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Thirty-one states now limit or ban personal devices in school for the 2025-26 or 2026-27 school year, and most of those bans lump smartwatches in with phones. Plenty of parents haven’t gotten the memo yet, and the gap between what a family assumes and what the school actually enforces is about to matter a lot more.
Indiana’s new law is the clearest example of where this is headed. Senate Enrolled Act 78, a bell-to-bell cellphone restriction, took effect statewide on July 1, 2026, and it explicitly defines banned devices to include cellphones, tablets, laptops, gaming devices, and any smartwatch connected to a phone or the internet. Districts had to adopt matching policies by that same date, meaning families walking into the 2026-27 school year face a much stricter standard than the one their older kids grew up with.
What’s Actually Changing
Cellphone restrictions in schools aren’t new. What’s shifting now is the scope: districts are closing what many call the smartwatch loophole, the gap where a phone stays zipped in a backpack but a watch stays on a wrist, buzzing with texts, notifications, and in some cases, quiz answers.
An EdWeek Research Center survey found 11 percent of school and district leaders already report a complete smartwatch ban, while another 34 percent allow the devices only under specific conditions. Close to 30 percent said their school has no smartwatch policy yet but is actively considering one. That “considering” number is likely to shrink fast as more states follow Indiana’s lead into the new school year.
Under Indiana’s law specifically, districts must decide whether students leave phones and smartwatches at home entirely or hand them over for storage across the school day. Exceptions exist for documented medical needs, translation support, special education services, and genuine emergencies, along with audio recorders used strictly for notetaking. Private schools are exempt.
Why Smartwatches Became a Separate Fight
Two problems pushed smartwatches into their own policy category instead of riding along quietly with general phone rules.
The first is cheating. A number of websites walk students through using a connected smartwatch to receive scheduled notifications with test answers, or to store information they can glance at mid-exam. One middle school principal in California described the shift plainly: her staff worried far less about texting on a watch and far more about students using it to look up answers in a test, as a glance at the wrist draws none of the attention a phone does.
The second is emergency access, and it cuts the opposite direction. Seventy-eight percent of parents surveyed by the National Parents Union want their child reachable by phone in case of an emergency, and plenty of families bought a kids’ smartwatch specifically so a child could reach them, or vice versa, without carrying a full smartphone. Some devices now ship with a “class mode” that locks the screen through school hours while keeping an SOS button live underneath. School safety experts are split on whether that actually helps: some argue a working line of communication counts for a lot in a crisis, while others warn that kids texting or calling in an active emergency can pull their attention away from instructions that keep them safe.
What Experts and Parents Are Actually Saying
Support for phone restrictions in class itself is broad. National polling has found roughly three-quarters of parents back prohibiting phone use in instructional time. That support drops once the policy goes bell-to-bell, covering lunch, passing periods, and recess too, though even there a plurality of parents are now in favor as more states adopt the stricter version.
Teachers describe the calculus differently. At one Maryland middle school, the principal noted that phones draw far more disciplinary attention than watches do there, so her school still allows smartwatches on the wrist while phones must stay out of sight, a reminder that policy details vary widely by district even within the same state. Districts that have tried harder restrictions, including locked pouches that cost one California school close to $100,000 for a single year, report that the behavior change often outlasts the tool: students stopped reaching for phones even after the school dropped the pouches the following year. The habit itself had already shifted.
It’s Not Just Indiana
Indiana is the clearest recent example: its law spells out smartwatches by name, and it’s one of more than thirty states now moving in the same direction. Some states leave the smartwatch question up to individual districts, which is exactly how a family can end up confused: a neighboring county might allow watches at recess while the district next door confiscates them the moment a student walks through the door. A handful of states have gone further and passed their own bell-to-bell laws that name wearables specifically, and Florida’s 2023 restriction on “wireless communication devices,” one of the earliest in the country, has already been used as a model for later state bills.
For families who move between districts, or who have kids in different schools within the same city, that inconsistency is the actual headache. A rule that worked fine for an older child at one middle school might not apply at all once a younger sibling starts at a different building, even within the same district and the same year.
Where the Confusion Actually Shows Up
The pattern that keeps surfacing in local news coverage of these new laws is simple: a family sends a child to school wearing the same kids’ smartwatch worn for years, reasonably assuming that a device with no cellular plan and no calling function outside Wi-Fi wouldn’t count as a restricted device. Indiana’s law defines any internet-connected wearable as covered, regardless of what functions happen to be active on a given day, so that assumption turns out to be wrong under the new rules, and the watch gets confiscated until pickup. Districts that have rolled out these policies well tend to pair the legal text with a short, plain-language summary for parents, sent home before the first day rather than buried inside a longer back-to-school packet. Districts that skip that step generate far more confiscation complaints in the opening weeks of school. The gap between what a policy says on paper and what parents actually absorb is where most of the friction lives.
What This Means for Parents Right Now
The most useful thing a parent can do before the new school year starts is read the actual district policy rather than assume it matches what an older sibling experienced two years ago. Look specifically for whether smartwatches are named, not just phones. A policy that only mentions “cellphones” could still leave a watch technically permitted at the school level while a newly passed state law says otherwise.
If safety and reachability are the real concern behind buying a smartwatch, ask the school directly how they handle emergency contact under the new policy. Many districts that ban personal devices for the school day have added front-office procedures specifically to close that gap. The concern is common enough that ignoring it invites real pushback from families.
For kids who will lose watch access at school, talk through the change before the first week rather than in the middle of it. A child who understands the rule ahead of time and knows exactly how to reach a parent through the school office handles the transition better than one who discovers the policy when a teacher confiscates the watch on day one.
What to Buy Instead, If You’re Buying at All
Some device makers have started building for this exact conflict rather than ignoring it. A handful of kids’ smartwatches now market a dedicated “school mode” that a parent can trigger remotely: apps, games, and messaging lock out entirely, while a single SOS function stays active underneath a locked screen. Whether an individual school accepts that distinction is a separate question from whether the feature exists, so a parent shopping for a first smartwatch this fall should call the school before buying anything rather than after.
Some families are opting out of smartwatches for the school day entirely and relying instead on the front office as the single point of contact, treating the watch as a weekend and after-school device only. Others are sticking with a basic, non-connected watch that tells time and nothing else, sidestepping the policy question altogether. Neither approach is right for every family; the point is knowing which trade-off you’re actually making instead of finding out the hard way at pickup.
Where This Is Headed
The smartwatch fight is really the phone fight one step removed: the same tension between focus in the classroom and reachability at home, playing out on a smaller screen. As more states follow Indiana into bell-to-bell restrictions for the 2026-27 school year, the devices families treated as a safe workaround are becoming the next thing schools spell out explicitly. Parents who check the fine print now avoid a confiscated watch and a confused kid in September, and a five-minute phone call to the front office in August is a lot cheaper than a tearful pickup-line conversation somewhere in week one.