Metro

While more than half the states have already implemented cellphone bans in school, an effort to encourage schools to voluntarily enact local bans found few takers in Pennsylvania.

Last year, the General Assembly approved a move to allow school districts to use a portion of security and mental health grant funding to pay for lockable bags to store cellphones during the school day.

The state allocated $100 million in school security and mental grants last year, split between 500 school districts, 176 charter schools, 74 career and technical schools and 29 intermediate units.

Eighteen grant recipients opted to devote a portion of the grant funding to support a cellphone ban, according to information provided to CapitolWire by the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, which oversees the grant program.

The Greater Johnstown Area School District was one of the districts that adopted a cellphone ban, using $54,000 in state grant funding to buy the lockable bags and related equipment.

The Johnstown school district previously had a policy against cellphone use in school but the district was still plagued by issues related to students’ constant use of their electronic devices, said Mike Dadey, Greater Johnstown’s assistant to the superintendent/safety coordinator.

“Our goal for this whole situation, to be honest with you, is to try to teach these kids responsibility and responsibility using their electronic devices. When is the proper time to use it, when it’s not a proper time to use it,” Dadey said.

“You can’t be making TikToks in the middle of a hallway,” Dadey said. “You can’t be making TikToks and videos and videotaping disturbances or disagreements or things like that.”

District officials also acted to try to address the mental strain from nonstop cellphone use, said Rebecca Castiglione, the federal programs/student services coordinator for the district.

“It was just constant. And so it was a complete distraction to their brains and their attention and their classroom engagement,” Castiglione said. “It was just all-around, not healthy and not productive.”

The district rolled out the cellphone ban in January, which hasn’t provided enough time for school officials to have academic assessment data to chart any meaningful change yet. But initial reports from teachers and other school officials have been positive and school officials saw less pushback from parents than they feared they might get, Castiglione said.

Removing the cellphones has improved the school environment even outside the classrooms, she said.

“Lunch could be a place where everybody sat and stared at their phones.

And, you know, now not having that phone, they’re engaging with one another again and having conversations and building social skills and improving their social emotional skills and being able to, you know, converse with one another and interact with other people instead of just doing an electronic device,” Castiglione said.

Act 55 of 2024 added lockable cellphone bags to the list of 31 allowable uses for the school security and mental health grants.

The Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency “does not divulge what schools spent their school safety funding on out of an abundance of caution for the safety of the students and staff,” commission spokeswoman Alison Gantz said.