Atlanta — Most school mornings in the Wilson home in Atlanta, Georgia, start the same way for siblings Angus and Sam: they’re woken up by an alarm, then a quick breakfast and a last-minute homework check.
One item they never forget is their phones. But once they get to campus at Lakeside High School, Angus and Sam’s screens go dark.
That is because the DeKalb County School District has rolled out the Disconnect to Reconnect program, which bans phone use during the school day. Students are required to keep their phones in their backpacks.
“It creates a much better learning environment,” Angus told CBS News.
Teachers at Lakeside High, the largest school in DeKalb County, say the distractions from phones made it harder to do their jobs.
“As a teacher, right, you fight for their attention all the time, and with cellphones, it felt like a losing battle,” social studies teacher Lauren Boggs told CBS News. “…I saw the grades really decrease. It was really different supporting them. It was really a losing battle, it was hard.”
More than half of the states in the U.S. now have laws that either ban or regulate cellphone use in schools, according to Education Week. New York enacted a K-12 bell-to-bell student cellphone ban in public and charter school classrooms that took effect this week.
Beginning in the summer of 2026, Georgia will officially be added to that list thanks to a bill signed into law in May by Gov. Brian Kemp, which bans cellphone use among students in K-8 schools. DeKalb County, however, has its own rules that are stricter than the state mandates in order to include high schools in the cellphone ban. Some other counties are doing this as well.
Meanwhile, the faculty and staff at Lakeside say their pilot program is creating instant results.
“We saw a big change,” Lakeside High Principal Susan Stoddard told CBS News.
In the year since the cellphone pilot program was introduced, Stoddard says Lakeside’s student conduct has improved across the board.
“Our students were really more engaged, and all of the areas that were causing disruption, or having consequences or resolutions, all of that decreased a significant amount,” Stoddard said.
Skyler Henry is a CBS News correspondent based in Atlanta. Henry was most recently a correspondent for CBS Newspath in Washington.
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