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When Terry Cummings proposed that Washburn District High School adopt a cell phone ban last fall, the assistant principal was met with little resistance.
The school’s administration supported it. Teachers supported it. Even parents broadly supported the policy, he said. And as the school year comes to a close, the rural northern Maine high school’s 89 students have come around to it, or are at least used to putting their phones in a box outside the school’s office every morning.
The ease at which Washburn’s ban occurred is a local example of the sweeping movement to limit cell phone use in schools across the U.S, and the bipartisan support it has generated. More than two dozen states have codified “bell-to-bell” bans that keep phones off and put away during the entire school day.
Gov. Janet Mills last month included the ban in the supplemental budget, putting the state’s nearly 200 school districts on a clock to implement bans by Aug. 1.
Across Maine, that means administrators, school boards and policy groups will spend this summer debating how, not if, they will implement the ban.
What does ‘bell-to-bell’ mean?
Most Maine schools restrict cell phone use in some form. Many require students to power their phones off during instructional time, but allow use at other times, such as between classes or during lunch.
A bell-to-bell ban, as it implies, prevents students from using their phones from the opening bell at the start of the school day to the dismissal bell at the end of it.
Maine’s new law goes as far as to include all “personal electronic devices,” including smart watches.
It’s among the most restrictive ways to regulate cell phone usage, and one not currently widely used across the state. Even Washburn District High School, which still allows students to use phones during lunchtime, will have to amend its months-old policy to comply with the state law.
In a sample survey of 12 school districts in northern Maine conducted by the Bangor Daily News, just one — the Madawaska School Department — reported having a bell-to-bell ban, which Superintendent Ben Sirois said has been in place for more than a decade.
But as the policy has gathered steam nationwide, other schools were already considering adopting it. East Grand School in Danforth was working on a bell-to-bell ban when the proposal was inserted into the supplemental budget, Superintendent Scott Richardson said. The concept was also being considered by a committee reviewing cell phone policy at Presque Isle High School.
A sample policy developed by the Maine School Management Association in coordination with the Maine Principals’ Association and the state department of education suggests that students store their phones and other personal electronic devices in a location determined by an administrator, and not “carry/wear” them during the school day.
That language appears to discount the use of magnetically locking pouches that Portland High School and others have adopted in their bell-to-bell bans. Students close their phones in the pouches in the morning and unlock them at the end of the day with a magnet at the school entrance, but can carry the pouch with them during classes.
Exceptions to the ban include students who use their phones to keep tabs on health conditions (glucose monitoring, for example), those who require assistive technology or translation services not otherwise available, or as authorized by an administrator in an emergency.
The law does not outline how schools should enforce the ban, instead putting that responsibility on staff and administrators. None of the school officials the BDN surveyed outlined how they would enforce the ban, as their districts work through enacting a policy.
The model policy includes such suggestions as verbal warnings and confiscation of the phone or other device for the rest of the day, and in the case of repeated violations, would require “a parent/guardian meeting and/or result in additional interventions or disciplinary consequences.”
“Success of any board-adopted policy in fulfilling its purpose depends on the willingness of school administrators and staff to enforce it,” a note included in the sample policy reads.
Student pushback
The biggest holdover to cell phone bans is — unsurprisingly — students. In a survey of 271 students by the Presque Isle High School committee, almost 92% said they disagreed or strongly disagreed with the idea that phones distract them from learning.
“It’s the most responses we’ve ever had in the history of Presque Isle High School,” Allison Reed, the high school’s assistant principal and committee member, said at a school board meeting in March. “Because [students] are extremely invested.”
And when policies are enacted, students get creative with ways to avoid them.
In Washburn, implementing the ban was “real difficult at first, because you’d see everything,” Cummings said.
Some students have brought two cell phones to school, Cummings said. Others try to skirt the policy by using smart watches. Kolbie Churchill’s classroom shares a wall with the school’s office, where the phones are stored. She said she’s caught students leaning against the wall trying to connect to their phones through Bluetooth.
“One kid just put his case in, thinking that we wouldn’t notice it was just a case without the actual phone in there,” Churchill, a library technician and Washburn’s yearbook adviser, said.
But as the school year progressed, fewer students tried to get around the ban.
“When they saw that we were actually going to follow through on it as an administration, then the kids were actually really good about it,” Cummings said.
The benefits
Teachers broadly support efforts to rein in use of cell phones, which most say are often classroom distractions.
A national survey of more than 20,000 educators led by a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2025 found that “the stricter the policy, the happier the teacher.”
In a separate survey of teachers at Presque Isle High School, 74% said that phones “absolutely” have an adverse impact on academic performance. Social interactions have also declined.
“If you walk into our lunchroom, it’s actually a little bit alarming,” Reed said. “We don’t have to control any noise level because students are just sitting at their table and they’re looking at their cell phones.”
“I do think it’s a plus because the kids aren’t buried in their phones,” Churchill said of Washburn’s ban. “They’re talking more, they’re engaging with their peers more, which is great. [Phones] just take a lot away. They’re worried about who’s texting who and looking at pictures on Snapchat and all of that.”
Less than a full school year into Washburn’s ban, administrators and teachers have seen and addressed many of the problems their policy has created. The benefits, they say, outweigh those.
“There’s going to be flaws with everything,” Cummings said. “It’’ll be a learning curve, but I think once the students adjust to it, they’re going to be fine.”
