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.
Also called phone-free campus, cell-phone-free school
A phone-free school removes personal phone access during instructional time to reduce distraction, cheating, and social-media-driven conflict. "Phone-free" typically means the whole school day ("bell-to-bell"), though some policies restrict only class time.
Schools make a campus phone-free in different ways: magnetic pouches, lockers, classroom caddies, or software that locks the device at the operating-system level. The common thread is that compliance does not depend on each teacher policing phones individually.
Related terms
Bell-to-Bell 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.
Phone 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.
OS-Level Phone 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.
Campus Geofencing
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.