A cellphone ban moving through the Pennsylvania Legislature could reshape daily life in the state’s public schools, and school boards across Carbon County spent portions of their recent meetings debating how to prepare for it.

The legislation, which had cleared the state Senate and moved to the House as of early February, would prohibit students from having cellphones on school grounds from the start of the school day to the end. Jim Thorpe Superintendent Robert Presley told his board during a workshop earlier this month the bill still had hurdles to clear.

“The state Senate passed a cellphone ban — now it’s in the House,” Presley said. “There’s really no teeth to it right now. It says we’re going to ban them — now you guys go and do it.”

At Lehighton Area School District’s meeting Monday, directors and administrators echoed that the bill’s final form remained unsettled.

Despite that, officials at both districts broadly agreed a mandate of some form was coming as the bill had drawn strong support from both parties.

“It was an incredibly bipartisan bill,” Jason Moser, Lehighton superintendent, said.

Presley said he personally supported the goal, even while acknowledging the implementation challenges ahead.

“Do I agree that cellphones need to go away? Yes — I know my own daughter is on her phone way too much,” he said. “I believe it’s going to pass, but it’s going to pass with maybe some other changes and some other way to give the districts a little more leeway in how they implement it.”

If the bill does become law, he said, districts would face immediate practical questions.

“If it does pass, you will then have to look at our cellphone policy and how we are going to enforce it,” he said. “The state is going to say you need to ban them. What does that look like? Do we put them in bags when they come in? Do we tell them they have to be turned off and in a calculator bag up here when they come in? That’s what we would have to decide.”

The legislation also raised a question at Jim Thorpe’s February meeting as to how a ban would apply to students in cyber schools.

“If you’re banning it in our schools, how are you going to ban it in a cyber school?” the superintendent said. “That’s not going to happen.”

Rob Moyzan, Jim Thorpe’s technology director, said a vendor had already approached the district with a technological solution before Christmas break. The company offered devices installed throughout school buildings that would block all cellular data to and from students’ phones and allow the district to filter what remained accessible. The system stopped short of blocking calls entirely, however, because of Federal Communications Commission rules around emergency calls.

“It was a really cool system, but it was a really high cost,” Moyzan said. “I think it was close to like $60,000 a year.”

At Lehighton, resident Roy James said the national and international tide had already turned against student cellphones.

He referenced a National School Boards Association study on the issue that he said he had shared with the Lehighton superintendent two months earlier. New York and Arizona were among the states that had already enacted bell-to-bell bans, James said, and research had shown that a majority of parents in at least one of those states supported the policy.

“I think the evidence is becoming very clear that cellphones at an early age are detrimental to learning and detrimental socially,” James said. “Denmark has totally banned the sale of cellphones to children under the age of 14. France is also starting to limit them. Sweden also is doing that. If Pennsylvania doesn’t act, it will be the outlier.”

Some Lehighton board members raised the question of whether parents would push back, particularly around emergency communication. Director Dave Bradley was skeptical that opposition would gain much traction.

“The largest lobby in the state of Pennsylvania is the PSEA,” Bradley said. “I don’t think those parents have a chance in heck about stopping anything that the state wants to do.”

Bradley suggested that technology could eventually bridge the gap between a phone ban and the safety concerns parents have raised, describing a wearable alert device that would allow a student to summon help and allow parents to send a message to the school office — without the distractions a full smartphone brings.

“Hopefully that technology will show up,” he added, “and we’ll have it to keep our kids safe.”