California's School Phone Crackdown: What It Means in the Event of a Shooting

On August 28, a shooting threat was spread via social media at Birmingham Community High School, in Van Nuys, LA. One week later, thirteen people were shot at a school in Georgia while their peers made frantic phone calls to their parents. Reports began to circulate about the ways in which students had made use of their devices to keep themselves safe.

Then, on September 6, the California Legislature sent Governor Newsom a bill that would require all school districts to limit their pupils’ use of cell phones while on school property. While the bill has been presented as a measure to eliminate distractions in the classroom, some parents have expressed concern about students’ safety in the event of an attack. 

In fact, however, experts often state that mobile phones are not an effective tool in school shootings. When researchers examine their safety implications, they tend to focus on their role in promoting bullying and gang violence.

The Governor, for his part, has dismissed complaints against the bill. “I’d hate to see another school shooting be the reason that we bring TVs into the classroom and then disrupt our children’s education,” Newsom told reporters. “Because, in essence, that’s what a cellphone is equivalent to — bringing a TV into the classroom and disrupting the ability to get quality academic time.”

However, there are a number of ways in which cell phones have helped students during past shootings. In 2018, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas students used Snapchat to communicate the location of the attacker. In Uvalde in 2022, a fourth-grader made a call to the police from her personal phone. And in Georgia this month, students called their parents to let them know what was happening and to say what might have been their last words.

Yet phones may put students in danger as well.  “When kids are locked down, the use of cell phones can actually draw attention to them,” Dr. Kenneth Trump, a school safety consulta, told LAPost.com. “In a room with all the calls, talking, pinging, messaging that’s going back and forth — that can attract a shooter to that area.” Even on vibrate, cell phones can cause noises that may be unwanted by students in hiding.

Dr. Trump says the demand for phones in schools as a safety measure may be attributable to wishful thinking on the part of parents. “Cell phones — understandably — provide an emotional security blanket for parents. What has not been explained to them before a crisis ever happens is that if you’re calling your kid at the school in the middle of an emergency, you could unintentionally be putting them in a less safe situation.”

And phones can enable malicious actors to make false threats and create chaos. In the case of this month’s threats in Van Nuys, cell phones may have turned empty words into a panic. The police have not uncovered any evidence that an actual shooting was planned, and the dissemination of unconfirmed information via social media greatly increased the speed with which concern spread.

Outside of shootings, cell phones raise a host of other safety concerns. “They can be used for cyberbullying and harassment,” says Dr. Trump. “We’ve even seen them used to arrange gang fights in some extreme situations.” A survey by Pew Research Center found nearly half of students have experienced cyberbullying before. The presence of cell phones in schools can expand the time in which teenagers are subject to harassment, and allow it to follow them into their classes.

Ultimately, each school board must come up with policies which balance the dangers posed by cell phones against the speed of communication that we have come to expect between parents and children. AB 3216 leaves it to the local level to decide what measures are best suited to their local environments. It will be administrators’ responsibility to decide on policies which limit the distracting effects of mobile phones while maintaining student safety.