Clear definitions of phone-free school terminology: bell-to-bell bans, phone pouches, OS-level locking, campus geofencing, compliance dashboards, state phone laws, and more.
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) 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 defines a virtual boundary around school grounds so that student phones automatically lock when a device enters the boundary and unlock when it leaves, without manual action.
A compliance dashboard is an administrator view that shows, in real time, which students are following the phone-free policy and which are not, across buildings and classrooms.
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.
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 restricts a phone's apps and functions at the operating-system layer of the device itself, so a student cannot bypass the restriction by closing or deleting a single app.
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.
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.
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.