I’m a California teacher who thinks phone use in classrooms is a big problem. I’m not convinced a new law will solve it.

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed Assembly Bill 3216, a law to limit smartphone use in schools.
• California teacher Joelle Clark said phones are a distraction and policies on their use can be hard to enforce.
• Clark anticipates students will sneak device time if allowed to have their phones on them — but if schools lock the devices up, parents could complain over safety concerns.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Joelle Clark, a 28-year-old public school teacher in California, about the state’s new law requiring schools to develop a policy that limits smartphone usage by July 1, 2026. This essay has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider verified her identity and employment.

I’m a six-year teacher, and I teach special-ed high school students with mild to moderate learning disabilities.

I recently decided to take up travel teaching. So, I moved out to California and I came into a school where students are constantly on their phones. They tell us it’s teacher discretion, so you go into one class and there’s a rule where you have to put your phone in a sleeve to get your attendance. But then in the next class, there are no rules.

I like to be a good guy in the classroom. I don’t like to be the bad guy. I don’t like to be the one to say, “No, you can’t have your phones,” because, in real life, they do have their phones.

Now that it’s a constant thing though, kids are cheating and using their phones for so many things that are just not good for learning. They’re also just scrolling on TikTok. I love scrolling too, so I get it. I go home and spend at least an hour every night scrolling. But waking up and scrolling and doing it every single hour of the day is different.

It’s hard to hold kids to any kind of phone expectations because there are different expectations in every class they go into. Some kids are really great with it, but a lot of them will even take phone calls from their parents and stuff like that.

They’ll be like, “My mom’s calling me.” What am I supposed to do as a teacher if you have your parents calling you?

The new law may change things by forcing schools to adopt one policy instead of leaving it up to the teachers — but I’m not sure it will solve the issue.

Schools may have trouble enacting phone bans

When I first applied for jobs, I found this high school in Chicago where kids had to literally put their phones in lockers before they went through security to get into school. I ended up working there and my students didn’t have Airpods, Apple Watches, personal iPads, or personal laptops in the classroom. They could only have their school Chromebooks, which blocked what they could go on outside of school stuff.

When kids were bored or done with their assignments, they would interact with each other. Or, they would put their heads down or find a skill, whether that was drawing or journaling.

That’s a way to manage phones, but the new California law includes a provision that says students can’t be prohibited from using their phones in an emergency situation.

It would be complicated to get phones back to students in those scenarios if a teacher is keeping them behind the desk or if they’re stored in lockers. If we take away that access, I could see parents standing outside the schoolyards when there’s a lockdown.

I saw it happen in Chicago when our students’ phones were in lockers and parents were outside the school because all they wanted was their kids, and we couldn’t get them because we were on lockdown.

I’m not sure the law will change things

I don’t see a way to regulate cellphone use among the whole student body if the phones are on them. If students have access to it, they’re going to use it, whether it’s in secret or out in the open.

Many school districts already have a smartphone rule in place. I feel like every district that teaches kids fully knows this is a problem. Schools don’t just ignore it, they try to enforce it, but just because it’s written in a law doesn’t mean that it’s going to be followed.

That’s kind of what happens with almost everything in school. We have a school-wide policy about what students can and cannot wear to school. I noticed the first two weeks of school that I was enforcing it and then realized that no one else was, so I was like, OK, I’m not going to enforce it either.

I don’t know what the right solution is. Maybe we should be teaching students healthy habits with their phones because that’s what the real world has to do. Maybe we should have a class on phones to teach kids healthy habits and the danger of media.

I have kids who are on their phones almost every day toward the end of the class period because they worked for 30 straight minutes. I strongly believe that if you work for that long, you should get a reward in some way.

In 2024 we’re moving toward a phone generation. We have our phones on us constantly in the workplace — and I think we need to learn to help kids manage their phones.