Florida’s school cellphone ban stokes controversy in Parkland

More than 200,000 students at one of the largest school districts in the nation have started the school year with a major change: no cellphone use allowed.

“I’ve noticed such a big difference in the classroom. Students talk more. They actually do their work,” Dominique Mayorga, a language arts teacher who installed a sleeve in her classroom that can hold around 30 phones, said.

Over the summer, Florida’s Broward County Public Schools made the decision to ban students from using cellphones and other communication devices for the entire school day. Students are to keep phones off or in airplane mode the entire day and relinquish them to designated areas, like Mayorga’s sleeve, during class, or face disciplinary action. The new policy, which went into effect in August, quickly sparked debate among parents, students, teachers and administrators.

Critics of the ban have raised safety concerns, arguing it could hamper communication during an emergency. It’s a particularly sensitive topic in Broward County after the 2018 Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which is in the district.

Response to the ban was quick. Parents flooded the comments of posts the district made on X and Instagram announcing the changes, circulating a change.org petition asking for the school to reverse the ban. It has garnered over 25,000 signatures.

Carline Dumoulin, a mother of two students at Broward’s Cypress Bay High School, is one of those signatories. Cellphones, she said, are “the way for us to communicate if there’s any type of problems going on at school, and I don’t need to go into the details — we know what’s happened before.”

Students “need to be able to communicate with the outside world, with their parents or their guardians, to let them know that there’s a problem,” Dumoulin added.

For many at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, cellphones were an important resource during the shooting. Some students used their devices to text loved ones, post live updates or even take pictures and videos, some of which would later be shown at the gunman’s trial, where he was sentenced to life in prison for killing 17 students and faculty at the school.

Broward County school board member Lori Alhadeff said she understands parents’ safety concerns all too well: She lost her 14-year-old daughter Alyssa in the Parkland shooting.

But Alhadeff supports the ban,…