During the first weeks of the new school year, the hallways of Austin High School looked like they might have back in the early 2000s. Students stowed Walkmans, old iPods, and MP3 players in their pockets. Wired headphones threaded from these into ears. Across Austin ISD this school year, following new state law requirements, personal communication devices of any kind – including cellphones, tablets, smartwatches, wireless headphones, even Kindles – are now banned during the school day, from bell to bell.
So kids got creative. At first, they turned back to ye olde devices like disc players, hopeful that these wouldn’t qualify as the banned “personal communication devices.” In place of taking photos with their cellphone, they brought digital cameras to school. Then, school administrators clarified that they couldn’t possess a personal device of any kind, so those went back into bags.
Those administrators are enforcing the new state law as required by the bipartisan House Bill 1481, authored by Rep. Caroline Fairly, R-Amarillo, which went into effect September 1 and prohibits essentially all cellphones and personal devices from being used during the school day, or even from being brought on school property. Teachers must confiscate such devices when they see them. Administrators only release them back to the student in the front office, often for a fee. Per the district’s adopted policy, exceptions will be allowed for medical needs and special education accommodations.
The school district says the policy is meant to boost focus, reduce distractions, and lower cyberbullying risks. At the August 21 AISD board meeting, Superintendent Matias Segura talked about the new phone ban in a positive light: students were more focused, taking handwritten notes again in the absence of iPads and styli, engaging with each other rather than their phones. “We got to see our cellphone policy in real form, and it was different,” Segura emphasized. “The lunch period at Burnet [Middle School] was awesome, kids were talking to each other.”
Trustee Candace Hunter, the chair of the district’s policy committee, told the Chronicle that the district has adopted the “least draconian implementation” of the phone ban requirement. Phones can be physically on campus, and teachers have flexibility on how they want to enforce the rule (classroom caddies? Just tucked away in a backpack?), but that’s also led students to face varying levels of actual enforcement. “We understand that [they] have been raised in this information generation,” Hunter said.
Many educators like the phone ban. Teachers commonly imposed their own no-phone rule in their classrooms before, which state law now only reinforces. The Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, the AISD 6-12 school, took it a step further and had already implemented a campuswide phone ban starting last school year, before HB 1481 existed. Jill DiCuffa, director of programs at Ann Richards, said the campus experienced a full year of noticeable benefits in the classroom. Their only change in implementing HB 1481 is that all personal devices beyond cellphones are now also banned.
“We got some pretty valuable class time back,” DiCuffa emphasized, explaining that previous issues like student distraction, a lack of peer-to-peer socialization, and frequent social media use in the middle of the school day had improved. “It definitely changed the culture of our campus, and we saw immediate improvements for student health and well-being.”
“It definitely changed the culture of our campus, and we saw immediate improvements for student health and well-being.” – Jill DiCuffa, director of programs at Ann Richards School
Detractors find the total ban on personal devices unnecessary and even dangerous. If a parent needs to contact their child for any reason, they’re often directed to call the front office, which will redirect to the classroom phone, which the teacher will pick up and then hand to the student. That’s more steps than a quick text, and slower. Some students and parents are concerned that, in the case of an unforeseeable situation, their ability to quickly communicate during the school day has been sharply cut off.
At the Aug. 21 board meeting, Trustee Hunter gave voice to those concerns. “As a parent who was texted twice last year … ‘Do you know why there’s a helicopter and lots of police outside my school?’, and I think in a country where the second-largest killer of children behind car accidents is gun violence while they were learning, [that’s] something we need to think about as a society and what our priorities are,” Hunter said. “Because I don’t believe the state of Texas has met that.”
Last Wednesday morning, shortly after parents had dropped their kids off at Barton Hills Elementary School, a man responsible for a fatality in the Zilker area and also shooting a police officer broke into a private home located one block away from the elementary school and within the vicinity of several other schools, including Austin High, per Austin American-Statesman reporting. The homeowner shot the intruder and police apprehended him, but Barton Hills families were shaken by the scene’s proximity to their children and school, and inaccurate safety alerts sent that morning by APD.
The school day at Austin High was delayed because of the shooting, but some students were already on campus. Zach Borja, an 11th-grader at Austin High, said that some had snuck a glance at their phone screens and were alarmed to see the public safety notifications put into effect by the shooting. News of the shooting spread verbally amongst students, but, Borja pointed out, it was against the rules for students to take out their phones to check for updates. “In theory, they shouldn’t be able to use their phone to see that we need to stay inside because there’s a shooter on the loose,” Borja said.
Students are now only allowed to use their school-issued Chromebook laptops, but those come with their own restrictions. Trustee Hunter says the Chromebooks are “really minimized to almost nothing”; many websites are blocked automatically by the district, and teachers have assigned online materials that students can’t actually access in class. Hunter added that fine arts and theatre teachers commonly ask students to use their cellphones to take photos and video of their work during class, reportedly leading a teacher to consider buying students old-fashioned video cameras. “And when kids are doing dance programs and they want to play their playlist, we’ve bought jamboxes, I guess, I don’t even know what. MP3 players?” Hunter said.
The intention of the policy was to help educators, and at face value, a phone ban is far from the most headline-grabbing requirement that the Texas Legislature has imposed on public schools this fall. Nonetheless, Trustee Hunter thinks that lawmakers’ attention could have been spent in more pressing areas last session.
“I think that our state is worried about a lot of things, but sometimes they’re worried about the wrong things. We have not heard one bill about gun control. We’ve not even heard one bill about raising the age to own automatic weapons,” Trustee Hunter told the Chronicle. “But yet, we have this bill that says, hey, kids can’t have their phones in class.”
This article appears in September 19 • 2025.
