Cellphones out in classroom; real world in

SALT LAKE CITY — "We call it a phone, but it's not. If it were a phone that you'd use to actually talk to people it would be great; instead it's a communication device that you use to not communicate."

That's Utah state Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, waxing eloquent about a subject he's come to know quite intimately: cellphones in schools.

It was his bill, SB178, passed almost unanimously in the recently concluded state legislative session, that prohibits students from "using a cellphone, smart watch, or emerging technology during classroom hours."

Under the new law, educators have the ability to make exceptions — for safety or learning-enhancement reasons — but for the vast majority of the time, students in public schools are breaking the law if they use their cellphones during class time.

The banning of cellphones had been considered by earlier legislatures but didn't go anywhere because the rationale that it was harmful was based more on speculation as opposed to actual data.

Then, a year ago, in March 2024, just days after the Utah legislative term ended, social scientist Jonathan Haidt's book, "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness" was published.

'A game-changer'

The book was on The New York Times bestseller list for 40 weeks. Reviews were both effusive and dispiriting. "Words that chill the parental heart," wrote the Wall Street Journal. "Incredibly chilling … Remarkably persuasive," blared the Telegraph.

Haidt's book "gave us the data we needed; it was a game-changer," says Fillmore.

And not just for Utah legislators. By the time the 2025 legislative session began, "we were latecomers to the game," Fillmore points out, noting that a number of school districts in the state had already implemented their own bans, along with more than a dozen legislatures in states across the country.

"A lot of states were looking for data to take action," he says.

With most of a year to prepare, Fillmore did his homework, speaking to and learning from Utah educators who were already clamping down on phone usage.

One visit was to Granger High School in West Valley City, where the principal had opted for a bell-to-bell ban — no cellphone use inside and outside the classroom for the entire school day.

"This would have been August of last year when we went there," Fillmore says, "the principal described to us how noisy the school was at lunch time. At first he wondered what was going on. Then he went outside and saw that the kids were talking to each other — actually using their mouths to talk, interacting and having fun together instead of just staring down at their palm."

'The virtual world is much more dangerous'

Fillmore has a history of looking out for kids. In 2018, it was his "free-range parenting" bill that helped protect parents from liability for letting their kids do such things as walk home unattended from school, or go to the park or the mall alone. It was the first such law passed in the country and inspired many other states to pass similar laws.

The objective behind the free-range bill is the same as the cellphone ban bill.

"I consider it another step in the direction of letting kids have more freedom and more time in the real world and actually experiencing reality," says the senator. "We put so many boundaries on our kids for the sake of safety in the physical world, but we take the tethers off in the virtual world — here's your phone, interact with perfect strangers — and the virtual world is much more dangerous than the real one.

"In the real one you'll skin your knee, you might break your arm, but in the virtual world you are virtually guaranteed to be harmed, and not by skinned knees and broken arms, but by depression and anxiety and broken mental health."

He continues, "When you break your arm you learn that it hurt so you're going to be more careful next time, but you also know 'I'm going to be better in six weeks.' When you get in trouble in the virtual world, where you've been stalked by a predator or you've been the victim of the kind of cyberbullying that comes from the worst kind of people, it has long term effects that are not 'I'll get better in six weeks and be more careful on the monkey bars from now on.' It can destroy the spirit in a way that has long term nasty consequences."

Keeping cellphones out of schools won't eliminate all those dangers all of the time, of course, but at least it will when class is in session and might help break some habits.

"Technology can be great, it allows us to do a lot of good things," acknowledges the Utah senator who has made it his career to look out for kids. But it also has power over us. "I'm a victim too," muses Fillmore, "I don't like how often I pull out my cellphone because I'm bored. We've kind of trained ourselves to do that. I wish it was easier to just be bored."

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