On Sept. 23, Governor Gavin Newsom passed the Phone-Free School Act, requiring California school districts to devise policies to restrict phone usage in schools by July 1, 2026. California school districts like the Los Angeles Unified School District have voted to ban smartphone and social media use during the school day, the act going into effect in 2025. Anthro interviewed Palo Alto Unified School District Superintendent Don Austin over Google Meets on Oct. 3 about how the act would impact schools in Palo Alto.
Listen to the audio for the full interview.
If phone restrictions are implemented in the district, how do you think that would work? We’ve seen in schools all across California it’s being implemented in many different ways.
“Actually, I’m not even sure if we need a policy change, to tell you the truth, because we have cell phone policies that allow for teacher discretion. And again, every grade level is different. So at the high school [level], there’s clearly teacher discretion right now to tell students either put your phones away or put them in this pouch, whatever that already exists. So that would be a form of a restriction that some school districts don’t have, that they’d have to figure it out. In our district, it’s not a district policy, but it’s a school practice. The middle schools all restrict cell phones. They already tell you to keep them in your locker. So I don’t see any change coming there at all. Elementary, that’s a little different animal. I think that’s worth having a conversation about. For sure, there are people that want us to have an approach more like the middle school level. There are also people that depend on that cell phone to feel good about their kids’ safety at school. So I think what we need to look at is, how can we have a balanced approach and so it’s not just a binary answer. It’s [not] a ban or not a ban. I think that’s a terrible place for us to start the conversation. So, I mean, that’s the big, big part on our end, starting with, I’m not sure there has to be a policy change at all, but we’re definitely going to look at it. It’s not a rush. It is not the most important topic facing us right now. And we’ve got until the end of the year in 2026 and a brand new school board being elected in about a month. So it probably makes sense to go a little slower.”
How big of an issue do you think cell phone usage is in schools, in California or specifically in Palo Alto?
“So okay, I’m going to separate a couple things. I have very mixed feelings about cell phones in general. I don’t have mixed feelings about social media. As far as the detriment that it presents, cell phones can be managed. You know, we can talk about what makes sense, as far as classroom usage during the time. Social media never sleeps, and it’s increasingly just flat-out negative. And I mean, I was just with a person that works in a space. His name is Travis Allen, and he was talking to me about the Internet, cell phones, whatever, are all fine if you’re getting information that you went there to find, but as soon as you’re getting information pushed to you, your eyes become the consumer, and you become the product of people that are benefiting from you clicking on stuff or having stuff pushed to you. That’s not okay. Now you went from being in control to being controlled. I think social media is masterful at creating addictive behaviors, and I’ve watched some documentaries about that as well where it’s not an accident. They work outwardly to make sure that what you see on your phone is what you’re interested in. And then here’s an additional downside that was explained to me by Travis Allen. I love this. He said, if you’re being sold to and you’re being sold things that you want to see, and it knows this because you hover on an ad and click on that, whatever, then you get, you form this feeling that everybody in the world believes what you believe. They all like what you like, because that’s all you see all day long. And the first time you have a human interaction, and that person doesn’t see it the same way you think they’re crazy, and then you want to fight with them, because how dumb could they possibly be? Right? Social media, like a lot of things in our lives right now, is substituting thinking with just being an observer. I think that’s a problem. Our school district was part of a lawsuit against social media companies. That’s how I feel about it. Yeah, again, people know I’m a user of social media, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see the significant downsides, especially when it gets into addictive or bullying behaviors.”
So do you think something like this phone restriction policy will kind of help to maybe de- incentive students to keep staying on social media. Or do you think it’s a separate issue that won’t be solved with this new policy?
“Well, you know, I think there’s a case to be made either way. You know, I understand the people that want bans and the people who don’t probably see most of this on the same page. It really boils down to your question, Does this really attack the problem or not? Minimally, I would think ‘How far are we willing to go?’ You know, if you want to say, ‘Hey, yeah, I want your cell phone, and it’s that thing. Mine’s pretty huge. Okay, fine. Well, you want my smartwatch. You want the other device that I might have. It hasn’t been invented yet.’ I mean, where does this end? If, if you’re always chasing this thing, yeah. I’m wondering why we don’t have better, you know, geo fences around schools so certain apps can’t make their way in. The technology exists, and that’s much better, in my mind, and more consistent than taking possession of someone’s phones. There’s a lot of issues that people that aren’t school administrators and teachers aren’t thinking about.”
Do you think if there was a schoolwide policy, it would be more of a class-to-class basis, like each teacher has their own policy, like you have to put it away in this place or keep it in your backpack, or, do you think it’s going to be more like some of the other schools in California, where you come into school and you lock your phone away?
“Yeah, a couple things. First of all, not a single teacher has reached out to me on this on either side of it, so I don’t know how the teachers feel about it, and I want to talk to them about that. You know, if they feel overwhelmingly that a district policy that clearly outlines cell phone restrictions and that they’re going to be uniform is a benefit, then we’ll consider that. I didn’t anticipate that, but I could be wrong. But I want to hear from the teachers that I can see as soon as we put something in place that, let’s say we put something in place that bans also phones use during the class day, okay? And now a teacher says, ‘All right, pull out your phones, because we’re going to do this activity, I want to gather your thoughts on that quickly through this app.’ Well, now what am I supposed to do? Discipline the teacher? Or do they have discretion? Either do or you don’t, and right now, they have discretion. I prefer that, but I’m happy to be persuaded otherwise, especially if a lot of teachers come forward and say this would help them. But right now, I haven’t heard a word from our teachers on this.”
