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Before a ban on cellphones, Jill Haffley said her classroom “was like Vegas.”
“The cellphones were lighting up all the time,” said Haffley, who was a teacher for 30 years before being elected to the Colorado Springs School District 11 school board.
Weary of the distractions, Haffley ran for office in 2023 on a platform of banning cellphones, and the 23,000-student District 11 did it starting in the fall of 2024. Haffley said that if you ask a group of students what it’s been like to go phone-free, they’ll say they don’t like it.
“But you get them individually and one girl told me, ‘Thank you for this. I can breathe again. I don’t have to continue to look at my phone every time I get a notification and I can blame it on you,’” Haffley said. “Our job is to educate these kids and we can’t educate them when their minds are constantly on their cellphones.”
Haffley was one of four school board members and superintendents who spoke to the Colorado State Board of Education Wednesday about their experience with cellphone bans. Under state law, all 179 Colorado school districts must adopt a cellphone use policy by July 1.
That policy doesn’t have to be a prohibition, but many districts are moving in that direction. The state’s largest district, Denver Public Schools, adopted a bell-to-bell ban this week.
Panelists said adults were as much to blame for cellphone distractions as kids. Parents would send their teenagers cute emojis or “thinking of you” texts during class, Haffley said. That was sweet — but also frustrating if 35 students’ phones were dinging during a lesson, she said.
Brian Hill, the superintendent of Mesa County Valley School District 51 in Grand Junction, said students told him their parents were sending them TikTok videos of cats and their athletic coaches were texting them about practice. Haffley said a mother relayed that her anxiety would go “through the roof” if she couldn’t get ahold of her sophomore whenever she wanted.
Parents were especially worried about contacting their children during a school shooting or other emergencies, the panelists said. The superintendents said they understand that fear but there are safer ways of receiving emergency notifications and less distracting ways of relaying messages.
“Without trying to sound like a jerk, we have landlines in all of our schools,” Hill said. “You can call the front office if it’s an emergency and you can get a message through to your kiddo.”
The districts varied in how they made their decisions to ban cellphones and how they explained the reasoning to families. While District 51 relied heavily on research that shows cellphone and social media use leads to increased anxiety and depression in children, District 11 Superintendent Michael Gaal said his district is “not in the wellness game.”
Instead, Gaal stressed the importance of creating a “neutral learning environment” where the primacy of instruction is protected and students aren’t influenced “by one constituency or another.” In addition to banning cellphones, the district banned all flags except for the American and Colorado flags, with exceptions for geography classes, Gaal said.
Aspen School District Superintendent Tharyn Mulberry said his district gathered feedback from the community. Unsurprisingly, it was mixed. He decided it was important not to belabor the process.
“Spending too much time collecting the data and doing community outreach is probably not as necessary as you think,” he said, noting that districts can always change their policies later.
District 51 is doing just that. The policy that the district adopted in 2024 allowed high school students to use their cellphones when they weren’t in class. But this fall, District 51 will switch to a bell-to-bell ban for all grades. Hill said he’s only gotten one upset email.
“This notion that everyone is going to start bombarding your email inbox when you implement it — I haven’t seen it,” he said.
Not that making a cellphone ban work is easy. All four panelists said students will find creative ways around any ban. At schools that require students to lock their cellphones in pouches, teenagers will lock up dummy burner phones or even phones made out of Legos instead, the panelists said. They’ll hide wireless earbuds under their hair or wear knit caps with earphones built in.
Haffley said her nephew told her he could buy a $3 magnet on Amazon that would unlock the pouch that his school uses. She told him he could spend that $3 if he wanted, but if he got caught, the district’s policy would require his mother to come to the school to pick up his confiscated phone.
Consistent enforcement is key, the superintendents said. And the longer the bans are in place, they said, the more a school’s culture shifts from scrolling at lunch to talking at lunch.
“We went back into the cafeterias, we went back into the hallways, we went back into the gymnasiums, and you know what we heard?” Mulberry said. “Noise.”
Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.
Melanie Asmar 2026-06-10 23:42:52
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