Michigan’s schools are heading into a policy overhaul this fall, and not every district is starting from the same place.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a law this year requiring all public and charter K-12 schools in the state to ban smartphone use during instructional time. The rules kick in when the 2026-27 school year starts in August. Schools get to decide how to enforce it, but they don’t get to opt out.
Private schools are exempt. So are students with medical needs or emergency situations.
Most districts already had rules. Some didn’t.
A research team of University of Michigan faculty from the schools of Public Health, Public Policy and Education spent this school year collecting cellphone policy data on every publicly funded school district in Michigan. They checked district websites, dug through student handbooks, and called districts directly when they couldn’t find answers online.
What they found: 779 districts, or 95% of Michigan’s publicly funded traditional and charter school districts, already had some kind of documented approach by the start of the 2025-26 school year.
Nearly all of them, 94.7%, had a district-wide mandate in place. Just 2.5% left it up to individual schools to set their own rules. Close to 3% had no stated policy at all. Whether those districts were communicating rules through other channels or simply leaving it to teachers, the researchers couldn’t say for certain.
The law forces all of that to get formalized. Fast.
Why this matters beyond test scores
The debate over phones in schools isn’t just about distraction. It’s more complicated than that.
Research cited by the University of Michigan team shows that smartphone use during school hours can pull students away from instruction, drag down mental health, and expose kids to bullying or recorded fights that spread online. A 2022 survey found that 97% of young people ages 11-17 were using their phones during the school day. That’s not a niche problem.
But phones also do real work for some students. Kids monitor blood sugar. Kids call home. In some districts, students use phones to contact anonymous digital tip lines to report threats before they escalate. Any honest policy has to account for all of that, not just the liability side.
Whitmer’s law threads that needle by keeping exemptions in place for medical and emergency use, while giving districts the flexibility to figure out the mechanics, whether that means pouches, locked cubbies, a phone-in-the-locker rule, or something else.
Detroit’s piece of this
For Detroit families, the stakes are specific. Detroit Public Schools Community District serves tens of thousands of students across a city where, for a lot of kids, that phone is the connection to a parent working a second shift or a sibling at another school.
A blanket ban that doesn’t account for those realities won’t just be unpopular. It’ll be ignored.
The good news is the law doesn’t mandate a single enforcement method. Districts have room to design something that fits their community. The hard part is doing that work before August, while also running summer school, handling budget shortfalls, and staffing for fall.
DPSCD has not yet released a public plan for how it will comply.
What the data gap means
The fact that nearly 3% of Michigan districts had no documented policy heading into this school year is worth sitting with. These aren’t tiny distinctions. No policy means inconsistent enforcement, confused parents, and students who don’t know what the rules are until they get in trouble.
Reporting by BridgeDetroit on the University of Michigan research highlights how uneven the baseline is across the state, which makes the August deadline feel more urgent than a lot of districts seem to realize.
The researchers are framing this as an opportunity to study which policies actually work, and that framing is useful. Michigan is, essentially, running a statewide natural experiment. Some districts will go with hard locks. Others will try the honor system. Some will vary rules by grade level.
By this time next year, there should be real data on what held up and what didn’t.
What to watch
The Michigan Department of Education hasn’t released detailed guidance on compliance yet. Districts need something concrete before they can finalize handbooks and train staff for August.
Watch for what DPSCD and other large urban districts announce over the summer. Their choices will shape what thousands of Detroit students experience every school day starting in the fall. Not a small thing.
