As shots rang out Wednesday morning at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, terrified students pulled out their cellphones. Through frantic texts that they feared would be their final messages, they told their families that they could hear gunshots, that they were scared and that they loved them.
Screenshots of their texts circulated on social media after the shooting, which killed two students and two teachers and injured nine other people. The texts have reignited a long-running debate: Should schools allow cellphones, which can be a major distraction in class but a lifeline during emergencies?
There is clear research showing the detriments of smartphones, particularly to adolescents. The phones and their addictive social media platforms have been tied to poor sleep, cyberbullying and unhealthy body esteem in young people. A 2023 study by technology and media research group Common Sense Media found that adolescents are overwhelmed with notifications from their smartphones — receiving a median of 237 alerts daily, with about a quarter arriving during the school day.
At least 13 states have passed laws or put policies in place that ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools statewide, or recommend that local districts enact their own restrictions, according to Education Week. Individual school districts, both large and small, have also implemented policies that limit or prohibit cellphone use, with a growing number relying on magnetically sealed pouches to lock up the devices so students aren’t tempted to check them when they should be learning.
Being able to get in touch if there’s an emergency is the top reason parents say they want their children to have access to phones at school, according to a National Parents Union survey conducted in February of more than 1,500 parents of K-12 public school students.
Yet fatal shootings in schools are exceedingly rare. And while parents may want to reach their children should there be shots fired or another emergency, phones “can actually detract from the safety of students,” according to Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a consulting firm that focuses on school security and emergency preparedness training.
“If you have 20 kids in a classroom and they’re texting, calling parents, livestreaming — they’re not paying full attention to the directions of adults and not being fully situationally aware of things they may need to quickly do to save their lives,” he said. “You have seconds to follow directions and move locations.”
Phones can create other hazards too, he said. Their ringing or buzzing might draw unwanted attention to classrooms where people are trying to hide. Having an influx of students making calls home or to 911 at the same time can overload phone networks or the emergency response system. And having parents race to school to check on their child after they receive an alarming text could block traffic, meaning emergency personnel can’t get in or out.
“Parents are going to come to the school anyway, but cellphones expedite that flocking to the school,” Trump said, calling phones more of “an emotional security blanket for parents” than something that actually makes kids safer.
Still, Apalachee High School students who weren’t able to contact their parents immediately said they felt an extra layer of fear during the shooting.
“I was shaking, scared, and I didn’t have my phone on me, and I couldn’t communicate with my mom for a half an hour,” one teenager who did not identify himself told NBC affiliate WXIA of Atlanta. “I didn’t know what was going to happen because you could hear the gunfires right down the hall. I don’t know if it was, like, the last chance I had to talk with her.”
According to Apalachee’s student handbook, cellphones are permitted in class under direct supervision of teachers as long as they are being used for instructional purposes. In between classes and at lunch, students are allowed to “use their electronic devices appropriately,” the handbook says.
Kim Whitman, co-founder of the nonprofit advocacy group Phone-Free Schools Movement, said the school shooting was “every parent’s worst nightmare.” But she said phones in schools are not where efforts should be focused to prevent more tragedies.
“We must address school shootings,” she said. “We can’t allow this to continue. But they are separate — they are an unrelated issue to phone policies.”
Robin Gurwitch, a psychologist who specializes in supporting children after disasters and other traumas and a professor in the Duke University department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said she understood why parents want to be able to communicate with their children during such an event.
Still, she said, “it is a very sad state of affairs that one of the reasons we think we have to have phones in the classroom is so when the shooting starts, students can call and say goodbye or let people know that this is happening.”
Amy Klinger, director of programs for the national nonprofit organization Educator’s School Safety Network, said there is room for compromise.
She pointed to schools that have decided to keep phones in locked pouches with students in their classrooms as opposed to in lockers or elsewhere in the building, which enables them to be quickly unlocked by their teachers should they need to.
“Every parent that gets a text that says ‘I’m OK’ does not have to go through the trauma that people had to go through on Wednesday,” Klinger said, referring to families who did not immediately hear from their children at Apalachee.
That’s what middle schools in Marietta, Georgia, about two hours west of Apalachee, do. Every classroom has a device to unlock the pouches that hold cellphones when it is safe to do so in the event of an emergency.
The decision was made after consulting with law enforcement, parents and teachers, Marietta City Schools Superintendent Grant Rivera told “NBC Nightly News” earlier this week.
“One of the dynamics they’ve shared with us is that we don’t want students being distracted by cellphones while they are listening to the directives and commands of adults who’ve been trained on how to respond,” he said.
At Apalachee, the activation of an emergency alert system has been credited with saving lives. The panic buttons, which are on teachers’ badges, immediately notified law enforcement that there was trouble.
Smartphones can do that too, Klinger said. But they also are sometimes used to record emergencies rather than running from them.
“We as a society have not done a very good job of really fighting against that notion and saying to kids, ‘You move away from the danger,’ whether it’s a tornado, a vicious dog, a fight, whatever it is,” she said. “Our culture says you run toward it and you film it.”