Earlier, you were sort of talking about the dangers of social media. So we were kind of wondering, what do you think about maybe restricting social media use in schools, instead of just restricting phone use?
“It’s super hard to monitor. Yeah, that’s where that geofence concept comes from. If there are ways to make it inaccessible, social media, apps during the school day. Yeah, I’d probably be faster to go to that than collecting cell phones. But yeah, we’ll see. Look, the phone is not the issue. It’s what people are accessing that is the issue. If we were able to restrict that access differently, then the phones would become less of an issue.”
I think you’re kind of agreeing with this, but there’s a lot of parents, specifically in California, who are very against any type of restrictions on their kids’ phones, simply because they want to be able to access their kids during the school in case of an emergency [or] a violent event occurring at the school. So I know you were kind of agreeing to this where there shouldn’t be an outright ban, right? But do you think parents being able to contact their students during the school day is important for the use of their phones?
“Yeah, I do, actually. I think some are excessive. You know, when we talk about social media addictions, I think there are cases with elementary kids that are getting multiple text messages in a classroom during the day. We can do better than that. You know, if it’s every day just because they want to do it, that’s probably not great for everybody involved. But you know, I look at the events in Georgia, recent school shootings. No one wants to think about a school shooting. I have to. That’s my job. I have to think about everything that can go wrong. The families in Georgia probably wanted to get a hold of their kids. The kids in Georgia probably want to get ahold of their families, and I don’t know what their cell phone policy is. I have no idea what their situation was, but if it happened here, I know where the public outcry would go on the back end of this. So I just want to be cautious. I think a lot of times people think things are really simple. Just go do this thing, and it’s rarely that simple. You need to have a little more thoughtful consideration about unintended consequences as well.”
And then I know you were talking a little bit about this, like, where does it end? Like, restricting your phone, restricting the watch, restricting the computers, or anything. I know that there’s also some outcry on if the phone gets restricted, the phone gets taken away. Like, regardless of any type of like restriction, it’s like, can the students just switch to using something like their Macbooks, which are just like, I think this goes back to your like, geo fence point. Can students just switch using their MacBook, because MacBooks are able to go into any type of social media stuff like that. Just like your opinions on that.
“Have you guys ever seen the movie ‘Jurassic Park’? One of my favorite lines in that movie is when they’re trying to figure out, like, how they ended up with dinosaurs that could mate when they thought they made them all single sex. And they say life finds a way. Anything we try to restrict, people are going to find their way around it. This is common sense. As a high school principal for a long time — I’ve been a superintendent for a long time. It’s true of students. It’s true of the employees, also. They’re just going to find a way around it. I’m much more interested in trying to educate about appropriate balance and not letting social media control you if you go there. How do you set restrictions? How do you know when a place is becoming unhealthy for you? I think that’s more of our role than trying to pull phones out of backpacks and police every way people try to get around it, but yeah, again, I’m not sure I’m in the majority on that one. For superintendents, I think a lot of superintendents are lining up to really deeply restrict access and make that their victory.”
So it’s more of like, just like, educating people on why it’s better to, like, restrict use and kind of keeping it more on, like a teacher-to-teacher basis, instead of maybe outright everyone’s got to follow this one policy.
“You know every community is different. Our community is overwhelmingly sophisticated, able to read, comprehend information. This isn’t a place where you have to hold everybody’s hand. We want people to be critical thinkers, so why rob them of that opportunity? If this is a real issue, and it is, you know. I was on the phone before you guys with Josh Oaks from Smart Social talking about this topic and other things. We’re in a contract with them. Again there’s a ton of parent education, student education. He said our district’s one of the highest engagement clients that he has in this topic. Well, maybe we just need to be a little more focused on a couple specific areas here. But, you know, it’s already going. They’re willing to go and have these conversations. I don’t know. I don’t love the idea of imposing something that maybe we should spend one more time talking about the purpose [of] and how we can attack it.”
Yeah, I’m sort of curious to know, what are your thoughts on, maybe implementing some sort of curriculum in all schools on how to ethically and healthily use technology, because I know we had that in middle school, but in high school, I don’t think we had any sort of curriculum on that.
“Yeah, you know, the state legislature keeps trying to add additional graduation requirements, and I think they’ve missed on almost every single one of them. I think local governments, locally elected school boards and local communities should be deciding what’s taught in classes. Now, if I got to be a state legislator and could create my own course that I think is important, it’d be very much something around ethics. Because AI is not a problem, the ethics around AI are a problem. Social media isn’t necessarily the problem, but there are ethical issues within social media. AI is not going to create cheating. In fact, Stanford just told me that their early research is that AI is not only not increasing cheating behaviors, but it’s a slight decline, but they said, at a minimum, you could say it’s flat. Okay, that was interesting. But what was more interesting is that they said 60 to 70% of students report cheating behavior in the first place. That’s staggering to me. So the problem isn’t AI. The problem is cheating behaviors. But what is everyone trying to do right now? How do we restrict AI? AI has never been the problem. Sixty to 70% of students have cheating behaviors.”
So I know, obviously you can’t necessarily make it a graduation requirement to take an ethics course, but is it something you would consider maybe in an Advisory class, or maybe a school-wide assembly, something like that, that just kind of helps students, at least, get an introduction into the ethics that you’re talking about.
“I work with Susan Leotta from Stanford. She’s their head of ethics, and we’re discussing some places where we can introduce it. I would not introduce it as a graduation requirement, I want to make that clear, but if a teacher was interested in creating a class, I’d still love to talk to them about it. Our courses aren’t developed by superintendents. They’re developed by teachers. And if there’s a teacher that had an interest, I’d have a lot of interest, personally, and work through what that could look like. I think it could be a fascinating course.”