Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order in July directing several state agencies, including the education and health departments, to establish model policies prohibiting cellphones during classroom hours in schools.
On Tuesday evening, Lisa Coons, Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, hosted a town hall meeting at the Chesterfield Career and Technical Center in Midlothian for the public to discuss how those policies should be shaped.
The goal is to reach a standardized set of guidelines that districts can adopt, rather than having policies vary greatly by division and school level.
Currently, Chesterfield County has different rules for cellphone usage at the elementary, middle and high school levels. Across the state, Mathews County prohibits students at any level from bringing phones to school. Hopewell City requires middle- and high-school students to place their phones into magnetically locked bags that render them inaccessible during classroom hours; Richmond expanded a similar pilot program in January.
Coons opened the discussion by referencing data that increased cellphone usage is detrimental to adolescent mental health. Youngkin’s executive order cites survey findings that children who use social media the most often are the likeliest to report poor mental health or thoughts of suicide or self-harm.
Tom Harris, who teaches drama at Short Pump Middle School, said that student cellphone use in class has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic, harming their social and emotional development.
“These kids don’t know how … to interact physically with other people,” he said. “They do know how to get on that device.”
Ryan Abbott, a Cosby High School social studies teacher, echoed the effects of the pandemic and increased cellphone use on students.
“At one point you’d worry about losing a student’s attention,” Abbott said. “Now you have to worry about winning their attention from the start. You constantly are on the lookout for their attention slipping away.”
Despite worries about students’ mental health and attention, teachers and parents raised concerns during the meeting.
Some pointed out that there are legitimate health and safety reasons for students to have access to mobile devices during the school day. One teacher who spoke anonymously said she had taught students with severe diabetes who rely on their phones to help monitor their blood sugar.
Monacan High School math teacher Jen Ray said that phones offer students a lifeline in potential emergency situations.
“We have teenagers who get to school in various ways and we need to make sure that they are safe,” Ray said. “To say 'no cellphones at all' is not reality.”
Another issue brought up by educators and parents was how to manage the balance between policies enforced at schools and rules set at home for students.
Harris added that teachers are fighting a losing battle to keep mobile devices out of classrooms without help from parents. He said he confiscated a student’s smartwatch last school year, then received a “threatening email” from the student’s mother, saying that “I had taken her daughter’s property.”
But parents in attendance were uncomfortable with the way that schools are framing the issue. One parent told Coons she set household rules on cellphone usage with her children, but “everything I try to do as a parent is unraveled once they end up in school.”
“There are teachers… who actually say, ‘Get your work done faster, [then you can] use your phone,’” she said.
The Chesterfield meeting was the last town hall scheduled by the Virginia Department of Education. The department is set to introduce its guidelines next month, with schools implementing them for the 2025–26 school year.
