Early reaction to off-and-away bans: ‘It’s been like night and day’
Taylor-Stuckey is now happy to have been proven wrong.
“Oh my goodness,” she said. “It’s been like night and day. Kids are now more focused on the learning that is occurring within the classroom. They are not being distracted by those devices and social media and technology.”
Just as importantly, she said students are talking to one another again and acquiring all of the soft skills that should make school enjoyable: cracking jokes, laughing and listening to each other. She credited the policy with having real consequences for cellphone use and effectively communicating the change to students and their families.
“I think for the overall school atmosphere, I think it reminds us why we’re here,” Winslow said. “We’re not here to mitigate drama. We’re not here to see what’s happening on social media. We’re here to learn.”
Caleb Michael Tinsley, a senior during the 2025-26 academic year, said students were “not thrilled” about the policy. However, the complaints later evaporated once they got used to the ban. He said he’s reclaimed something he didn’t exactly know was missing.
“There’s something that you lose when you’re in a phone versus speaking to somebody, and I really think that I’ve gotten it back for my senior year and I actually really appreciate that,” he said.
Caleb Michael Tinsley, a senior at Hershey High School during the 2025-2026 academic year, said most students adjusted to the cellphone policy changes. (Kenny Cooper/WHYY)
During the 2024-25 academic year, Radnor experimented with phone pouches as a way to ban cellphones during instruction, but they proved to be unpopular with some parents and ineffective for crafty students eager to take a peek at their device. With a sleight of hand, some students put calculators and fake phones in pouches.
“We just realized it wasn’t necessarily working to the highest level,” MacNamara said.
After months of focus groups and discussions, administrators decided to take a different approach. The policy was simple: a “bell-to-bell” ban with a caveat. Phones just had to be “off and away.” Violators would be disciplined. The school gave students notice before the 2025-26 academic year began.
“ I heard … that people were gonna come to my door with pitchforks and hang me out to dry,” MacNamara said. “There wasn’t a single kid who did that. So it really transitioned well, and through my administrative team and our teachers being consistent and following this rule, this initiative, we are making gains.”
What does science say about cellphones and child health?
According to Education Week, at least 39 states and the District of Columbia require school districts to either ban or restrict students’ cellphone use.
In February, the Pennsylvania Senate passed a bill to ban cellphones bell-to-bell in the state’s K-12 schools. In June, the state House passed a similar bill. However, progress stalled over the summer.
For years, educators and parents have viewed cellphones as a classroom distraction. Growing research tying cellphone use to mental health issues and other problems has intensified calls for restrictions.
Dr. Ran Barzilay, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how environmental and lifestyle factors affect children’s health, particularly under stress.
“But over the last, I would say, five years, watching my own kids grow up and seeing patients come in, you see that the environment of the kids these days, much of it, if not most of it, is online,” Barzilay said.
He said smartphones reflect an inflection point in the kids’ digital environment. Using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, Barzilay, along with researchers at CHOP, the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University, studied the impact cellphones had on young people.
In December 2025, Barzilay and his collaborators found that 12-year-olds who owned a smartphone had higher rates of depression, obesity and insufficient sleep than those who did not.
In June 2026, that same team of researchers followed up with a slightly older cohort. Getting a smartphone around age 13 was associated with insufficient sleep a year later, while heavier smartphone use was associated with depression, obesity and insufficient sleep.
In his profession, Barzilay said they “let science speak, not opinions.”
“We are not saying that smartphones are bad in any way. That’s not my point,” Barzilay said. “We are saying that giving your kid a smartphone has implications for your kid’s health. Now, it’s not bad and it’s not good. It may have both bad and good components that we’re just not too sure about yet.”
He encouraged parents to speak with their children before purchasing their first cellphone in order to mitigate some of the risks.
“I think that the same way that we should have discussions as parents with our kids on what they eat, how they handle themselves in the world, when they go outside of the house, how they should behave in terms of their safety — we should talk about cellphones in a similar manner,” Barzilay said. “And we should use science such as our paper, for example, as something to discuss with them. That this just came out and there seems to be something going on, so we should think about this seriously.”