Teachers have had classroom phone policies for years; what’s new at schools like Bullard are that their bans are blanket, campus-wide restrictions. Many of the schools that moved early to adopt such bans are smaller and charter schools, like Soar Academy, a TK-8 charter school with 430 mostly low-income students in San Bernardino. Like Bullard, it also found enforcement of its ban was tough. Suspending students wasn’t an option. Neither was yanking phones from students’ hands. That left an honor system, which relied on students’ willingness to accept that smartphones and social media are harmful to their mental health and a distraction from learning.