A House committee on Monday agreed to give public and private elementary and secondary schools discretion about whether to ban cellphones during instructional time.
The House education committee voted 11-6 to amend the ban so public and accredited private schools may – not shall – adopt policies and procedures governing the use of cellphones. The committee voted to send the bill to the floor.
The bill required those procedures to ban students from using or accessing a personal electronic communication devices during the normal hours of the school day, including in the classroom, breaks between classes and lunch.
There is still a bill banning cellphones in the Senate, but it stalled in a committee over concerns about whether it should cover private schools.
Republican state Sen. Renee Erickson of Wichita, chair of the Senate education committee, has had apprehensions about applying the bill to private schools.
Erickson is worried about mandating state policies on private schools that don’t necessarily benefit from the same resources as public schools.
The president of Kansas Family Voice had similar concerns, although the Kansas Catholic Conference has supported the legislation.
Lawmakers, who on Monday wanted to make the cellphone ban voluntary, said it was a matter of giving control to local schools.
Republican state Rep. Sherri Brantley of Great Bend, the author of the amendment, said some districts already have cellphone bans in place.
“If they already have the cellphone policies in place, they’re already following their own rules,” Brantley said.
Republican state Rep. Megan Steele of Manhattan and Democratic state Rep. Linda Featherston of Overland Park shared support for making the bill discretionary for school districts.
“It’s a return of local control, which has been the No. 1 concern of people I’ve heard from,” Featherston said.
Steele had a similar view.
“We hear a lot in this committee about local control, so I will go with supporting the amendment,” Steele said.
Republican state Rep. Susan Estes, chair of the House Education Committee, thought that the amendment would undercut the whole purpose of the bill.
“I think that undermines the total weight of the bill,” Estes said of the amendment.
In December 2024, the Kansas State Board of Education adopted a report from a task force that recommended school districts ban cellphones during the school day.
The report was not a mandate and only provided guidance for school districts to follow if they wanted to impose a policy governing personal electronics.
Education Commissioner Randy Watson emphasized that the report didn’t reflect a directive for Kansas schools.
He said the report was intended only to provide guidance in helping school districts adopt their own policy.
“We already have a ‘may’ from the state school board that’s out there, and a lot of our schools haven’t adopted the bell to bell that the state school board recommended,” said Education Committee member and Republican state Rep. Kyle McNorton of Topeka.
“Personally, I think this is a public health crisis we’re facing and the data is behind it,” McNorton said.
Republican state Rep. Lon Pishny of Garden City said he would favor keeping cellphones out of the classroom but said that should be up to local districts.
“I’m in favor of electronic device bans during school days,” Pishny said. “We should have never allowed them in the first place, but it’s hard to put that horse back in the barn.
“What do we do next? I think we leave it to the local districts to figure out how to do that,” he said.
A survey by the state Board of Education last summer found that 46.7% of 256 surveyed districts had cellphone policies that varied by grade level, while 26.3% indicated each school had its own policy.
About 24% had a single, districtwide policy that applied to all schools and grade levels.
Just 31.4% of high schools had a bell-to-bell ban on cellphones, while 60.7% of middle schools had a ban in place and 66.5% had bans in place for elementary schools, the survey showed.
A total of 77.8% said their high school students may use personal devices during passing periods or lunch, and 36.4% of middle schools had the same policy in place.
There was an unsuccessful effort during the meeting to remove private schools from the bill.
“I’m going to have to object to this one,” Featherston said.
“When I talk to people in my caucus who supported a cellphone ban, they said it was because this a public health crisis,” she said.
“So, if it’s public health crisis, I think it needs to apply to all school situations.”
Republican state Rep. Rebecca Schmoe of Ottawa bluntly stated her support for removing private schools from the bill.
“Quite frankly,” Schmoe said, “we don’t get to tell the private schools what to do. Public rules for public schools.”
