Junior Luke Brown was in Rebecca Oswald’s government class on the first day of school when he witnessed a student getting a personal electronic device violation slip. Brown stated he was angered because taking someone’s norms just to turn and disrupt them isn’t fair. For years, students have been accustomed to using technology for everything in their day-to-day lives.
After the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, schools embedded technology in students’ learning as much as possible, making resources and assignments accessible at all times. With that, many have been frustrated with the statewide ban on personal electronics; it seems to be a ‘blanket tactic.’ Knowing the 2025-26 school year was going to include a statewide cell phone ban, many students and teachers were wondering how one could just block access to all personal electronics so abruptly.
This past summer Missouri governor Mike Kehoe passed Bill 68 Section 162.207 titled “Electronic Personal Communication Devices,” which requires each charter school and school district in Missouri to adopt a written policy regarding student’s possession and use of personal electronics.
The initial idea was to remove distractions in learning. However, the law excludes devices in students’ lunches, seminars, study hall, or passing periods. The Francis Howell School District has a policy against the use of cell phones, smartwatches, gaming systems, headphones/earbuds, speakers, and cameras.
Junior Alex Jones disagrees with the phones being banned in general, but understands where the idea came from with the academic aspect. He wants to be able to use phones for non-academic times.
“I felt like it had good intentions, but it wasn’t enforced the right way,” said Jones.
At the start of the year, students were required to use the school-mandated Chromebooks without the use of any personal electronics. Junior Ella McCleary disagreed with the phone ban but was primarily frustrated with the personal electronic aspect, as she used to use her iPad to complete online assignments and study. It was also a better alternative to the Chromebooks because she could multitask and take notes on it. Now, some adjustments have been made to where students may use personal laptops, iPads, Chromebooks, and Kindles for educational purposes, with teacher discretion and permission.
“It’s a change and not being able to use my iPad for school, which sucks because the computers [take a long time],” McCleary said.
With this rule in motion this year, many teachers and students were wondering how this could affect learning in school. The main intention was to focus on learning, but with the budget the district has, especially FHC, our school is not a 1:1 ratio with students to Chromebooks, which makes learning online so much harder. Multiple classrooms have to share one Chromebook cart, resulting in more teachers moving to paper work. McCleary has noticed multiple changes with this.
“The cell phone ban has impacted my learning negatively because not everyone has a school-mandated computer to use whenever I need to do my work, and I can’t because I don’t have a Chromebook to use, so I have to wait until I get home to use my personal device or wait until a different hour to get it done,” said McCleary
Associate Principal Dr Andrew Downs has explained that there have been patterns within the students breaking the rule. He and his colleagues have noticed that once a student gets caught once or twice, they typically don’t get called in again.
“In most cases, when a student gets called down once, we don’t see them getting called down again; we’ve only handed out a handful of [in-school suspensions],” Downs said.
As the school year progresses, students have been adapting more and more, learning that the ban wasn’t as detrimental as they thought it would be and learning better ways to learn without their phones.
“You come to appreciate [the ban], honestly, because [not being on your phone] helps you connect with your peers and it helps you learn good study habits, [by not being distracted],” said Brown.
