Bell to bell

What Indiana’s phone law has changed inside one high school

By CHARLOTTE LAWRENCE
Guest Columnist

Around the middle of second block my hand goes toward a pocket that’s empty, and it happens before I’ve decided anything. Then reality hits, I put my hand down and go back to whatever I was doing.

The law

Senate Enrolled Act 78 was signed by Gov. Mike Braun on March 5 and took effect July 1. It bans students from the use of wireless devices in every school corporation and charter school in Indiana for the entire school day, instead of only during instructional time, which is what the 2024 law previously covered. Classes, passing periods, lunch. Bell to bell.

Districts pick one of two choices: either students can’t bring devices at all, or they can bring them but must keep them powered off, stored, and out of sight all day. There are exceptions for emergencies, documented medical needs, and students with IEPs.

Sen. Jeff Raatz of Richmond, who co-authored the bill, told the Indiana Capital Chronicle that in a perfect version of this, “no cellphone will get past the front door of the school.” His argument wasn’t that the 2024 law had the wrong idea. It was that it couldn’t be enforced. Teachers were burning instructional minutes policing pockets, and the new law moves that job up to administrators.

Hamilton Southeastern went with storage. Fifth through eighth graders use lockers. At Fishers High School, where majority of students don’t use lockers, phones stay powered off in backpacks and teachers pick a spot in the room for the backpacks to stay. A first violation means the phone gets taken and you get a detention. Christi Thomas, HSE’s director of student services, told WRTV, “It’s the law, and we’re going to enforce the law.”

What I’ve seen

I’m one student in one building and my observations aren’t data, so take them for what they are.

Differences become glaringly apparent. Disconnected teachers stand out, and the teachers that are passionate about making a difference in students’ lives are thriving. People are more focused. That’s the change I would have argued against in May and can’t argue against now. In a roughly 80-minute block there used to be a point were almost instantly the room quietly came apart. That happens later now. Some days it doesn’t happen at all.

More work is getting done during the day. When there’s no phone to grab, people do the assignment. Study halls that use to be rooms full of silent screens are rooms where somebody actually opens the packet.

And people talk. Lunch got louder. Passing periods got louder. I’ve watched students who have had the same class together since August finally learn each other’s names, mostly because they have no other choice.

I’d be leaving out half the story if I stopped there. A lot of students are angry about it, and plenty are actively looking for a way around it. People are following the rule. That isn’t the same thing as agreeing with it.

What the research says, which nobody is going to love

In April, researchers from Stanford, Duke, Michigan, and Penn published the largest study of school phone bans anyone has done, through the National Bureau of Economic Research. They looked at schools that adopted lockable pouches, using GPS data, test scores, discipline records, and a survey of roughly 108,000 teachers.

Phone use dropped sharply, which you would expect. In the first year after adoption, disciplinary incidents went up and students reported feeling worse. Suspensions rose about 16 percent. After that first year, both reversed. Well-being turned positive and the discipline spike faded. Test scores were the flat part. Average effects came out close to zero, with modest gains in high schools, mostly in math, and small losses in middle schools.

Put it together and you get something neither side is going to quote happily. The policy does the thing it literally says. Phones go away. Teachers get relief. The first year is rough and then it stops being rough. What it doesn’t do, at least not quickly, is move achievement. If someone tells you this law will fix test scores by spring, the research doesn’t back that. If someone tells you it’s damaging a generation, the research doesn’t back that either.

So is it too far?

Extremes usually mean a more precise tool already failed. The 2024 law did fail, not because keeping phones out of class was the wrong idea, but because we asked individual teachers to enforce it one student at a time, and that was never going to hold. Bell to bell isn’t the ideal policy. It’s the enforceable one. I understand how we got here.

But enforceable and right sized are two different standards, and I don’t think the first should quietly stand in for the second. There’s room between a phone in every hand and no headphones anywhere in the building. I’d rather watch a district actually test that room than assume the widest possible rule is the only one that stays standing.

One last thing

To the people who wrote this law: you didn’t take away a toy. You took away the thing my generation runs almost everything through, including some things you would want us to keep doing. Most of us are adjusting. Some of that adjustment has been genuinely good, and I want to be on record saying I did not expect to write that sentence.

Just don’t mistake us following the rule for the experiment being finished, and don’t mistake a quieter hallway for a solved problem. The dependency that’s going to shape my graduating class isn’t sitting in a backpack at the front of the room. It’s the one that answers in four seconds and never makes us sit in not-knowing long enough to learn anything.

We put the phones away. That was the easy part.

Charlotte Lawrence is a senior at Fishers Highschool, and is currently serving as a high school intern for Tiffanie Ditlevson.

Sources

1. Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 78 (2026), signed March 5, 2026, effective July 1, 2026. Coverage: Indiana Capital Chronicle, “Indiana schools face stricter cellphone rules under new ‘bell-to-bell’ law starting July 1,” May 13, 2026. https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2026/05/13/indiana-schools-face-stricter-cellphone-rules-under-new-bell-to-bell-law-starting-july-1/
2. Purdue Exponent, “Indiana’s S.B. 78 expands school phone limits,” March 13, 2026. https://www.purdueexponent.org/city_state/politics/indiana-sb-expands-phone-limits/article_853ab3c5-a4e1-46f7-a698-95507926aaba.html
3. WRTV Indianapolis, “Stricter cellphone rules begin for HSE students under new Indiana law,” July 2026. https://www.wrtv.com/news/local-news/hse-schools-prepare-for-stricter-cell-phone-rules-under-new-indiana-law
4. Hamilton Southeastern Schools, Back-to-School Guide, 2026–27. https://www.hseschools.org/about/back-to-school
5. Pew Research Center, “How Teens Use and View AI,” Feb. 24, 2026. Survey of 1,458 U.S. teens ages 13–17, conducted Sept. 25–Oct. 9, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/02/24/how-teens-use-and-view-ai/
6. Allcott, H., Baron, E.J., Dee, T., Duckworth, A.L., Gentzkow, M., and Jacob, B., “The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches.” NBER Working Paper No. 35132, April 2026. https://www.nber.org/papers/w35132
7. Figlio, D.N., and Özek, U., “The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida.” NBER Working Paper No. 34388, October 2025. https://www.nber.org/papers/w34388
8. Paragon Health Institute, “Banning Smartphones in Schools: Review of the Literature Shows Positive Impact,” January 2026. https://paragoninstitute.org/public-health/banning-smartphones-in-schools/
9. Dingle, G.A., et al., “Tuned In Emotion Regulation Program Using Music Listening: Effectiveness for Adolescents in Educational Settings.” Frontiers in Psychology, 2016. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00859/full
10. “Influence of music on the hearing and mental health of adolescents and countermeasures.” Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2023. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2023.1236638/full