Lawmakers looking to ban cellphones in Texas classrooms

AUSTIN (Nexstar) — On Tuesday, the Texas House Committee on Public Education first laid out State Rep. Caroline Fairly’s, R-Amarillo, House Bill 1481 — banning cellphones in school during instructional hours. Despite being left pending in committee, the bill has broad bipartisan support, with over half the Texas House listed as co-authors.

“[For] the generation I’m in it’s very real, it’s here, it’s now,” Fairly said. At 26, Fairly is the youngest Republican woman in the history of the Texas House.

“The reality is our generation is more depressed, anxious, less focused and more distracted than ever before,” she said.

HB 1481 simply requires school districts to “adopt policies prohibiting students from using
personal wireless communication devices during instructional time,” and to “designate a secure, out-of-sight area for the storage of personal wireless communication devices.” All other aspects of the bill, including the punishment for students violating the phone-free policy, would be up to the districts. For some, that’s still too much overreach from the state government.

“I’m a mom of three kids, two of them have cellphones, they’re an absolute problem,” Tarrant County GOP Precinct Chair Hollie Plemons said during public testimony on Tuesday. “But this is something that needs to be handled locally.”

However, Fairly believes this bill would take pressure off the teachers as students would blame the state government for new policies.

“The amount of reinforcement we have gotten back from school teachers, ISD members, who have said ‘we need help on this. The teachers are [treated as] the bad guys, they don’t want to come back to school and teach because they’re used to taking away phones,'” she said. “This is a practical way for us to come in and support our teachers.”