On Jan. 1, 2026, state funded educational institutions were legally required to prevent the usage of cell phones during the school day. This was done following a bill that updated sections 5502.262 and 3313.753 of Ohio legal code.
Previously, Talisman explored the premature phone ban implemented by Hayes at the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year. However, these rules are no longer just school-wide; they are state laws which districts must follow.
According to Fox 8 news, school districts that fail to enforce them will not face outright punishments, but will likely lose out on educational benefits from the state.
Along with this, the rules that students in Delaware face are different than in other counties. DACC and Delaware City Schools face bans described by Education Ohio as “except for limited times,” and while this ban type is common, many other districts such as Cincinnati Public Schools have some listed as “throughout the whole day.” These all day bans are commonly done through the usage of Yondr Patches, which are hand held pouches that hold a phone and can only be opened by certain devices controlled by the school.
Earlier in the school year, it was difficult to understand the effectiveness of the implementation of this ban due to the short amount of time that the ban had existed at Hayes. However, now sufficient time has been given to assess the enforcement of the phone ban by the teachers and administration.
“There is a lot of verbal enforcement but not a lot of actual action,” senior Joshua Blank said. “Mostly it’s just teachers yelling at students to put their phones away.”
This enforcement has been consistent both in action and location.
“They’re definitely enforcing it, mostly yelling at you if you’re in the hallways,” senior Corbin Bulwinkle said.
Others have seen this differently.
“We definitely see the administrators not enforcing the ban in the hallway,” social studies teacher Nathan Weakland said.
The lack of increasing enforcement is likely due to a stagnation of the general usage of devices at school.
For students, it is about the same as it’s always been: there are those who try to get away with it. Definitely, from the start, there’s been an uptick in the amount of kids with their phones walking through the hallway.
However, the current enforcement seems to have met its limit in some capacity, with a small percentage of the student body responsible for the majority of phone usage incidents.
“There’s no change from when we banned phones earlier in the year,” Blank said. “Almost nobody actually gets on their phones, and the people who do get on their phones are the same ones every time.”
This viewpoint was reiterated by teachers, too.
“I think for the most part that it’s the same individuals, they’ve figured out how to get around it,” Weakland said. “You have the random ones that try once in a while to pull it out, but the administration and teachers all understand who the usual suspects are.”
Along with this, concerns were made about the difference in effect based on academic level.
“I don’t think that [the phone ban] has really helped advanced students at all,” Blank said. “However, I don’t know about other students.”
Overall, little change seems to have occurred in the implementation of the phone law beyond Hayes’ premature ban earlier in the year. Staff seems to have somewhat met their limit in the increasing responses to students using their phones. Along with this, student usage of phones seems to have been systematically reduced to a select minority of the school population.
