Howard County believes that the new phone policy can improve focus in class, but does the Long Reach community feel like it was worth sacrificing phones for it?

On March 3, 2025 the new phone policy was originally enforced across all of Howard County because of issues concerning safety happening in the past during school hours. This change in the code of conduct impacts students from kindergarten through twelfth grade and it is now mandatory for teachers and administrators to enforce these rules.

Before the ban, the main issue that Howard County was seeing after COVID-19 was the daily fights happening in local middle schools. The National Center of Educational Statistics collected data about the percentage of schools with at least one incident of crime. They discovered that a whopping 90% of middle schools had violent incidents along with 85% of high schools between 2021-2022. Phones were also the key for kids to set up fights and cyberbullying other peers during school.

From the beginning the majority of students have greatly disliked the policy when it was first enforced during last school year and that opinion carried over to this year. However, teachers are also having struggles because of the ban. Teachers have noticed that even if students are not using their phones they will find alternative ways to distract themselves in class.

“Then you have other students that are still not interested in the material, and will find another way to become distracted, i.e. Chromebook,” stated a female teacher at Long Reach.

Another thing that teachers seem to agree on is that enforcing the phone policy adds additional work on top of their responsibilities of teaching their classes. One teacher observed that high achieving kids that want to succeed are more likely to follow the phone policy since they understand how it can help them be focused and aware of their phone usage.

The students who do continue to break this policy don’t care about their actions because they are not experiencing greater consequences. “In order for someone to get more effective feedback it has to be more immediate and it needs to be consistent,” a male teacher said.

After interviewing multiple students–to no one’s surprise–they all agreed that phones have made it more difficult in school in some capacity. The usual points of wanting to listen to music and not having contact with important people (such as parents) were brought up, but one interesting thing that was mentioned was how classes are now being disrupted more because of teachers trying to enforce the policy. “A new problem I have noticed is how annoying it is… [when a] teacher constantly says to get off [your phone],” from a junior at Long Reach.