The state legislature passed a law banning cellphones in Utah classrooms with almost unanimous support this year. However, this isn’t the first time lawmakers have tried to address phone use in schools. What changed was their approach to the issue.
“We've got more studies, more data, more parents and more teachers upset with cellphone use in school,” Republican Rep. Trevor Lee said. “At that time, we didn't have a ton of that.”
In 2023, Lee unsuccessfully sponsored a bill that would have banned phones in all schools with limited exceptions, forcing kids to place their phone and smartwatches in a cubby before class. The bill died in committee.
The bill Gov. Spencer Cox recently signed into law was sponsored by Republican Sen. Lincoln Fillmore. It “prohibits a student from using a cellphone, smart watch, or emerging technology during classroom hours” starting July 1, but individual schools and districts have the authority to create their own policies that are more or less restrictive.
Fillmore thinks a big reason his bill passed is because it is more flexible than Lee’s 2023 bill.
When Lee introduced his bill to the House Education Committee, he said teachers approached him about their concerns with phones in schools. He argued there were a lot of “unhealthy side effects to phone usage,” including anxiety, students’ inability to stop looking at their phone and being an overall distraction to the learning environment.
Lee’s colleagues on the Republican-dominated committee expressed numerous concerns, saying it was government overreach, violated property rights and hindered parental access to their children.
“I feel like this is the heavy hand of government in a way that it's not meant to be,” said former Republican Rep. Kera Birkeland during the committee hearing. “I'd love to get behind a public information campaign. I'd love to educate people and kids, I just don't think making a law that is entirely unenforceable is a good precedent to set with kids.”
On the other hand, Fillmore’s bill sets a statewide default of no phones in class, but schools can still craft whatever policy they want.
“That change is important, because up until now, the state had been silent on the issue. And that meant that schools were still in a position to decide their own policy, but they were deciding it from a standpoint of ‘how do we limit the damage that this is causing to kids?’” Fillmore said.
Now, with the default policy of ‘no phones,’ Fillmore said schools can create their own policies with an eye toward integrating technology in beneficial ways. If Lee’s bill had been run this year, Fillmore thinks it still would have failed. Most of the concerns Fillmore said he heard from his colleagues were based on the 2023 approach that left no room for deviation.
Fillmore said another reason there was so much support for his bill was because the broader conversation around restricting phone use has changed. The topic was increasingly being discussed and more research was being published.
The 2024 book The Anxious Generation by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt played a big role in shifting the narrative.
“I think that raised consciousness across the state and across the country on this issue,” Fillmore said.
On social media, Cox strongly encouraged others to read the book, and The Policy Project, a nonprofit organization that ran a campaign supporting Fillmore’s bill, gave every lawmaker a copy.
The book also helped convince Republican Rep. Doug Welton, a teacher and co-sponsor of Fillmore’s bill. He was not a fan of Lee’s 2023 effort but said he got behind the phone ban this year partly because of new publications like The Anxious Generation. Welton also thought this bill was better because it preserved local control.
In the classroom, Welton said he noticed something different about his high school students who grew up with smart devices.
“It took me a while to figure out what it was, but they just engage differently,” Welton said. “They also came in with a lot of mental health issues. They came in with a lot of connection problems, they're not able to advocate for themselves very well. There's a whole bunch of things.”
Before the session started, Emily Bell McCormick, president of advocacy group The Policy Project, said her group was nervous about being able to get the bill passed because of what happened in 2023. McCormick thinks politics and the strictness of the bill played a role in its failure.
“Frankly, I don't think people were ready,” she added.
Lee agrees that people weren’t ready to take up his previous bill. Part of the reason, he thinks, is because of his status in the Legislature at the time. As a freshman lawmaker, Lee said tackling cell phones was a bigger effort than he had realized. But he also thinks his reputation as a firebrand didn’t help. Lee made headlines ahead of his first year in the Legislature for comments he made about the LGBTQ+ community and for running a secret controversial Twitter account.
“If the media portrays you as being some massive wild card and bomb thrower, like, yeah, they're [lawmakers] going to be skeptical to want to deal or listen to me,” he said.
He added the relationships between him and other lawmakers have drastically improved since his freshman year. Experience and reputation aside, Lee said the biggest thing that has changed in that time is public awareness.
While Lee applauds his colleagues for moving the needle on the issue, he doesn’t think Fillmore’s bill has any teeth. He believes it to be a very “hands off bill” that allows school districts to create whatever phone policy they want.
Since a school phone ban would affect a lot of Utah families, McCormick said lawmakers might have been unsure about how their constituents would react. But her group gathered together parents and students who supported the bill, which she said showed lawmakers that a community backed this effort. That, combined with growing conversation about the harms of youth cellphone use, she said, gave lawmakers a safety net in voting for the bill.
It also helped, McCormick said, that the governor has made removing phones in classrooms a priority in recent years.
Still, it took some convincing. One argument they used to sway lawmakers was that the data is clear and there should have been action years ago.
“We have basically equipped our kids with a tool or a device that even we as adults can't fully control ourselves on,” she said. “So we as the adults in their lives, need to step in and create an atmosphere and a policy that will help them succeed.”
As a parent of teenagers, McCormick said she’s seen her own opinion shift over the years. At first, she thought her kids needed a phone at school and got used to being able to easily contact them. But in talking with other parents, many saw academic and emotional problems for kids stemming from phone use.
“We became numb to it, and we kind of allowed something that in theory we would have all said no to in the beginning, had we realized what was happening.”
And there might be more student phone use legislation in the future.
At a ceremonial signing of the bill, Cox said it was a “huge first step” but he wants a “bell-to-bell” ban, meaning phones are banned for the entire school day. The new law’s default policy prohibits phones in the classroom but they can still be used between classes.
“It is a mistake not to do bell to bell. All of the research is 100% clear that bell-to-bell does protect our kids so much more than going to recess and getting on your phones, going to lunch and immediately being back on your phones,” Cox said. “So I hope we're not done here.”
Stevie Shaughnessey contributed to this story.
