A Bluegrass State bill could soon ban student cell phone use in classrooms across Kentucky, allowing exceptions only for instructional purposes and emergencies. 

“You can’t teach kids that are distracted,” State Rep. Josh Bray, a Republican who introduced the bill, said Sunday on “FOX & Friends Weekend.”

Bray touted the effort as a “common sense” approach to curtailing the increasingly problematic use of social media and texting during school hours. The push, he said, came after hearing from teachers who said the distractions make their jobs more challenging. 

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“I was at a middle school basketball game, and I had a teacher approach me, and they talked about the need to get cell phones out of classrooms. They said it’s a tremendous distraction, especially post-COVID. We faced a number of issues in the education space, post-COVID. We’ve seen a drastic increase in mental health issues. We’ve seen an increase in suicides. Test scores aren’t where we want them to be, so we just thought that this was common sense,” Bray said. 

The proposal echoes a measure enacted to curtail cell phone use in Florida classrooms last year, a measure some say has helped students converse with each other more often and cut down on distractions.

“They’ve had a tremendous response from their districts, from their teachers,” Bray said.

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“Some districts have gone even further, and they’re banning usage all throughout the day,” he added.  “And there’s some anecdotal data that shows how effective this has been.”

A North Carolina middle school also took a different approach to help cut out distractions, removing mirrors from the girls’ bathrooms to prevent students from making TikTok videos during the day.

“It’s pretty clear our students face enough, particularly post-COVID with everything going on,” Bray said. “We just need to end the distractions.”

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Bray’s proposed bill would require each school district’s board of education to adopt policies that get cell phone distractions out of the classroom and include those policies in the district’s written standards of student conduct.

Students who violate such policies will be subject to discipline in accordance with board policies.  

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