The state Legislature is poised to consider expanding the state’s classroom cell phone ban for elementary and middle schools to high schools. Under the plan passed last year with bipartisan support, school districts had until Jan. 1 to come up with a policy for keeping phones out of student hands during classroom time for kindergarteners through eighth graders, and they have until July to start enforcing it.

The author of the ban, Peachtree Corners Republican state Rep. Scott Hilton, said he introduced the high school expansion as House Bill 1009 near the start of this year’s legislative session after he said educators gave high marks to what Hilton calls “distraction-free education.�

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That’s because Georgia’s new English language arts standards, which take effect in July, will include an emphasis on handwriting, and particularly cursive. The standards will address handwriting starting in kindergarten and move to cursive in third through fifth grade. The previous standards did not have an explicit place for handwriting.

“We want to ensure that our students, when they graduate from the state of Georgia, have all the skills they need,� said April Aldridge, deputy superintendent of teaching and learning at the Georgia Department of Education. “In the world we live in, that means we have to have a varied degree of skills and we need to know when to use the skills in which situations.�

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