Just about every kid has a cellphone, but teachers don’t want them in their classrooms.
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“I feel like there’s no place for a phone in school,” said Marlene Lanza, a teacher at Howard Drive Elementary School.
She was one of more than 1,200 teachers who responded to the annual NBC6 teacher survey. It is not a scientific sample. It’s a random poll of public school educators, distributed by the teacher unions in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties.
In our survey, 87% of teachers support banning cellphones at school all day in all grade levels.
“We’ve already got a ban on cellphones in schools and from my experience, it is primarily working,” said Oren Shahar, who teaches at Comstock Elementary School.
However, 52% in our survey said it’s difficult to enforce the cellphone policies of their school districts. Of course, students access social media through their phones, and 94% of teachers are concerned about social media’s impact on the mental health of their students.
“A lot of the problems we have with bullying, a lot of the problems we have that end up in some kind of an altercation, stem from social media,” said Thais Garcia, who has been teaching at Henry Filer Middle School for more than thirty years.
Adrienne Kahn sees social media’s influence at her school, Bayview Elementary School.
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“A lot of them believe everything that they see, like they see it and they’re like, well, it must be real because it’s on social media,” Kahn said.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is another big concern. In our survey, 79% of teachers worry about students using AI for schoolwork, and not just to cheat on a test or an assignment.
“Are they reading enough? Are they understanding it, because what it is, is that you’re letting the computer do the work for you, but if at any point you have to do things by yourself, you’re not going to know how to,” said Nancy Howard, a teacher at Homestead Senior High School.
“The use of AI is rampant, and it’s very concerning,” said Orlando Morales, a teacher at Pompano Beach Middle School.
He told us that too many of his students rely on AI.
“And one of them, what they said to me broke my heart, they were like, Mr. Morales, I just can’t think for myself, you know, and I think that really is the biggest concern about young people using AI for everything,” Morales said.
Just this week, the Florida Board of Education announced K-12 guidelines for AI, including parental notification if AI tools are being used at school, and a mandatory opt-out alternative assignment if a parent objects to their child using an AI platform.
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