As the 2025-26 school year approaches, Centralia High School is preparing to crack down on students using cellphones in the classroom.
During the Centralia School District Board of Directors meeting on Thursday, Aug. 14, Centralia High School Principal Scot Embrey presented a new cellphone policy to the board members with support from District Superintendent Dr. Lisa Grant.
During the presentation, he pitched a simple and straightforward new rule: no cellphones in the classroom. Under the new policy, any devices seen by a teacher during class will be confiscated and checked in to be retrieved at the end of the day. Students will still be allowed to use the devices during lunch and in passing times between classes.
The district already restricts cellphone use by students in its elementary and middle school facilities, but restrictions on cellphones in the high school have been mixed, according to Embrey, with some teachers enforcing classroom cellphone bans while others don’t. He now says the district and staff will put forward an united stance on the devices.
“In the learning environment, there are no cellphones,” Embrey said. “Part of the kind of campaign or communication that we're going to talk about when we roll this out, is it's basically, we see it, we take it. If it's in the classroom, if it's out, it doesn't really matter the reason.”
During the board meeting, Embrey and Grant each testified to the need for a more strict and straight forward policy on cellphones. Embrey says the push for the policy came largely from the staff who see the devices as a major distraction. Grant added that phones are the origin of many of the disciplinary issues administrators deal with whether it's cheating, bullying, inappropriate content or something else.
During the presentation, the two administrators also pointed to growing evidence that shows restrictions on cellphones in the classroom are shown to be a benefit to students and school districts. Board members appeared largely supportive of the new policy as administrators and board members alike agreed that it was important to teach students how to manage their use of their devices and not let them district them from their work.
While school officials say the demand for the new policy came from within the district, it follows a national trend that has already begun to take hold in the state. The Chehalis School District has a similar policy in place already. The Washington state Legislature has also heard multiple bills proposing pilot programs or new restrictions on cellphones in public schools.
According to reporting from Axios, roughly half of states in the U.S. have either passed or are considering passing some sort of restrictions on cellphone use in public schools. The Associated Press has even pointed to it as one of the few issues that is popular across the political divide with both red and blue states establishing the policies.
Centralia school administrators say they expect to see resistance to the policy from students to start, but hope that by the end of the year they will see less phone use in district classrooms and improved performance in the classroom.
“We'll know it's working well as we go month to month, as we get to the middle of the year, end of the year, it's gonna go down and down and down,” Embrey said. “And then that will become, you know, basically just a habit of students as they roll into ‘25 and ‘26 and ‘27.”
