After school cellphone bans passed many statehouses with bipartisan support in recent legislative sessions, state lawmakers are turning to legislation governing how long students should spend looking at screens.

This year, four states passed laws restricting or regulating screen time for students from childcare through fifth grade.

Iowa capped digital instruction at 60 minutes per day for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, with exceptions for special education, assessments and computer science. 

Utah lawmakers this year directed the state education board to develop grade-specific technology rules, including restrictions on screen time in kindergarten through third grade and prohibiting one-device-per-student ratios in elementary school. 

A new Tennessee law requires every district and charter school serving K-5 students to adopt an age-appropriate digital device policy to minimize unnecessary screen time. And Alabama this year adopted a law requiring the establishment of screen time standards and teacher training for childcare facilities, prekindergarten and kindergarten.

But a Missouri bill to require school districts and charter schools to adopt screen time policies for kindergarten through fifth grade and an Oklahoma proposal to cap screen time at 60 minutes per day for students in prekindergarten through fifth grade both failed. 

The Missouri bill easily cleared the House but stalled in the Senate. Despite passing the Oklahoma House unanimously, that bill stalled in the Senate and faced pushback from a technology industry trade group. The Software and Information Industry Association referred to the bill as an “unfunded mandate” and said it would increase administrative burdens and undermine workforce readiness.

Some school districts also are adopting screen time policies for the upcoming school year. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school district,  is the one of the first to impose systemwide, grade-by-grade instructional screen limits.

Los Angeles has barred instructional screen time before second grade. The district also set limits that increase incrementally to 60 minutes per subject each week for middle school students and 90 minutes per subject each week for high school students.

Inanna Balkin, a rising high school senior at Amherst Regional High School in Massachusetts, told Stateline that “it’s really important for students to learn how to manage their screen time,” and that schools should help students develop habits for managing screen time rather than simply removing access to technology.

“Automatically not having access to your phone or a screen during the day kind of doesn’t allow for students to be responsible for their own management when school is over,” said Balkin, who uses an app called Opal to block distractions while doing homework.

There are no clear national statistics measuring how many minutes students spend using screens for classroom instruction, yet screen time has become a focus of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., including a warning from the surgeon general’s office.

Tracy Weeks, senior director of education policy and strategy at education technology company  Instructure, told Stateline that states should consider metrics other than minutes when proposing screen time policies.

“The policy focus has been on minutes, and that’s the wrong conversation to be having, because not all minutes are created equal,” Weeks said. “Scrolling for 10 minutes is not the same as actually interacting with a tool for learning.”

Virginia now requires public schools to provide instruction about time spent using electronic devices and their addictive potential. Maine is directing the Maine Education Policy Research Institute to study classroom technology use, including average instructional time on school-issued devices and existing safeguards. 

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at [email protected].