New Jersey Legislature Adopts Bill to Restrict Cellphones in Schools
The New Jersey House and Senate voted Monday to adopt SB-3695, which would restrict students' cellphone use in school. State Sen. Paul Moriarty (D), one of the bill's sponsors, told us Tuesday that outgoing Gov. Phil Murphy (D) plans to have a public signing of it in two weeks. Murphy had set phone-free schools legislation as one of his priorities for his last year in office, Moriarty said.
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New Jersey's action comes as a number of states have implemented similar "bell-to-bell" bans on phones in schools. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) signed SB-139 in May to institute a ban for the 2025-26 school year, with the restriction becoming optional for districts in the 2026-27 school year and afterward. Texas' AB-1481 was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in June. A similar bell-to-bell ban, SB-142, became law early this year in Arkansas, as did AB-2 in Wisconsin and HB-782 in Iowa.
In addition, pending in the Pennsylvania General Assembly is SB-1014, requiring districts to adopt a bell-to-bell phone-free policy, while a similar bill, SB-21, is before the Vermont General Assembly.
Moriarty said the New Jersey legislation was prompted by reading about studies of the harms of phone use in schools, as well as efforts around the U.S. and elsewhere to curtail their use during the school day. "Phones often prove to be a barrier to learning [and] to learning how to socially interact with one another," Moriarty said.
Under the legislation, the New Jersey education commissioner has 90 days from the signing of the bill to craft a policy about student use of cellphones and social media, with the boards of education of the state's public schools to adopt that policy.
Moriarty said the hope is that the commissioner is "as specific and as limiting as possible" while giving districts a bit of flexibility on implementation. That could mean phones are all collected at the start of the day for elementary students, while older students take their phones with them from class to class but don't have them on their person while in class, he said.
The initial hope had been to adopt the legislation in June, in time for the start of the 2025-26 school year, but it was held up in the Assembly, Moriarty said. In hindsight, that wouldn't have given the state's 500-plus districts enough time to comply, he added.
New Jersey Schools Boards Association CEO Timothy Purnell emailed that the association sees the bill as "positively impact[ing] student learning and promot[ing] enhanced mental health, and we are optimistic that districts will retain some flexibility to provide authorized use of internet-enabled devices when a principal or chief school administrator determines there is a need to do so." He said the association is one of the stakeholder organizations that the education commissioner needs to consult with in developing the guidelines required by the bill.