SPRINGFIELD — Jill Friday said her Spanish language classrooms at Southeast High School in Springfield last year often felt like student living rooms, with kids scrolling on their phones, taking calls from family members and listening to music on headphones.
After weeks of tripping on phone chargers snaking around chairs, Friday enlisted a school janitor to plug up all the charging outlets. Students still snuck to the halls to charge their phones and answer family calls.
Those problems ended, for the most part, last August, when the Springfield school district enacted new rules requiring high schoolers to have their phones off and put away during class, middle schoolers to keep their phones in their lockers and elementary schoolers to keep them in their bags. Previously, each school could write its own policy.
The district’s phone policy update was a relief for Friday.
“In the past, kids would just sit there passively because they already had something else to do, and it was called being on the phone, which just makes you not want to get out of bed some mornings and go into work,” Friday said in an interview. “I was in this weird triangulated corner telling kids to not answer their mom, and parents told them to answer their calls, but now it’s against policy, and I feel like I’m a teacher again.”
Districts across the state could be required soon to implement similar policies. Gov. JB Pritzker and Illinois lawmakers proposed a law last month to bring back a cellphone ban in Illinois public school classrooms.
Pritzker’s proposal, which is now incorporated into bills introduced in both the state House and Senate, would require school districts to adopt guidelines to prohibit students from using cellphones during instructional time, while providing secure and accessible storage for the devices, before the 2026-27 school year.
The proposal lists a few exceptions, such as allowing students to use phones during an emergency, when a teacher authorizes the device for instruction, or when a phone can assist students with a disability or is necessary for a student learning English. The bill would not allow fines, fees, ticketing or the help of police officers, as a means of enforcement.
“I know that a lot of students don’t love the idea of putting their cellphones away during class time, but better learning is better for all the kids in the classroom and really for the entire school and the entire community,” Pritzker said at a news conference earlier this month.
Pritzker’s proposal enters a decades-long debate over phones in schools, with some arguing students need phones for security while others say they create a distraction and provide a means for cyberbullying.
Illinois first tried a ban on wireless devices in schools in 1990 through a bill sponsored by state Rep. Mary Flowers. Cellphones were rare and expensive, but the ban was aimed at addressing concerns that drug deals were being negotiated on phones.
That ban was rescinded in the early 2000s with a law allowing public school districts to set their own rules on cellphone use. It was an initiative that Flowers and many others supported after the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
“What resonated with me the most was the Columbine situation,” Flowers, a Democrat from Chicago who doesn’t support the latest effort to ban phones in schools, said in an interview last month. “A lot of those kids ran away from the school, and so parents were calling trying to find out where their children were.”
Stephanie Diaz was a student at Highland Park High School in 2023 when another student brought a gun into the building, leading officials to order a lockdown. She said having a phone allowed her to let her mother know she was OK.
“It just felt like a sense of security, like you just knew that you were fine,” Diaz said. “And also, in that moment, you just want to know that you’re seen, if that makes sense, like in that moment I want to know I’m safe. I want to let my mom know that I am fine, like I’m alive and well. And I feel like doing that through the school office is just not effective.”
Under the proposed legislation, students would be able to get possession of their phones and use them in cases of emergency, although it’s not clear how that would be accomplished. Based on her experience, Diaz said it’s not practical for students to rush and get their phones in an emergency. During the lockdown, she ended up in another classroom where she wouldn’t have had her phone.
Countering the security argument, school safety expert Kenneth Trump said phones can have a negative impact on safety because they can distract students from “split-second instructions that will be given by schools.” Phones can also be used to accelerate rumors, spread misinformation and cause parents to flock to schools, hindering the work of first responders, he said.
“Cellphones provide an emotional security blanket to parents, understandably, I should say, but they may not provide physical safety for kids, and can actually be counterproductive,” said Trump, who has worked on safety measures with pre-K-12 schools for over four decades.
The legislation also includes a provision allowing students to have a phone if a licensed physician determines it’s necessary for the student’s welfare, or to fulfill accommodations such as an Individualized Education Plan or 504 plan. That part of the proposal is also subject to criticism, with some arguing that it’s just one additional way those students would stand apart from their peers.
“I would be more concerned about the othering, bullying or stigma that could come from this. If two students in a classroom are allowed to use phones for accessibility purposes, it is not hard to imagine the social impact of singling them out in such a way,” said Frank Lally, an education policy analyst for Access Living.
