Streeter: Cellphone bans at Maryland schools make sense — until they don’t

About a month ago, my terrified child called me to say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was arresting people outside his school, unwittingly providing the tip for what became a national news story.

If that disturbing incident were to happen during the 2027-28 school year or beyond, that call probably won’t be possible. My son would be subject to the Joanne C. Benson Maryland Phone-Free Schools Act, a new law requiring each Maryland county board of education and Baltimore City to develop and implement policies that enforce restrictions on student cellphone use.

Do I think students should be playing Roblox rather than reading, writing and ’rithmetic? Of course not. I don’t want my son’s phone out on his desk. But I want him to be able to get to it if necessary.

I’m not the only parent who acknowledges the issues with unchecked devices used willy-nilly but still bristles at a ban. “I really think that my kids should have phones in school,” Laurel Kelly of Wicomico County wrote me on social media. When one daughter was in elementary school, the child tripped and hit her face so hard her clothing was bloodied and torn. The 10-year-old didn’t have a phone, and no one from the school called Kelly.

When another of Kelly’s daughters was sexually harassed, though, “she was able to text me and I came to help and deal with admin,” Kelly wrote. Although she acknowledges the devices can be a distraction, “How can I trust the school to communicate and protect my kids when they haven’t before and continue to do things like this?” she wrote. “My kids need a phone.”

Those who champion the new restrictions don’t think students need those phones — at least not with unfettered access. “As parents, we are always going to worry about our kids and do everything we can to protect them,” said Paul Lemle, president of the board of the Maryland State Education Association. Yes, students face legitimate dangers like shooters, but he believes “the real threat is in their pockets.”

He doesn’t mean just the pull of phones away from schoolwork but the untamed world of predators and scammers on the other side of the screen. “It’s not a solution but a framework that we, as educators, work with families to try to mitigate the dangers and distractions to kids,” he said of prohibiting phone use.

“I don’t think educators really want what you’d call a blanket ban,” said Lemle, who conducted an informal poll in his classroom that revealed a third of his students spent more time with screens than they did asleep.

The new law prescribes that each district will have its own procedures that will then be followed by each school within them. That consistency and uniformity is the only way the policies will work, Lemle and others said.

Since 2020, “off and away” has been the policy in Baltimore County, which means phones powered off and stored out of reach. Heather Jennings, a teacher and part of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County subcommittee that helped write that policy, said her group wants to make sure it is consistent throughout the district and that it addresses new technology they couldn’t have imagined, such as smart glasses.

Jennings said she understands the nervousness and helplessness of not being able to get to your kid. Her older son had shooting incidents on both his high school and college campuses. “I thought, ‘It’s following him,’” she said. “But my concern is about him getting to safety, rather than calling me.”

I hear her. I really do. But I perhaps naively believe my kid could do both? I remember when my sister in Prince George’s County was oddly out of reach for hours during the D.C. sniper shootings, when we normally talked eight times a day. I don’t think I let out a full breath until I saw her familiar number pop up on my phone.

Sometimes, it’s just better to know.

Look, are there phone-based shenanigans at school? For sure! Former Baltimore County teacher Rebecca Powell, who now lives in Rising Sun, saw students texting their 7-Eleven orders to class-cutting classmates and scheduling fights on phone calls. “I heard someone say, ‘I’m gonna beat up Dadada on Thursday,’” she said. “I was also making phone calls home like, ‘Hey, I called a couple of times. Your child is very nice, but they’re definitely failing my class. They’re on the phone a lot.’”

Baltimore County parent Emily Mullinix’s concern is that these “dangerous and shortsighted” bans and policies coincide with a precarious time. “There’s more police presence in schools, and ICE is trying their damnedest to get into schools,” she said. “Why are states trying to leave students and teachers vulnerable and unable to record incidents?”

All classrooms in Baltimore County have phones in them, Jennings said, so if there is an emergency, teachers have access to the outside. The truth, however, is that the older they get, the more likely it is that kids have their own phones. So what to do about them?

Some schools use Yondr pouches with magnetic locks to store phones, something financially and logistically “untenable in a larger school,” Jennings said. At the end of the day, she thinks having them put away, with clear consequences if they emerge, is the goal.

“If I have something in a bag that never comes out, isn’t that what we want?” Jennings asked.

Even Lemle admits this law isn’t a fix for problems we can’t fully anticipate, but it’s a start. “We won’t be able to control technology in the way we would like. I think we are writing the best policy we can.”

I hope that’s true. Lives depend on it.