What is the best way to handle cellphones in schools?
That's a question Michigan educators are grappling with this spring after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law a ban on smartphone use in Michigan schools.
The law goes into effect in the school year that begins in August 2026. It requires public and charter K-12 schools to adopt rules prohibiting students from using smartphones during instructional time, but it allows educators and school officials to determine the best way to do that.
The new law includes several exemptions, including medical or emergency use, and does not apply to Michigan's private schools.
We are University of Michigan faculty in the schools of Public Health, Public Policy and Education, and we are interested in how cellphone access both helps and hurts students in schools. Many districts already have cellphone policies, but the new law creates an opportunity to look at which policies best support student well-being and academic success.
Drawbacks and benefits to student learning
Cellphones were used by 97% of young people ages 11-17 during the school day in 2022, with both good and bad effects.
Cellphone use can distract students and lead to disengagement from school, impaired learning and poorer mental health. It can also lead to exposure to interpersonal violence, such as bullying or fights, and harm broader well-being.
But students also use phones in beneficial ways, such as monitoring their blood sugar levels, connecting with family and peers, and even contacting digital tip lines to prevent violence.
Defining the array of cellphone policies
As part of a CDC-funded project focused on cellphone policies and health, we collected data on existing cellphone policies in the 2025-26 school year for every school district in Michigan. Our team checked hundreds of local and regional education authority webpages and consulted student handbooks. When digital information was missing, we contacted districts directly. Building on a national teacher survey called Phones in Focus, we recorded not only when phone use is restricted but how schools restrict it, noting cases in which the district policy varied by grade level.
At the time of this writing, our data reflects 779, or 95%, of publicly funded traditional and charter school districts in Michigan.
At the start of the 2025-26 school year, 94.7% of districts had existing mandates, compared to 2.5% of districts that required individual schools to set their own policies.
Just under 3% of all Michigan districts had no stated policy at all. It is possible that these districts communicated a set policy through informal channels or, in practice, were letting schools decide on their own rules.
Among districts with mandated policies, there were important differences in rules relating to cellphones. To help think through policies, we sorted them on two criteria: when policies are enforced and how policies are enforced.
About half of the district policies provided different rules by grade level. In these cases, we include the policies for high school students to generate the statistics
Go to The Conversation to read the full article.
