The Blue Ribbon Task Force studying cell phone use in schools recommended that phones be turned off and kept away from students throughout the school day in a report presented to the Kansas State Board of Education.
The report’s recommendations are broken into three sections: personal devices in school, screen time, and mental health and parental oversight of district-owned devices. The report is informed by about a dozen sources that include academic studies, government research, news articles and popular psychology books.
“We really wanted to make sure that everything we did was grounded in research,” said Brian Houghton, a principal at Fredonia High School.
The report comes as districts across the country are limiting access to phones , including many of the largest school districts in the country.
The recomendations
In addition to keeping students off personal electronic devices during school, the task force also recommended that schools store phones somewhere inaccessible to students, create communication procedures for emergencies, create a device policy for staff and have teachers report gaps in its technology policies.