Editorial: SC needs a real school cellphone ban, with real enforcement (2024)

In the four and a half years since Gov. Henry McMaster called on the Legislature to ban cellphone use in public schools, phone-borne distraction and mental health problems have only increased. So as classes start back across the state, we’re excited about the long-awaited ban that S.C. Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver finally sold lawmakers this summer.

We just wish it were already in place. Actually we wish a lot more about how it was passed, but this is the big one.

As The Post and Courier’s Anna Mitchell and her colleagues report, the new law that took effect July 1 threatens school districts with losing state funding unless they “implement a policy adopted by the State Board of Education that prohibits access to personal electronic communication devices by students during the school day.”

But the earliest the board could adopt a policy is at its Tuesday meeting— too late for school boards to sign off on before classes start.An Education Department official told school superintendents in June that they should have a “goal” of having a compliant policy in place by January.

In the long run, a delay of five or six months won’t matter a lot— what matters is having a toothy policy— but in the short run it means districts whose current policies don’t satisfy the not-yet-adopted state requirements will have to change polices mid-year.

We’d love to live in a world where that wouldn’t be disruptive— where no parents would let their kids take a phone to school— but that’s not the world we live in. Just the opposite, in fact: The biggest problem schools have had with trying to limit student cellphone use has been pushback from parents.

Ms. Weaver told the Board of Education in June that she wanted to help teachers and schools by essentially being the heavy here: allowing them to blame her for telling parents their kids can’t use cellphones at school. Indeed, that’s always been a big theoretical benefit to a statewide ban, because most districts already have some restrictions on phone use, although it’s not clear how many buck parental pressure and actually enforce those bans.

Ms. Weaver, like Mr. McMaster before her, favors giving districts flexibility, but that’s not what we need, at least not without a baseline. That’s what we already have. What we need are clear parameters that spell out when at a minimum phones are prohibited; we would favor the entire school day, because of the needless disruption the addictive devices pose to normal human interactions, but we’d settle for a ban on using them while students are in class. The state policy also needs to spell out enforceable punishments for students who violate it.

The problem with leaving that to schools or teachers isn’t that we don’t trust them. It’s that Ms. Weaver is right about teachers needing backup. For that to work, though, the state can’t simply tell districts they have to have some sort of vague prohibition that no one pays attention to. It needs to say no cellphones when students are supposed to be learning, with sanctions for schools that don’t actually enforce the ban.

The proviso gives the Board of Education broad authority, so we don’t see any reason it couldn’t provide the teeth the proviso lacks. It should do that.

Then next year, the Legislature should pass a permanent law. That would require the public hearings that this proviso never got, where parents would have the opportunity to testify about why their children shouldn’t be required to pay attention in class. It also would provide some permanency, which is something a proviso has right up until the moment it doesn’t.

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