, but a large majority of the new Ipad students are doing it to find a way around the rule and be connected to a screen. 

The complete ban of phones was for the better of the students, so they can stay focused and because according to Los Angeles Unified, “near – constant” notifications were damaging the mental health of students. 

As the next school year approaches, all of California’s rules will begin to adopt the policy “no cell bell to bell”, but will California successfully unplug students, or did they just change a 6-inch distraction for an 11-inch one?