by Todd Truitt

Virginia’s move toward cellphone-free schools has now become a bipartisan through-line across two administrations.

Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger yesterday signed Senator Stella Pekarsky’s (D-Fairfax County) follow-up school cell phone legislation, which had unanimously passed the Senate and overwhelmingly passed the House of Delegates. The law tightens the existing ban by replacing the word “restrict” with “prohibit,” making unmistakably clear that the ban applies from the first bell to the dismissal bell — including lunch and passing periods.

In July 2024, then-Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order directing the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) to issue guidance for Virginia schools on school cell phone bans, launching Virginia’s push toward phone-free classrooms. That VDOE guidance issued in September 2024 defined the state’s approach as the bell-to-bell model. And last year, then-Gov. Youngkin signed the Commonwealth’s first statewide student cellphone law with that bell-to-bell model, which was almost unanimously approved by the General Assembly.

But some districts had used creative lawyering around the original law’s use of the word “restrict” to allow for exceptions in lunch and/or passing periods. For those school divisions that treated the prior language as flexible, the General Assembly’s intent is now impossible to miss. It is officially a bell-to-bell prohibition written into state law.