The Illinois Education Association, which represents teachers and other education professionals, is not taking a position on the Illinois bill, according to IEA spokesperson Bridget Shanahan.
Cellphone policies vary at school districts across the state. According to Friday, the Springfield school district policy requires phones to be “off and away” during class time but leaves the mechanism for achieving that up to individual schools and teachers. Other districts with a ban, including those in Peoria and Hinckley Big-Rock, west of Aurora, use magnetized pouches to lock phones away for the day.
Educators offer many reasons for instituting bans. Hinckley-Big Rock School District 429 Superintendent Jessica Sonntag said videos taken by students in class were sometimes used to humiliate classmates.
“I started having kids tell me that they would take a zero on assignments before they would present in class, because they were afraid that they were gonna be recorded by their classmates and made into a TikTok meme or whatever for people to just destroy them over,” Sonntag said.
Phones have also been blamed for their role in promoting fights, with students using their devices to both set up the confrontation and then record it on video, said Wendy Turner, a teacher at Grant Middle School in Springfield.
“There are a lot of issues with violence in our schools, and a lot of it is the recording of the fights, and last year, when they were allowed to have their phone in their pocket, the fights were being planned,” Turner said.
Martin Torres, Pritzker’s deputy governor for education, said officials in Peoria have told him that stricter phone policies have lessened classroom distractions and improved student mental health.
“They say that it’s improved student participation in classroom dynamics, and this is going to help reduce screen time and social media exposure, and there’s a lot of research evidence that suggests social media is linked with anxiety and depression and body dissatisfaction eating disorders,” Torres said. “We felt like it was important for the state of Illinois to have one common, one common policy with respect to this matter.”
It’s unclear how the state policy would be enforced.
“The precise method is less important to me than making sure we have that baseline,” Pritzker said at the Champaign news conference earlier this month. “This is about local control. We’re setting simply a minimum standard.”
Becca Lamon, superintendent of the Ball-Chatham School District west of Springfield, said parents need to be more involved in restricting phone use.
“They’re asking us to police how their child is using the device they gave their child,” Lamon said. “We could be supported more by parents setting limits on those devices. Our teachers are here to teach, and their time should be spent on teaching, not becoming cellphone police.”
Chicago Public Schools has no district-wide policy on cellphones, but individual schools can create their own rules. Disney II Magnet High School on the Northwest Side implemented a policy last year that gave students the option to place their device in a phone locker or keep their phones in their backpacks, in addition to not allowing students to take their phone to the bathroom.
Iliana Rzodkiewicz, the school’s principal, said parents underestimate their kids’ addiction to phones. A school survey showed students spend an average of 12 hours a day on their phone. Parents estimated four hours in a separate, similar school survey.
In East Aurora School District 131, students are required to place their phones in the lockers at the beginning of each class period, hold onto the key during class and take them out at the end of each period. They’re free to use their phones in between classes or at lunch, according to the district’s superintendent, Jennifer Norrell, but must repeat the locker process at each class they go to, according to Cynthia Martinez, an eighth grade social studies teacher at Fred Rodgers Magnet Academy, a middle school in the East Aurora school district.
Compliance hasn’t been perfect, and Martinez said the restrictions can only do so much if parents don’t also reinforce cellphone rules to their kids.
“Some of these students, you know, really the first time they’re asked to put away the phone is at school,” Martinez said, saying they can’t control what goes on in students’ homes.
Students give a number of reasons for wanting to hold onto their phones in class. Some argue not having a phone creates a distraction.
“I feel like just having my phone on me keeps me focused,” Tony Ballard, a Springfield Lanphier High School student, said. “I’m on my phone before I do my work, and it helps me function on what I’m doing. It just triggers something to get me focused.”
The COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated issues with student phone use and socializing at East Aurora, Norrell said earlier this month. Rzodkiewicz said the pandemic “skyrocketed” phone use and issues stemming from phones.
Friday, the Springfield high school Spanish teacher, said taking phones out of students’ hands has left her only more convinced that kids are too dependent on them. She said she’s also seen more learning gaps that she missed when students had their phones.
“If they’ve got a phone the whole time, you might not have any idea of students’ communication skills or their ability to carry on a conversation,” Friday said. “It shows the very places where it’s our job as teachers to help.”
