Our children deserve a phone-free school day

As a physician, a local health official and the parent of an upcoming Glendale Unified student, I think the early evidence makes the case for a comprehensive ban clearer than ever.

After the past few years, I understand why families might bristle at another policy that might feel like someone telling them what to do. But who is actually making decisions about their children’s attention right now? It is a handful of Silicon Valley companies that spent years engineering products to capture and hold the developing minds of children. A bell-to-bell ban gives that authority back to parents by creating a rare environment where apps and algorithms cannot reach their kids. 

Right now, even parents who want a phone-free school day for their child cannot achieve it on their own, because the social pressure and the culture of constant connectivity make individual opt-outs nearly impossible. A district policy solves that collective problem and gives every family what many already want.

Los Angeles Unified’s experience over the past year tells a useful story. Teachers in schools with consistent enforcement report calmer classrooms and more face-to-face conversations among students. But compliance has been uneven. Students have found creative workarounds for Yondr pouches (where cellphones are kept until class is over), and about half of the district’s schools opted for the honor system, producing weaker results. The lesson is straightforward: Vague policies produce vague outcomes, and schools that drew a clear, uniform, physically enforced line saw the strongest compliance.

Some thoughtful voices have argued that the real target should be the social media companies, not the phones. I have some sympathy for this. California has already passed legislation requiring platforms to implement default privacy settings for minors, and the momentum for stronger regulation is encouraging. Bipartisan voices are demanding accountability for the harms these products cause children. But schools cannot wait for companies to redesign their platforms out of the goodness of their hearts. School-level phone policies and industry regulation are complementary strategies, and we should pursue both.

The data from the Los Angeles County Health Survey that originally motivated my letter remains alarming. Nearly a quarter of Glendale’s children reported feeling very anxious, worried or nervous in the past year, 70% above the countywide average. An additional 11% reported deep sadness or depression. While city-level data was less precise on the exact figure, the trend holds. I have seen it in my clinical practice with kids whose sleep is wrecked, whose attention is fractured, whose anxiety is tangled up with the feeds they cannot stop checking. No single policy will fix all of this. But removing one powerful stressor for seven hours a day during the period when students are supposed to be learning and growing is a meaningful step.

At the November 2025 board meeting, Glendale district survey results showed strong community support for a strict ban, alongside real concerns about emergencies, enforcement burdens on teachers and how to differentiate by grade level. Those concerns deserve answers. 

As the district prepares to finalize its policy, a few principles from the past year stand out. Physical separation works better than a trust-based system. Emergency access can be built in, and modern systems already allow staff to unlock devices in seconds. A bell-to-bell standard is simpler and fairer than carving out permissible windows during passing periods or lunch. It is also better for teachers. The exhausting policing disappears when the rule is uniform and the devices are simply inaccessible. While high schoolers might seem to warrant more latitude, the evidence for restricting their access during the school day is just as strong. And any ban should be paired with the harder work of building school environments where students genuinely want to be present.

A phone-free school day is about giving our children back something that has been quietly taken from them. They need the freedom to be bored, to daydream, to have an uninterrupted conversation with a friend, to sit with their own thoughts for more than a few minutes at a stretch. That is what childhood is supposed to feel like. LAUSD’s teachers are seeing early signs of it returning. Glendale has the evidence, the community support and the state mandate to get this right.

Naman Shah, M.D., Ph.D., is director of medical and dental affairs at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. The views expressed are his own. He wrote this for edsource.org.