On July 30, 2025, the revised version of House Bill 250 went into effect, requiring the Oak Hills Board of Education to revise its own cell phone policies, banning them completely. Unlike the 2024-2025 school year, students are no longer able to have access to their cell phones, AirPods, or any other cellular devices between bells, lunch, or study hall. The real question in this matter is how this is affecting the students and teachers.
With this revised policy, Oak Hills High School aims to create a more conducive learning environment for its students by minimizing distractions. With this in mind, Mr. Price, a teacher and Varsity Basketball coach at Oak Hills High School, stated that his basketball players, when asked how much time they spent on their phones daily, estimated it to be around six to nine hours per day. Mr. Price stated that “I know they don’t like it, and they don’t think it’s useful or necessary, but I think it will help them in the long run”.
There’s no questioning this; overall, these students will benefit from it in the long run by increasing their productivity during school hours and helping them develop more efficient critical thinking and problem-solving skills. According to Mental Health Awareness Education with cell phones, it is reducing the students’ abilities to problem solve, increasing bullying and cyberbullying, and increasing plagiarism and the use of AI. An anonymous student noted that he believes that “It’s good for preventing kids from using AI, and actually resolving their own problems, but I do believe we should have more freedom with lunch”.
Many other students would agree with this statement, but there are some drawbacks for some students when it comes to whether it’s actually helping them get their work done and helping with their attention. When interviewing another anonymous student, asking ‘how has this affected you personally’, he stated that, “I can’t listen to music anymore in lunch or study hall, making it a lot more difficult for me to do work”. Most students, now about 50-60 percent of the student body, sometimes work more efficiently with music, as CSU Global surveys have shown, making this revised policy less effective for some students.
Overall, both students and teachers believe that this revised policy will help them as students in the long run, even with the possible drawbacks of this policy being less effective for some students when it comes to work ethic. Though some think that this may change the bill for the better or worse in the future, such as the rules and discipline becoming stricter or the rules being thrown out the window.