Students would be banned from using cellphones during the school day under legislation approved Tuesday by the state Senate.

The vote came shortly after Gov. Josh Shapiro released his 2026-27 budget address. Shapiro posted on social media last week that he wants lawmakers to send him a school cellphone ban bill.

He repeated that call during his budget address Tuesday.

“I am calling on you to put a bill on my desk to ban cellphones while kids are in school. I know there are bills in both chambers to do this — come together and send a bill to my desk,” Shapiro said. “Students need to spend less time focused on their phones and more time focused on learning, on talking to their friends face to face, and on developing the critical skills they’ll need later in life.”

The bill’s prime sponsor, Sen. Devlin Robinson, R-Allegheny, said that the statewide cellphone ban is necessary because local bans have not worked.

“We are spending nearly $12 billion on K-12 education this year alone. But we’ll be flushing it down the drain if we can’t recapture our students’ attention,” state Sen. Devlin Robinson, R-Allegheny, said in a floor speech ahead of the vote.

“Teens spend an average of eight hours on their phone each day. A study from last year found that on average, teens are spending one and a half hours on their phones during school hours,” Robinson said. “That’s a quarter of the school day. We need to step in. We cannot allow our investment into education to be robbed by the tech moguls who are stealing our students’ attention.”

Robinson is the prime sponsor of SB 1014. Twenty other states have already enacted similar bans on cell phones in school, he said.

Among neighboring states, only Maryland and Delaware do not ban cellphone use during the school day. Ohio’s school cell phone ban took effect Jan. 1.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation in January that bans cellphone use during the school day. The New Jersey ban doesn’t take effect until the 2026-27 school year.

The legislation gives school districts until the 2027-28 school year to implement local policies banning cellphone use during school hours.

Numerous studies have linked cellphone bans to improved academic performance by students, reduced behavioral problems and improved student mental health.

The state’s largest teacher union, the Pennsylvania State Education Association has been lobbying for the state to enact a cellphone ban. Teachers’ had initially been skeptical of the cellphone ban concept, out of concern that it would be difficult to “put the genie back in the bottle,” according to testimony by the PSEA’s vice president Jeff Nye at a November, 2025 joint hearing convened by the House Education and Health committees.

However, as evidence supporting the benefit of cellphone bans mounted, the teachers union adjusted its position and began arguing that the state “could and should” put that genie back in the bottle.

“Mobile devices disrupt students from learning,” Ney said at the hearing. “Your average teenager gets 237 texts a day. Think about those pings and how many they are getting during their seven hours at school while they are supposed to be learning.”

The legislation now goes to the House for consideration.