Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday called for a statewide ban on smartphones in California schools, joining a national effort to curb cyberbullying and classroom distractions by restricting access to the devices.
Newsom, who has four school-age children, said this summer he would work with state lawmakers to significantly restrict cellphone use during school hours in the nation's most populous state. His directive came hours before the board of directors of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest school district, voted to move forward with its own smartphone ban that could begin in January.
“When children and teens are in school, their focus should be on their school work, not on screens,” Governor Newsom said in a statement.
Efforts to regulate cellphone use on campuses have crossed political lines, with Republican-led states like Florida and Indiana already enacting their own restrictions. New York City has allowed individual campuses to set their own policies since repealing its blanket cellphone ban in 2015, but Gov. Kathy Hawkle said last month she aims to impose a statewide ban as soon as 2025.
The move in California comes after US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called this week for social media platforms to include warning labels, accusing them of contributing to a youth mental health crisis.
“Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media have double the risk of anxiety and depression,” Dr. Murthy wrote in a New York Times opinion piece on Monday, “and as of summer 2023, the average daily usage time for this age group was 4.8 hours.”
Many California school districts already restrict cellphone use during class, but enforcement can be a challenge for teachers and administrators, and loose policies can allow phones to disrupt daily activities.
In Los Angeles, for example, cellphones are banned during class but allowed to be taken out during recess, and school board members said Tuesday they want to ban cellphones and social media platforms at all times from now on.
In the past, some parents have opposed the ban, fearing they would lose access to their children in the event of a school shooting or other emergency, and teachers unions, while welcoming the effort to prevent distractions, have been reluctant to take on the responsibility of enforcing the policy.
Newsom, a Democrat, said he would ask lawmakers to impose stricter limits on cellphone use in classrooms for the state's more than 5.5 million public school students before the California Legislature ends its session in August, in an announcement first reported by Politico.
Governor Newsom signed a bill in 2019 allowing districts to implement cellphone bans but did not require them. In 2022, he signed an online safety law requiring websites and apps to install child protections, then last year urged California tech leaders to drop a lawsuit challenging the mandate.
Both bills passed with broad bipartisan support in the state Legislature, where such cooperation is rare and Democrats overwhelmingly control the legislative agenda.
A Common Sense Media poll last year found that 97 percent of teenagers use cellphones during class, and a Pew Research Center survey released in April found that 72 percent of U.S. high school teachers and 33 percent of middle school teachers said cellphone distraction was a major problem in the classroom.
Newsom, whose two oldest children are teenagers, has personal experience of the challenges of navigating a world where social media and smartphone use have skyrocketed.
Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles last month, Newsom's wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, blamed the tech industry for failing to address social media addiction and other mental health issues among young people that are exacerbated by technology. She said she and her husband once pulled one of their daughters out of school because of cyberbullying by adults, only for the child's classmates to later emulate that bullying.
The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Trustees voted Tuesday to implement a smartphone ban that will affect more than 500,000 students in more than 1,400 schools.
Longtime board member George McKenna voted against the proposal, arguing that teachers already have a hard time enforcing existing regulations and that parents need to be able to contact their children during natural disasters or other emergencies — and he predicted it was only a matter of time before students overturned the ban.
“Kids are kids no matter what era they live in,” he said.
But Nick Melvoin, one of the board members sponsoring the proposal, said the district is helping lead a national movement.
“When the government put warning labels on cigarettes about 60 years ago, 42 percent of adults in this country smoked. Now it's down to about 11 percent,” he said. “I think we'll be pioneers here, and our students, our city and the whole country will benefit as a result.”
Jonathan Wolf He contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
