Confiscation. Calls home. Sealed pouches. Why schools struggle to ban cellphones

Angelica Zamora-Reyes, a senior at Downtown Magnets High School, works on her smartphone at her home in Los Angeles in July. “That’s why rules limiting phone usage in a consistent manner for all in a given setting like schools are more likely to be effective than individual approaches by individual parents, or even individual teachers.” It also may be easier to change phone culture, experts said, in a middle school setting simply because there tend to be fewer kids in a tighter age span compared to high school. Officials in Santa Barbara allowed phone use outside of class because they wanted teens to learn to “self-regulate” their relationship to the devices, said Superintendent Hilda Maldonado. Melvoin predicts a 95% student compliance rate in the district with “5% that will be stubborn.” When the Santa Barbara ban kicked off in the 12,000-student district last school year, not all students immediately complied. In one case, Maldonado said, a substitute teacher incorrectly assumed a student was hiding their phone instead of putting it in the “phone hotel.” I It turned out that the student didn’t have a phone.