The saga of a statewide phone ban in schools continues. Monday afternoon, state representatives voted 126 to 75 in favor of the policy.<\/p>\n
The bill voted on was slightly different from a bill passed by the senate several months ago. It needs to go through the senate\u2019s committee process to reconcile or confirm those differences.<\/p>\n
While most lawmakers agree that phones are distracting and should be limited in schools, there have been firey debates on if the state or local school boards should make that choice.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s vote had bipartisan support, and bipartisan dissapproval.<\/p>\n
Supporters say banning them in public schools reduces distraction but also protects against broader harms.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know from the medical community that the white matter in children\u2019s brains is not growing normally. Again, this is a massive public health crisis,\u201d said Rep. Mandy Steele, a Democrat from Allegheny County and sponsor of the bill.<\/p>\n
Seventy five lawmakers voted against the bill, several said that local school boards and parents should make the choice around phone policy.<\/p>\n
\u201cI trust our school boards to make these decisions when the technology changes,\u201d said Rep. Natalie Mihalek, a Republican from Allegheny and Washington Counties. \u201cI trust our school boards to be able to pivot much more quickly than Harrisburg ever could.\u201d<\/p>\n
When asked about local control concerns, Steele said that the U.S. Constitution puts public health as a state government responsibility.<\/p>\n
Some school districts want to enforce phone bans, but some local parents oppose the policy. They say a statewide mandate can shift the blame on adopting the practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The saga of a statewide phone ban in schools continues. Monday afternoon, state representatives voted 126 to 75…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":209649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2288,37,28,5929,30,29,382,8551],"class_list":["post-209648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-bureau","tag-harrisburg","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-capitol","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-politics-of-the-united-states","tag-united-states-house-of-representatives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}