by Ty Tagami | Aug 22, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Next fall, every public elementary and middle school in Georgia will have to swim against the cultural tide by banishing cellphones.
It will be a major undertaking: nearly every teen in America has one, and they have grown up with addictive social media flashing across their screens.
Despite the size of the task, some schools have already checked it off their to-do list, and their experience can serve as an example for the rest of the state.
“It is going surprisingly better than we expected,” said John Pace, III, superintendent of the Henry County School District, which prohibited cellphone use in all schools when students returned from summer break a few weeks ago.
Pace’s district of 40,000 students south of Atlanta is a year ahead of the deadline set by a state law passed this year. Henry County also prohibited cellphone use in high schools even though the new law will not require it.
Pace said the only pushback he received was an email from a student who said she needed her phone to study even though the district gives students locked-down devices.
Henry County could have banned phones by fiat, but experts say that approach invites opposition, and Pace agrees, adding that his system is not even using the word “ban” to describe its new policy.
“Distraction-free learning environments. That’s what we like to call it,” he said.
Pace brought the community along through meetings with teachers, parents and students, where they discussed the consequences of cellphone distractions.
Last year, a teacher asked all students to turn on the notification sounds on their phones, then counted the rings, dings, beeps and buzzes. On average, there were 636 per 50-minute class period, the district reported in an online video.
At a forum on cellphones and teens at Emory University last week, public health professor Julie Gazmararian cited research that says it takes 23 minutes to refocus after disruptions like phone notifications.
“This is an issue that is considered a crisis in both health and educational arenas,” she said.
The lawmaker who introduced the cellphone legislation said he was inspired by observing his own family’s behavior.
“I have three children who are addicted to their cellphones,” state Rep. Scott Hilton, R-Peachtree Corners, said at the Emory conference. “And we need to change that.”
It will be a big task. There are more than 1.1 million students in Georgia’s public elementary and middle schools.
And, according to a 2023 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 95% of teenagers in the United States have a smartphone, almost all of them with daily internet access.
The report said social media is good and bad: it can foster connection, creative expression and learning while also encouraging unhealthy social comparisons and stealing time from exercise, sleep and study.
Older studies have measured the brain drain caused by phones, even when they are not in use. One published in 2017 found that university students who placed their smartphones on the desk in front of them performed worse on math and memory tests than peers who left their phones in a different room.
A year later, another study said participants who dined with friends or family enjoyed the interactions less when they put their phone on the table than when they stowed it.
Most districts have not yet implemented cellphone prohibitions.
In a collaboration with the Georgia Department of Education, Gazmararian surveyed superintendents across the state. Her preliminary results indicated 42% prohibit phones the entire day. The superintendents cited various barriers to implementation, with two-thirds saying their biggest challenge was parent resistance.
A high school in Brockton, Mass., overcame such resistance, in part because cellphones were being blamed for extreme violence.
Students were getting into so many fights at Brockton High School that members of the school’s leadership committee called for intervention by the National Guard.
Students were using their phones to antagonize each other and to schedule fights, one news outlet reported. Some parents said their kids were afraid of going to school.
The National Guard never actually came, but Kevin McCaskill, the school’s principal, leveraged the discontent to push for a prohibition on cellphones.
At evening community meetings, he and his staff emphasized the academic toll from phone-related distractions. They also addressed parents’ biggest concern: how would they reach their kids during an emergency?
The school would send accurate and timely information, McCaskill promised. He told them that if they relied on calls or texts from students, they would be more likely to receive and spread misinformation, causing hysteria.
The school’s case was convincing enough, and as of last fall students were no longer allowed to use their phones at Brockton High. Staff at eight entry points ensured that all 3,800 students put their phones into pouches that only the staff could unlock. Students could carry their phones around in these pouches made by a company called Yondr, but they could not access them.
The number of violent incidents dropped, and students began to engage with each other more, McCaskill said.
Instead of brooding over something they saw on social media or in a text message, they were making eye contact and talking — in the cafeteria, in the hallways and in classroom discussions.
“We brought back the art of conversation,” McCaskill said.
