Many of the questions from our community regarding the new cell phone policy focus on school safety. The following excerpt from the National School Safety and Security Services shares several examples of how cell phones negatively impact school safety:
Student use of cell phones impacts school safety in a number of ways:
Cell phones have been used to make bomb, shooting, and other threats to schools which may require extended time to investigate and identify the perpetrators.
Cell phones have been used for making threats to individual students, cyberbullying, instigating fights, and other school safety disruptions.
Student use of cell phones during an unfolding emergency can distract their attention from safety and emergency response directions being given by school staff.
Cell phone use by students can hamper rumor control and, in doing so, disrupt and delay effective public safety personnel response.
Cell phone use by students can impede public safety response by accelerating parental and community arrival at the scene of an emergency during times when officials may be attempting to evacuate students to another site.
Additionally, experience in emergency management has shown us that regular school telephone systems become overloaded with calls in times of a crisis. While we do recommend cell phones for school administrators and crisis team members as an emergency management resource tool, it is possible that hundreds or thousands of students and others rushing to use their cell phones in a crisis could potentially overload cell phone systems in some areas. Therefore the use of cell phones by students and others in the immediate school community could potentially decrease, not increase, school safety during a crisis.
Cell phone use, texting, and other outside communications by students during a crisis also expedites parental flocking to the school at a time when school and public safety officials may need parents to be away from the school site due to evacuations, emergency response, and/or other tactical or safety reasons. This could delay or otherwise hinder timely and efficient parent-student reunification. It could potentially thrust parents into a zone of potential harm.
Cell phone use also accelerates the unintentional (and potentially intentional) spread of misinformation, rumors, and fear.
Excerpt from the National School Safety and Security Services, https://schoolsecurity.org/trends/cell-phones-and-text-messaging-in-schools/, July 28, 2025