ARKANSAS (KTAL/KMSS) — Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton is working to ban students from using phones in schools.
Senator Cotton is pushing for a bipartisan Focus on Learning Act which instructs the Department of Education to study the impact of reducing cell phone use in the classroom.
“Children should go to school to develop skills like math, reading, and writing that will help them succeed and build healthy relationships with their peers and teachers,” Arkansas Senator Cotton stated in a press release.
The bill would provide select schools with $5 million a year for five years that want to create a phone-free student environment.
The press release details ‘the funding would be used for the installation of lockers or secure containers for students to store their cell phones during the school day.’
He referenced a study on teens’ mobile phone dependence stating 97 percent of children aged 11-17 use their cell phones during the school day with an average use of 43 minutes per day.
The applications that took up the highest proportion of time during school hours were social media (32%), gaming (17%), and YouTube (26%) during school hours.
TikTok is the most popular and longest-duration app used.
“And a generation of Americans are now conditioned to continually scroll through social media apps and are more likely to play games on their phones during lunchtime or free periods than talk to their friends,” stated Senator Cotton.
Senator Cotton expressed that push notifications on phones cause a distraction, no matter how engaging a lesson is. The study reported that half of their participants received an average of more than 237 notifications per day.
