Rancho High School teacher Reuben D’Silva started the 2025-2026 school year impressed by his students’ performance in the classroom.

The difference? No phones.

“Just these first two weeks I’ve been able to see such a difference in productivity levels, students are turning in work at higher rates compared to this time last school year because they have the phones away,” D’Silva said.

Months prior, D’Silva in his role as a state assemblymember voted in support of SB444, which requires Nevada school districts to adopt policies regarding cellphone use in schools. Several large school districts such as Clark, Washoe and Nye already had policies in place prior to the bill’s passage, but SB444 helped standardize and require the policy statewide.

Nevada is one of 17 states and the District of Columbia starting this school year with new restrictions on phones in classrooms, bringing the total to 35 states with laws or rules limiting phones and other electronic devices in school. This change has come remarkably quickly: Florida became the first state to pass such a law in 2023.

Sen. Angie Taylor (D-Reno), who sponsored the bill and is the former president of the Washoe County School Board, said the need for the bill was obvious.

“There's just a growing amount of research that demonstrates the [negative] impact of cellphone usage in schools,” Taylor said. “Having been on the school board, knowing that the problem has been elevating across the years, we had an opportunity to have a bill to do something that's going to help students in school.”

The bill passed unanimously in the Legislature, and Democrats and Republicans in other states have taken up the cause, reflecting a growing consensus that phones are bad for kids' mental health and take their focus away from learning, even as some parents say the issue is less clear-cut.

“I feel like we’re only treating a symptom, rather than the root causes of student disengagement and distraction,” said Rebeccca Dirks Garcia, a Clark County School District (CCSD) parent and administrator of a popular CCSD parents Facebook group. “Some students feel like they’re going to school to just sit in a classroom, if you take their phones they’re gonna find another way to get distracted.”

Dirks Garcia, who has two kids in different CCSD high schools, said schools also need to look at how students are engaging in the classroom. 

Elizabeth Adler, a Spanish teacher at Sunrise Mountain High School in Las Vegas, offers students high-quality fidget toys in exchange for phones upon entering her classroom.

“It’s only fair to replace the behavior,” Adler said. “A lot of times the cellphone behavior, it's a subconscious thing you do, you pick it up and you touch it just to look at what time it is, to click a button, to open apps, to close apps. It's become part of us.”

Evana Lan, a student at Reno High School in the Washoe County School District, said she appreciated that Nevada’s law allows for flexibility.

“Circumstances are so unique, so a blanket policy wouldn’t work,” Lan said. “This is why I like the guideline of having a policy but districts and schools being able to determine the exact circumstances to their own discretion.”

Lan noted enforcement in her school is left up to the teachers. In her math class, she temporarily exchanges her phone for a calculator, while in other classes she stores it in a pouch or in her backpack.

This class-to-class difference was a concern of Dirks Garcia’s when the policy was being rolled out across the state.

“From a statewide perspective, Nevada leaves a lot of things to the district and in big districts like CCSD a lot gets left to the schools,” Dirks Garcia said. “When it passes people think one big transition is coming, but 100 different things get rolled out and the main objective is never met.”

Taylor said there was a reason behind leaving the policy specifics up to the districts — Nevada’s 17 school districts are diverse and each have their own needs.

“My belief is that school boards, because they operate in that district, they are closer to the issue, to the challenge, and so they know the nuances that will best fit their situation,” she said.

Lan says even though policies are different across classrooms, the consequences for violating them stay the same at her school.

At Western High School, English Language Learner strategist Anna Torres Ocasio McAndrew says support from school administration and setting an expectation of no phones as soon as the school day begins is what helps teachers the most. 

“As soon as [students] come in, the principal will make an announcement, ‘Welcome Warriors,’ and he'll proceed and say, make sure your phones are in your pouches, and visible on your desk. Teachers, make sure you go around and make sure that the phones are put up and get ready to learn,” Ocasio McAndrew said.

D’Silva says support from administrators and hall monitors gives the policy “teeth” in his school.

“If a student is on [their] phone or disregards the teacher, we can call a hall monitor to come down and confiscate the phone immediately,” D’Silva said. “I'm seeing that so far, the district and local school administrations have been supporting teachers on this.”

Some parents, though, want constant contact with their child.

“One of the challenges is people frequently say you should not need to reach your child during the school day. I tell my kids, 'Don't text me and listen to school personnel in an emergency.’ But there are other parents who don't feel that way,” Dirks Garcia said. “Should students be focused on learning? Absolutely. But when it comes to communication and keeping your kid safe? There's a lack of trust.”

Many parents echo this — generally supporting restrictions but wanting a say in the policymaking and better communication, particularly about safety — and they have a real need to coordinate schedules with their children and to know about any problems their children may encounter, said Jason Allen, the national director of partnerships for the National Parents Union.

Research remains in an early stage.

Some researchers say it's not yet clear what types of social media may cause harm, and whether restrictions have benefits, but teachers "love the policy," according to Julie Gazmararian, a professor of public health at Emory University who does surveys and focus groups to research the effects of a phone ban in middle school grades in the Marietta school district near Atlanta.

"They could focus more on teaching," Gazmararian said. "There were just no disruptions."

Another benefit: more positive interactions among students. "They were saying that kids are talking to each other in the hallways and in the cafeteria," she said. "And in the classroom, there is a noticeably lower amount of discipline referrals."

Nala Williams, a student at Cimarron-Memorial High School in the Clark County School District, said she’s seeing similar results in Nevada.

“It definitely helps us be a little more social,” Williams said. “I think I've talked to the most people that I'm not directly friends with this year compared to last year, just because you don't have that free time to go on your phone.”

Williams said it’s so easy for students to look up answers on Google or ChatGPT, which is bad for the future of education because students can cheat on assignments and papers but not gain any skills. She says phones can also exacerbate mental health issues, which along with distractions and cheating are issues she identified in a recent paper for her sociology class about phones in classrooms.

“I think it’s really important that the phone ban is here, because it takes away those three things for the most part, and hopefully [they’ll] be gone completely in a couple of years,” Williams said.

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The Associated Press contributed to this story.