AURORA | Aurora Hills Middle School teacher Tracie Jansen, for the most part, has her students work on classroom assignments with pencils and paper. The old school technology in her sixth-and-seventh-grade language arts class, free of cell phones, has breathed new life into the classroom, she said.
“My students are more engaged and enabled to access learning without distraction,” Jansen says, adding that the phoneless classroom has done wonders for her students learning English as either their first or second language
Aurora Public Schools rolled out a no-phone pilot program district officials are calling “away for the day” in March 2025.
This change came after state lawmakers passed House Bill 25-1135 last year, requiring all Colorado school districts, not including non-district charter schools, to adopt, implement, and publish policies “concerning communication devices” during the school day. Every district must meet this deadline before July 1.
The state isn’t dictating cell phone usage in schools, but it’s requiring schools across the state to focus on cell phones in classrooms as schools across the country debate, adopt, or turn back cell phone bans.
Marisa Vasquez, operations director for middle schools at APS, doesn’t describe the policy they have been trial running as a “cellphone ban”.
“We have a developmentally age-appropriate policy for kids who are in pre-school through eighth grade, and then we have a separate policy that is applied to our high school-aged students,” Vasquez says. “Some people do call it a ban, but what it means is that the phone is away during the entire instructional day, starting when the students enter the threshold until they leave school for the day at the end of the day.”
Nationally, 77% of U.S. schools say they prohibit cellphones at school for non-academic use, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
A spokesperson for Cherry Creek School District, Arapahoe County’s largest public school district, says that “each school determines the cell phone protocols that best support their students.”
Elementary schools, including Sunrise Elementary School and Meadow Point, insist that cell phones must be silent and stored at all times while students are at school. Violations result in confiscation of phones, which only parents can retrieve, according to those schools’ websites.
Most Cherry Creek middle schools with publicized cell phone policies allow students to use them at lunch or during breaks.
Most Cherry Creek high schools require students to stow and silence phones during instructional time.
Vasquez says APS has implemented a variety of enforcement systems, including Yondr magnetic pouches, which have become popular at comedy shows and concerts, but it really depends on a school-by-school basis.
“[The policy] is school-specific,” Vasquez says. “We have some schools like some of our P-8 schools, that have maybe a hundred kids at each of the middle school grade levels, which is where we most see the need for [the pouch] policy. Some schools manage the ‘away for the day’ policy as meaning phones in backpacks, and don’t have the need for the magnetic pouches.”
Vasquez calls the pouches “an assist” for larger middle schools where there are several hundred students per grade level.
Vasquez said that she has seen a marked change in the students in their pilot schools.
“For students, we’ve seen a very significant increase in their ability to regulate their emotions, and that’s measured by something we call the ‘Connection, Belong, and Regulation’ survey that we have students take several times throughout the school year.”
According to Vasquez and data from the self-reported survey, students reported a 7% increase — from 68.9% to 76% — in positive regulation of their emotions from October of 2025 to January of 2026.
Jansen says that she has seen the difference in her classrooms.
“There are students who are not in a hurry to run out of the classroom — excusing themselves to the bathroom — because they’re trying to see any sort of information that they received on their phone,” Jansen says. “They’re not able to check on any concerning information from a friend or to spread gossip. I’ve noticed a lot of students having less behavioral concerns. A lot of bigger fights, a lot of them, were spread via text.”
Importantly, Jansen says her students are more focused on the lesson at hand.
“Students are more likely to be engaged in lessons and to be more aware for longer periods of time,” Jansen adds. As a teacher, “if you weren’t as quick as a TikTok video, then you had lost their engagement immediately. But a lot of students are willing to go through a lot of harder work to access their learning.”
Jansen says that having her students’ full attention is critical, especially since she teaches multi-language learners and has a mix of kids in her classroom. Most importantly, she says her students have been enjoying reading and talking to each other more since the policy was rolled out.
Although district officials say they have not seen a distinct change in academic performance, Vasquez says that they are hopeful that “with students able to regulate their emotions at a stronger level,” and that the lack of distractions will translate to the end-of-year summative assessments.
Some parents have voiced concerns that they might have difficulty contacting their students in the case of an emergency. Jason Maclin, APS’s director of high school operations, says that they had heard those concerns through their parent focus groups, which the district has used to craft their policy language.
But Maclin says that the district had convened stakeholder focus groups with students, parents, and staff.
“Overwhelmingly, our parents were concerned with school safety and said, ‘we’re very much in support of a distraction-free environment, but we’re not in support of a completely phone-free’ with school safety being one of the reasons,” Maclin says.
Parents reportedly told the district that they would like to have the ability to reach their children in the event of an emergency.
National school safety organizations, like the National Association of School Resource Officers, have said that students are safer when they don’t have their phones during the school day.
A spokesperson for the Aurora Police Department’s school resource officer team told the Sentinel: “The schools put out various messaging to parents with accurate and vetted information to limit the possibility of disinformation being disseminated during an emergency, either intentionally or inadvertently. And phone service and school wi-fi can be strained if many students are communicating at the same time, which can affect the ability and performance of school safety equipment…”
For the most part, Aurora Public Schools officials say high schools have proposed less strict policies for students, while some elementary schools insist phones are off or even stored while students are in class.
Recent research on the outcomes of phone bans is varied. Scholars at Stanford University, Duke University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania published their findings with the National Bureau of Economic Research. The NBER study found several key findings:
- Phone bans work. Teacher surveys in schools that banned phones bell-to-bell found that the share of students reporting using phones in class for personal reasons fell from 61% to 13%. And GPS data suggest phone usage dropped dramatically — a “large and persistent decline” on campuses with bans, researchers noted. These schools saw a roughly 30% drop in total device pings during school hours by the third year after pouch adoption. This change, however, can’t necessarily be read as a direct measure of the change in student phone use, researchers say, since the data also includes use by adults. And pings are often recorded when phones are on but not in use. But the data still suggest that the sheer impact on student use is substantial and that it can be read as a “conservative lower bound” on the magnitude of cell phone policies.
- Discipline worsened, then improved. In the first year of adoption, schools that banned phones saw about a 16% increase in suspension rates — both in- and out-of-school — but this effect faded in subsequent years, researchers found. The uptick likely reflects the fact that many schools took enforcement seriously — and that students turned to other disruptive behaviors.
- Student well-being dipped, then bounced back. Subjective well-being declined in the first year of adoption, then rebounded, researchers found. It turned positive by the second year.
- Academic achievement gains were minimal. Average effects on standardized test scores were “consistently close to zero” across the first three years after adoption, with similar findings across subjects.
- Attendance, attention, and bullying were largely unaffected. Effects on attendance were “close to zero” — researchers also found no measurable improvements in perceived online bullying or self-reported classroom attention.
Still, these findings are just a glimpse into the early days of phone bans, experts say. Phone-free policies certainly do what they are meant to: drive down student phone use.
The APS Board of Education will be voting on approving the student communication device policy proposal to be fully adopted at their next board meeting on May 12, which is available via YouTube or Zoom.