Gov. Josh Shapiro announced June 1 that both the House and Senate have come together on a cell phone ban in schools while signaling that he will sign the legislation.

Parents should get ready now for the changes they will likely see when school reopens in the fall, because for some students and parents there will be an adjustment period as they get used to new limits on the use of cell phones in school. But the state’s action will be just that – an adjustment, not the end of the world.

Both Democrats and Republicans have taken up the cause, reflecting a growing consensus that phones are bad for kids’ mental health and take their focus away from learning, even as some researchers say the issue is less clear-cut because research is still being conducted. Social media use correlates to poor mental health, but research hasn’t proven that social media uses actually causes poor mental health. And, many of the school cell phone bans are too new to know whether or not there is a correlation to incidents of discipline problems and bullying before and after cell phone bans take place.

Anecdotal evidence, though, is pretty promising.

Officials from many schools in neighboring Chautauqua County noted more interaction between students when New York placed a strict bell-to-bell ban on cell phone use in the state’s schools. Students reported speaking to classmates they didn’t usually talk to, and school administrators noted a return to the noisy lunchrooms of decades past after cell phones had turned the lunchroom cacophony many adults remember into a quiet usually reserved for libraries. Students who needed to get in touch with their parents during the day did so the old-fashioned way – via a classroom telephone. The experience in New York state this year was, for the most, positive.

Cell phones have become so ubiquitous in our society that the thought of limiting their availability to school students during the school day is actually a controversial idea. It shouldn’t be, in our opinion, especially given the early returns in other states that have enacted bell-to-bell cell phone bans.