At lunch last school year, sixth graders at Bayside Middle School in Virginia Beach could be heard shouting “Uno” and tapping out sound patterns on a Simon game console. Getting students hooked on classic games is one way Principal Sham Bevel has tried to soothe their separation anxiety after the district banned cellphones two years ago. At Bayside, as a result of this school's ban on cellphones, students must keep the devices in their lockers during school hours.

But convincing kids there’s something better than posting TikTok videos or browsing friends’ Instagram posts is an ongoing struggle.

“Cellphones are to children what the blanket was to Linus,” Bevel quipped.

Cellphone bans during school hours have gained momentum in recent months, with states like Virginia, Ohio and  South Carolina taking action and the Los Angeles and New York districts moving in that direction.

But schools may find that deciding to remove phones is the easy part. The real test is finding a way to secure and store them that both staff and families find acceptable. Complete bans on cellphones leave some parents nervous, but partial restrictions often put teachers in the uncomfortable position of policing the rules during valuable class time.

“All of these have pluses and minuses,” said Todd Reid, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education. The agency is gathering public comments on how best to implement Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s July 9 executive order to have phone restrictions in place by Jan 1. Officials will release guidance in mid-September. “All of them really come down to how the policies are implemented.”

One approach to schools banning cellphones, storing them in students’ lockers, can be hard to enforce, said Kim Whitman, a co-founder of the Phone-Free Schools Movement.

“Teachers say that students ask to go to the bathroom and then go get their phones,” she said. “It still allows negative activities to happen between classes — cyberbullying, planning fights and others videoing them.”

Read the full article about schools banning cellphones by Linda Jacobson at The 74.