From burner phones to decks of cards: NYC teens adjusting to the smartphone ban

Texas banned phones in schools as well. A local school administrator told me “in the high school, the lunch room is now loud with talking and laughter!”

There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same.

Regardless, it’s great to see that the ban has seemingly nudged things in a healthier direction. Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.

Yes, parents are definitely part of the problem here. I am a former teacher and my wife is an active teacher so we've seen this first hand.

Though not entirely to blame, parenting is certainly a part of the cell phone addiction problem. Setting time limits and holding kids accountable for breaking rules around phone use would go a long way toward guiding kids toward more healthy behaviors and letting them know someone cares about their well-being.

Modeling constrained phone use is another aspect. Parents will struggle to get their kids off their phones if they are spending all their own free time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

At what point did school districts change?

When I was in high school, right about the time that cell phones were becoming common among adults but not yet among kids, our school had a blanket policy that all electronics other than calculators and simple watches were to remain in lockers or at home.

Having a CD player, pager, pda, cell phone, or pretty much anything else in class was forbidden. Teachers would take them away and you'd get it back from the principal's office at the end of the day.

I've seen a lot of talk about schools banning phones, but I don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place.

When smartphones first started coming out a high school teacher took mine away - there was no blanket ban but I had undiagnosed ADHD and I wasn't paying attention during class. As she was taking it I told her if it got broken while it was out of my hands that was her responsibility, it cost a thousand dollars. I wasn't a rich kid and I got it on a contract with the phone company. I remember she got really stressed out and cried about it during class.

If you multiply that by 30 kids in a class, conservatively, a teacher could be stuck sitting on 30 confiscated iPhones. That's like half their annual salary in kids claiming they broke their phone. Not to mention any claims that a teacher used a kid's phone for some nefarious purpose.