Each period as they filter into her English class, Emilie Throckmorton’s students at Bangor High School must line up their phones within a metal box by the door. As she takes attendance, she checks to see whose phones are in the proper places.
The school’s policy banning students from carrying phones during classes took effect this fall, and Throckmorton says it has improved focus in her classroom and eliminated what had been a constant battle for students’ attention. All Maine public school students may face even stricter bans soon.
Gov. Janet Mills is pitching a bell-to-bell cellphone ban statewide, following the 26 states that either ban or limit phone use in schools, according to Ballotpedia. The majority of those states are led by Republicans including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, while Democratic-led New York became the largest state to go bell to bell ahead of this school year.
Maine’s Democratic governor proposed the idea at her annual State of the State address on Tuesday night, receiving applause from both sides of the aisle. That was a rare moment of unity during a speech colored by Mills’ campaign for U.S. Senate and a Republican walkout.
“We know that social media can be very disruptive, especially during the school day, and disruptive to the mental health of young people,” Mills told lawmakers. “So it’s time to get cell phones out of our classrooms.”
The idea has quickly gone from a fringe issue to one with strong support. Only 26 members of the Maine House of Representatives voted for a Republican-led bill on the topic in 2019. Lawmakers easily passed a measure last year that forced school districts to implement policies on the subject. Mills’ education department gave skeptical testimony on it and associated bills.
One of the Republicans who voted against the proposed ban seven years ago was Rep. Steven Foster, R-Dexter. But he said times have changed since then. A study from Florida found significantly higher test scores in the second year of a ban, and 76% of teens expressed support for some kind of ban in a Brookings Institution survey released this month.
“Proponents of keeping those cell phones available to their children, maybe even to their students, I think are now realizing what that has been detrimental to keeping the students’ minds on the education at hand,” Foster said.
Maine schools were already moving in this direction. An October survey by the Maine School Superintendents Association found that nearly a third of districts in the state had already passed some kind of ban. They are more popular in lower grades than they are in high schools.
Mills’ proposal could irk school board officials who have been working hard in the wake of the 2025 law to create their own policies only to have them supplanted by a strict statewide ban.
“We are frustrated that the timing of this change could force some districts to amend their policies again, in some cases only a few months after adopting new policies,” Robbie Feinberg, a spokesperson for the Maine School Management Association, which represents school boards, said.
Proposals for bell-to-bell bans often face pushback from parents who fear what may happen if their children are unable to get in touch with them during an emergency. A legislative solution would save school boards from confronting the thorny security question. Some reviews have suggested that banning cellphones increases safety during emergencies at school by preventing the spread of panic and misinformation.
Throckmorton said that she would be in favor of such a policy and was glad to hear Mills’ pitch, despite her school’s existing but limited ban.
“If you walk past the lunch room, you’ll see a group of students and most of them are looking at their phones,” she said. “I just have to feel that we are robbing them of the opportunity of really being present and engaging with each other socially because they default to their phones, because that’s what the phones were designed to do.”
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.