Cell phone bans enacted in metro school districts, now advocates pushing for national version

ATLANTA — It’s a trend making its way across the country: districts banning cell phones in school.

Several districts in the metro Atlanta area have already enacted bans, including in Marietta and DeKalb County schools.

As Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Sophia Choi reports, some advocates are now pushing for a larger, national policy to ban cell phones from classes.

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Schools across the country are still working on ways to deal with the presence of cell phones in schools.

Right now, those efforts are a patchwork of guidelines and policies that vary from state to state, and as we’ve seen in the metro area, even district to district and school to school.

In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams is weighing a measure to manage phones in class.

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“We want to get it right, we want to remove any distraction from our children,” Adams said, calling the phones distractions from learning.

Now policymakers and school leaders are trying to manage restrictions in the nation’s largest school district.

A survey by Pew Research showed more than 70% of high school teachers blame phones for interfering with learning.

“We were losing hours and hours of instruction time,” Tina Lulla, a chemistry teacher, said.

As districts struggle to find common sense solutions, some teachers have taken to social media to share ideas.

Mitchell Rutherford, who taught biology for 12 years in Arizona, said he grew exhausted by students being distracted and on their phones.

“It’s demoralizing for teachers to just constantly be fighting against this distraction and for kids to constantly be fighting against this thing that just drains the life out,” Rutherford said.

He eventually chose to quit teaching, even after working on ways to engage with students about the impact of cell phones in class.

“It seemed very drastically and suddenly in the last year that the bad outweighed the good. It no longer, you know, was a tool that was really useful, it was just like constant distraction,” Rutherford said. “It’s hard to even inspire a kid to care about your subject or, you know, want to do well in the class when they just have this easy out.”

Rutherford is now calling for broader action, using his experience as a teacher to push lawmakers to create legislation to ban phones in classrooms.

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