(The Center Square) – The Wisconsin Assembly approved a bill that will ban cellphones in the classroom.
Also approved in the lower chamber are bills to adjust state report card test standards back to prior levels, require cursive to be taught in the classroom, and require classroom materials such as textbooks to be available to parents for review.
The bills will next be sent to the Senate for review.
The cellphone ban applies in the classroom. Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay, said that around 90% of Wisconsin school district’s already have a cellphone policy but the issue is enforcement. He pointed to an executive order from New York and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker touting a school cellphone ban as evidence that the legislation is nonpartisan despite the 53-45 vote that was largely along party lines.
“The average high school kid spends seven to nine hours a day on the phone, which leaves them little time for school work or socialization and it really robs them of their ability to focus,” Kitchens said. “Cellphones are not going away but we need to teach them to use them responsibly.”
Kitchens said the suicide rate among young women is three times as high as it was in 2010, saying social media has contributed to that increase, and that 72% of high school teachers say cellphones are a major problem in their classroom.
Democrats in the Assembly largely voted against the Republican-sponsored bills and at one point introduced an amendment that would provide breakfast and lunch for free for all students in the state.
“I was pleased to vote no on a handful of education bills today that are nothing more than politically-driven, unfunded mandates,” said Rep. Ben DeSmidt, D-Kenosha. “These bills do absolutely nothing but burden our teachers and students without providing the necessary funding. As a former educator, it’s like handing out a big pile of homework, but with no pencils or resources to complete it.”
The school standards bill was approved 55-44 and would reset the K-12 school report card standards of 2019-20, makes grades 3-8 standards the same as those set by the National Assessment of Education Progress and would make the high school testing standards the same as those from 2021-22.
The cursive writing requirement bill was approved 51-46, a bill updating the state’s civics requirements passed 54-44 and the bill making classroom teaching materials available for review by district residents passed 54-43.