On Friday, October 31, Governor Tony Evers enacted Act 42. The bipartisan bill targets cell phone usage in schools and requires schools to institute a policy that prohibits usage of cell phones throughout the majority of the school day.
The focus of Act 42 is to reduce the negative effects of cell phones on students, and it had to draw student’s attention back to learning. This change comes after years of inconsistency amongst Wisconsin districts around cell phone policies.
“One thing that studies have consistently shown is that reduced interruptions and improved attention are what they see when phones aren’t accessible during that class time,” Amanda Albrecht, Digital Learning Education Consultant for the Wisconsin District of Public Instructions. “Also, there was a study out of Florida that found improved test scores and fewer unexcused absences by the second year that they had banned cell phones. National research labs like the Digital Wellness Lab link excessive smartphone and social media use with increased anxiety, stress and sleep issues.”
Act 42 was circulating around the state government for a few months before it finally came into effect. It was originally proposed by Republican State Representative Joel Kitchens on February 17, and was supported and discussed by both representatives and citizens.
Albrecht collects information on the learning habits of students and interprets the data for others to understand. She worked to inform others about the proposed bill.
“It was proposed by a Republican assemblyman, and he was the one who wrote the bill and came to us at DPI and asked for some feedback,” Albrecht said. “We went back and forth. It went through the assembly at that time, and then it was on the Senate floor. When it got to the Senate floor, myself and also my colleague, Sarah Kennedy, went to the state capitol and we testified before the Senate. … In this instance, though, we testified what we call for ‘information only.’ Basically, what we did was we went there to help the senators understand the research behind what was going on,”
The act outlines specific instances for the appropriate usages of cell phones in schools. It was drafted in a way that allows it to overlap with local school boards while still giving each school district the authority to make specific regulations to best fit each district’s needs.
“It really protects that instructional time, but it also allows for…local control, which we’re very proud of in our state,” Albrecht said. “School boards and school districts have their own local control, and this law does still allow essential exceptions and a lot of local decision making, because most school districts already have a policy in place. This isn’t really going to affect the policy that they already had, because if you read through it, it has exceptions for when teachers see that it’s appropriate for instruction; if there’s an emergency, or if the school board sees that it’s a time for cell phones to be used. It really does continue to give those school boards that autonomy to be able to have local control within their district.”
This bill was originally created to counteract the negative impacts phones have on education. The introduction of cell phones and other devices have completely changed the modern structure of education, mainly due to its role in distracting students during instructional periods, according to Albrecht.
“When students do not have their cell phones for a myriad of reasons, their anxiety goes down, test scores go up, and it just seems to be a better fit, especially for mental health, for most students,” Albrecht said.
One part of the DPI’s (District of Public Instruction) duties is collecting data from schools and their students’ learning. Just last year, they started surveying schools on their phones policies and their cell phone data.
“Then this year, we’re just finishing up that survey again,” Albrecht said. “So of the school districts in Wisconsin that took the survey (73% to 75% of districts in Wisconsin), 90% of them already had something in place, already saying either that they [had] no phones, or there were parameters around when [phones] could be taken out, so what we’re basically seeing is that this will not affect what a lot of school districts already had in place.”
Throughout all schools under the Shorewood School District, there is a policy requiring that phones either be put away or in a phone caddy. The policy complies with the new act and needs little to no changes.
“We’re pretty in line with what other schools are doing,” said Tim Kenney, Shorewood High School principal. “I have talked about our cell phone policy with other principals in the woodland conference. In our athletics conference, I meet with those principals on a regular basis when we talk about all kinds of school policies and things like that in some schools […] I can just say most schools have a policy that’s very similar to ours where students are not allowed to have them in some capacity on their person.”
SHS created the phone policy to assist the teachers in managing classes and encourage learning, with the current policy being a phone ban during actual class, but not during passing periods or lunch. Originally, teachers requested that the policy be made two years ago.
“Essentially, at the high school, what it had been previously is we were leaving it up to classroom teachers about whether they’re going to allow students to have cell phones on their person,” Kenney said. “That inconsistency that developed from that started to be problematic. It was a distraction. And the teachers basically came to me and Ms. Jamerson […] they basically said, ‘We just don’t want kids to have cell phones in their hands during class time.’ […] And we [drafted the policy], and we rolled it out last school year.”
Due to past experience teaching at Shorewood, Kenney could personally relate to the input his staff had shared.
