Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s call for new cell phone restrictions in schools led Michigan legislators to reintroduce House Bill 4141. In a new opinion piece for Bridge Michigan, Ford School Professor Brian Jacob and Justin E Heinze, associate professor in the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, dive deeper into effective cellphone use policies.
Jacob and Heinze write that “state lawmakers are on the right track” with regards to House Bill 4141. Both scholars support how the bill provides local districts with wide discretion to craft policies that best meet their specific needs. “For schools adopting cell phone policies, there is no one size fits all approach, and the Legislature is right to leave the specifics of cell phone restrictions up to individual districts.”
Based on their experiences as parents of students in Michigan’s public schools, they discuss how they have seen implementation issues in how teachers interpret and enforce cell phone rules.” To address this, Jacob and Heinze recommend local educators adopt policies that make enforcement more straightforward, highlighting that “systems that rely heavily on teacher monitoring or voluntary student compliance will likely be more challenging to implement.” Approaches like lockable pouches that securely store phones during all school hours would take the burden of implementing restrictions in classrooms off of the teachers.
Jacob and Heinze also emphasize the importance of evaluation to guide policy decision making. In addition to measuring how well students comply with the new rules, evaluations should also consider “whether the new rules influence student outcomes such as attendance, grades, disciplinary incidents, test scores, and mental health.”
“The key [to effective cell phone use policy] lies not simply in restricting devices, but in creating intentional policies that reflect our educational priorities and commitment to student wellbeing,” Jacob and Heinze conclude.
Read the opinion piece in Bridge Michigan here.
