Laws like this give the school cover to confiscate the phones and say "talk to your congressperson if this bothers you, my hands are tied".
We're entering pretty substantial numbers of parents who grew up or at least spent their entire adult lives with cell phones and the expectation of constant communication. In fact, from my anecdotal experience, the mid-older millennial cohort is the worst at expecting immediate replies at all hours to any form of communication be it social or work.
One of the things I realize I'm grateful for in hindsight is parents who didn't grow up with that, and had no problem calling the front desk of the school if there was a legitimate emergency that needed to involve pulling me out of school. And it turns out for anything short of that, the news could wait until 4PM.
That seems like one of the easiest excuses for kids to make that is hard to argue against.
Parents calling their kids in class isn't as rare as you might think...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/style/yondr-pouch-school-...
Consider that lots of these people have kids, and when they do, they tend to have a very friend-like relationship with them. Like, they aren't just magically better at this stuff when it's their kid.
These situations are a source of a great deal of this behavior, and the "I can't contact my kid-friend!" anxiety.
Even when I was in high school "I was responding to my mom" was the go-to excuse when caught using a cell phone. I had one teacher who would actually read what was on the screen (this was before locking your phone was common and probably lawsuit material today, but things were different) and call kids out when they were lying. The threat of having a teacher read your text messages was enough to put an end to cell phone usage in class.
The rollout of LTE data and more-modern smartphones + social media during that area was a nuclear bomb on teenagers's ability to focus in hindsight. I can distinctly remember the divide between dumb phones/ipods/early smart phones with slow data, and modern social media + fast cellular data to get around school network bans. Things went from the occasional student thinking they were clever with a wired headphone down their sleeve to near constant distraction very rapidly.
The "innovation" has been basic leadership -- setting policies at the school/district and in this case state level. Consistent expectations make it easier for students to follow the policy. Some schools have gone as far as physically locking phones away for the day, though reading the article it sounds like that's not what Oregon is doing.
I don't think that explains anything.
"I dunno Mom, at the start of 4th hour I put my iPhone in the basket Mrs. Wormwood makes everyone drop their phones in, and when I got it back after class the screen had this big crack in it. It wasn't because I dropped it in 3rd hour in Mr. Lockjaw's PE class while walking and checking Instagram, nuh uh. Can you get me the iPhone 17 Pro Max instead of the iPhone 17e this time?"
And then at conferences (or worse, at the PTA meeting or school board meeting) Mrs. Wormwood is going to hear from Mom how she broke Johnny's phone and cost them $1100.
Now it's state law. It's not Mrs. Wormwood's decision to confiscate phones from students, preventing little Johnny from texting Mama when there's a lockdown, it's the law and her hands are tied.
It's not up to the teachers' discretion in the schools near me.
Some schools may do things differently, but it seems like the one highlighted in the article allows the kids to keep phone in their backpacks: "Rather than use pouches or lockers, students are allowed to keep their phones safely stored in their backpacks"
I didn't see anything in the article or the text of the EO about confiscation. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R5kfyMYsA6cg3VQKutUxLTIGVpI...
The local schools I'm familiar with allowed phones in backpacks, but if you got caught using it during class there were consequences.
Enforcement was never perfect. Some teachers didn't care, some students were sneaky enough to not get caught. Yet the consequences seemed to keep the kids afraid of using phones for the most part (from what I've been told, obviously I wasn't sitting with them in class).
Some of these articles are written like entire classrooms were just scrolling their phones during class? I don't get it. Was there just a total lack of enforcement?