“As a former high school classroom teacher, I taught math here for 10 years,” Kenney said. “I get that challenge of being a classroom teacher where you’re trying to manage 25–30 students and you’re trying to teach them a lesson for the day. You have all these moving parts that … can kind of get lost.”
Kenney notes the effectiveness of the policy and its improvement on student performance.
“I think that the vast majority of [students] are compliant with the expectation. I [go] into classrooms, I see the [phone caddy] is full. I’ll be like, ‘Okay, there’s 23 kids in here, and I only see 20 cell phones,’” Kenney said. “So does that mean that three kids have their cell phones on them, they might. But as I look around the classroom, do I see anybody on their cell phone? No, I don’t.”
While Kenney doesn’t fully oppose the use of phones, he has found that banning phones maximizes the learning of Shorewood students.
“The point is to not be distracted by [phones] during instructional time,” Kenney said. “Do I want all the students to put them into the caddies? Yes, absolutely. I want them to just meet that expectation, but the [reason] behind us doing this is so that students can concentrate better in class. They’ll actually interact with each other instead of this device. We have definitely seen big gains in those things, and we’ve had a big uptick in student achievement from last year and also from the year before.”
Shorewood’s phone policy is relatively similar to many school districts, mainly in terms of not having students have their phones on them in class. However, other schools around Wisconsin have policies ranging from magnetic pouches to phone vaults. Across the state, there have been numerous positive responses to Act 42 from various school districts.
“When we were testifying before the Senate, there were parents, there were educators, there was a whole myriad of people that were there to testify in support of the bill,” Albrecht said. “So what we’ve heard has been very positive from the adults in the room, for the most part.”
Most of the state is aligned with the act, especially with it being a bipartisan bill. However, a few school districts would prefer more autonomy.
“I haven’t come across any districts that said they were pro-phones,” Albrecht said. “I have come across districts that said we don’t really need a law, because we can create our own policy and we don’t need it to be a law. And then I have come across other districts and other educational technology professionals like myself, who make the argument that students are going to have phones as they get older, and they need to learn to utilize them appropriately, and that we wouldn’t be able to teach them that if we took the phones away. There are both sides of that.”
The State is trying to give its districts their own voice in the matter, while also working to help them develop a good policy.
“A few [districts] have reached out, and I’ve pointed them to [our Cell Phone Policy Continuum], which they’ve said has been really helpful a lot of times,” Albrecht said. “Especially when district administrators want to go before their board, they really want some type of scholarly articles or some type of research that has been done that they can utilize for whichever side of the spectrum they’re on, and so that’s really what that continuum does. Here in the state of Wisconsin, like I said, we’re a very proud local control state, so as a department, we’re really here to make recommendations, to help guide but we’re really not the people that say what you have to do and what you don’t.”
There is still work to be done to figure out which different policies work best. Certain policies can work better than others depending on the school. Kenney states Shorewood’s policy performs best for SHS. The restriction in phone usage has overall benefited the district, while a full phone ban has improbable success. There are also inherent safety hazards with a system like that.
“[A schoolwide ban] would be impossible for us,” Kenney said. “Yeah, if you’re going to have a rule like that, it has to be one that you can enforce. You don’t want to make up a rule and put it out there and then you can’t enforce it, because people are always going to try to get around the rules.”
While phones have many negative effects, they also allow students to communicate effectively during an emergency.
“I don’t personally agree with [a full ban] anyways, for safety reasons,” Kenney said. “If we actually had an emergency here, I would want every kid here to have a cell phone in their hand because there’s many ways you can track cell phones. You can call cell phones, You can text them, you can message, but even if we did have a full on ban, with the way that we’re set up, with the college [campus style], I don’t even know any school that would actually be really successful [in enforcing that].”
As for the Shorewood School District, many parents have welcomed the recent phone policy. Laura DeRoche, SHS parent and Shorewood resident, stated she saw the positive impacts of the policy.
“I think it’s a good policy as long as it’s uniformly enacted in all classrooms,” DeRoche said. “I think the ideal phone policy might look different depending on the age group…like 9-12 should definitely have more autonomy, but for k-8, there should not be phone use at all during the day, even during lunch.”
As someone who has worked in schools before, DeRoche says she appreciates Shorewood’s improvement and hopes they can continue to adapt the policy in future years.
“We know that the phone policies that work best are where if someone has their phone on their person, it is taken immediately by a staff member, and I hope that this is what is happening at Shorewood. Parents like to make arguments about safety and logistics, but kids went to school for decades without cell phones. As for the safety issue, I get it, but using phones during an emergency like an active shooter can actually make things significantly more dangerous.”