Phone-Free School Glossary

• Bell-to-Bell Phone Ban

  Also: bell to bell, all-day phone ban

  A bell-to-bell phone ban prohibits student cell phone use for the entire school day — from the first bell to the last — including passing periods, lunch, and study halls, not just during class.

• BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)

  Also: bring your own device, student-owned devices

  BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) refers to students using their own personal phones and devices at school, as opposed to school-issued hardware — the context in which most phone-free policies must operate.

• Campus Geofencing

  Also: geofence, location-based locking

  Campus geofencing defines a virtual boundary around school grounds so that student phones can lock when a device enters the boundary and unlock when it leaves, without manual action.

• Compliance Dashboard

  Also: admin dashboard, phone compliance monitoring

  A compliance dashboard is an administrator view that shows which students are following the phone-free policy and which are not, across buildings and classrooms.

• Five-Year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

  Also: 5-year TCO, total cost of ownership

  Five-year total cost of ownership is the full modeled cost of a phone-free program over five years — including hardware, annual replacements, and staff labor — used to compare phone pouches against software on equal footing.

• Instructional-Time Phone Restriction

  Also: class-time phone ban, during-instruction restriction

  An instructional-time phone restriction prohibits cell phone use during class but may permit it during passing periods, lunch, or free periods — a narrower scope than a bell-to-bell ban.

• OS-Level Phone Locking

  Also: operating-system locking, device-level locking

  OS-level phone locking restricts a phone's apps and functions at the operating-system layer of the device itself, rather than inside a single app the student controls.

• Phone Pouch

  Also: magnetic pouch, Yondr pouch, lockable pouch

  A phone pouch is a lockable fabric pouch that holds a student's phone during the school day and is opened with a magnetic unlocking base, used to physically prevent phone access on a phone-free campus.

• Phone-Free School

  Also: phone-free campus, cell-phone-free school

  A phone-free school is a campus where students cannot use personal cell phones during the school day, enforced through policy and a storage or locking method rather than relying on teacher-by-teacher discretion.

• State Phone-Free School Law

  Also: state cell phone law, phone ban legislation

  A state phone-free school law is legislation or an executive order that requires or directs public schools in a state to restrict student cell phone use, ranging from full bell-to-bell bans to guidance for local boards.

Looking for what the law says in your state? Phone laws by state. For longer reading, every guide, by topic.