The second largest school district in the country has banned cell phones and social media usage throughout the school day.
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) voted 5-2 in favor of the ban on Tuesday. The ban will impact nearly 500,000 students from kindergarten to 12th grade.
The Board of Education, however, will need to meet later this year to iron out details before the ban goes into effect in January, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The LAUSD already has a policy in place banning cell phones during class time. However, this new policy would enforce the ban across the entire school day, including breaks and lunchtime, according to the Times. Potential strategies board members are considering include locked pouches or cellphone lockers, ABC News reports.
Whichever form it takes, the district said the ban will be “informed by best practices and by input from experts in the field, labor partners, staff, students, and parents,” according to ABC News. School district officials also said they will take into account students who use their phones for translation services.
Nick Melovin, a school board member who voted for the ban, said, “Students are glued to their cellphones.”
“[Students are] surreptitiously scrolling in school, in class time, or have their head in their hands, walking down the hallways,” Melovin told the Times. “They’re not talking to each other or playing at lunch or recess because they have their AirPods in.”
Some parents say they have safety concerns about the ban. AnneMarie Fulton, who has a child enrolled in the LAUSD, said on social media she is against the ban according to the Times.
“I don’t want her to not have access to call me if needed,” Fulton said of her child. “I’m strict on phone usage anyway, but taking that ability to contact away from a child doesn’t exactly seem right.”
Joseph Williams, director of Students Deserve, a group that recruits and assists student activists, said the ban could also prevent students from recording incidents of police abuse.
“In the past, some students have used phones to capture criminalization or police violence like incidents of arrest or pepper-spraying of students at schools, or [to] connect with their parents or lawyers/advocates when their rights were being violated,” Williams told the Times.
The move comes one day after US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for all social media platforms to have a tobacco-style warning label notifying users that the sites are “associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”
“A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe,” Murthy wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times.