He said more students have been passing their Advanced Placement courses and earning dual enrollment credits.
Marietta City Schools, a small district north of Atlanta, implemented a Yondr pouch policy in middle school the same semester as Brockton High.
The district compared the students’ year-to-year responses on the Georgia Department of Education’s Student Health Survey.
“The kids reported a 22% improvement in their ability to focus in class,” Grant Rivera, the superintendent, said at the Emory conference.
In Henry County, students leave their phones in their lockers or place them in storage units in each class, then stow them in their backpacks while walking between classes. They face disciplinary action if they use them.
Gazmararian’s research indicates that nearly two-thirds of her survey respondents who have prohibited phone use are doing so with lockers and backpacks.
McCaskill said the main tool is cultural. At Brockton High, some students have tried putting a fake phone in their Yondr pouch, but other teens turned them in when they pulled out their real phone, he said. “Phones have gone underground.”
Some schools in the Savannah-Chatham County system have had a similar experience. A longstanding policy that outlined how students could bring their own devices to school and use them in classrooms also allowed school leaders to prohibit them. About half the schools that were surveyed as part of the district’s preparation for the new law had already done so, including some high schools, said Derrick Butler, the district’s chief administrative officer.
The schools used various methods to control phones, including portable lockers purchased on Amazon.
The district has not yet studied the effectiveness of the various tactics. What is more important, Butler said, is the norm that gets established. Some kids might hide their phone so they don’t have to put it in the teacher’s locker, but during classroom observations and through interviews with school staff they didn’t see or hear about students using their phones where they were not allowed, he said. “And ultimately, that is the goal, right? It’s not so much that we want to collect your phone. We want you to be actively engaged and not distracted.”
Pace, the Henry County superintendent, said he included high schools in the phone prohibition because the students themselves acknowledged their phones were distracting them.
He decided he should lead by example. He used to tour schools with his phone in hand, taking notes. Now, he jots on paper, though he still transfers the information to his phone later.
Pace likened his own experience to withdrawal from an addiction.
“The first two days, it was hard for me,” he said. “By the time I got to day five, it was easy.”
by Ty Tagami | Aug 22, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The Republican National Committee elected Joe Gruters, a Florida state senator and long-time ally of President Donald Trump, as its new chairman Friday.
Gruters, who was the only candidate for the leadership post and was endorsed by Trump, stepped down as RNC treasurer, a spot then filled by Jennifer Saul-Rich of New York.
Gruters succeeds Michael Whatley, who is leaving the chairmanship to run for U.S. Senate in North Carolina, also with Trump’s support.
Whatley raised the specter of a repeat of the Trump impeachments under Democrats should Republicans fail to keep control of Congress after next year’s mid-term elections.
“We have a choice: Two more years of a golden age or two more years of impeachment,” he said at the party’s summer meeting, held in a ballroom at the Westin in downtown Atlanta.
Gruters is a former chairman of the Florida state GOP and now chairs two committees in the Florida Senate — Banking and Insurance, and Fiscal Policy. He said his party has a financial head start on the next elections, with an $84 million war chest, which he said is more than five times what Democrats have on hand.
He also said his party has many factions to unite, adding that his priority will be election integrity and voter registration.
“Together, we will expand our Republican majority and deliver sweeping victories that will shape America for generations to come,” he said, closing the meeting by saying the GOP is Trump’s party and “we’re going to do everything humanly possible to help him advance his agenda and make sure that he’s successful and he has a full, full four-year term.”
The Democratic National Committee also elected a new chairman this year. Ken Martin, who headed the Democratic Party in Minnesota, was chosen in February to lead the Democrats’ efforts to recapture at least one of the legislative chambers in Congress in 2026.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 21, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Smoking kills, but many still do it, and a small group of Georgia lawmakers want to help people kick the habit and discourage others from starting.
A big challenge for a bipartisan panel in the state House of Representatives: their main proposal is a tax increase, and tax increases are not popular in an election year. Their proposed legislation would come up for a vote in 2026, observed the chairwoman, Rep. Sharon Cooper, R-Marietta, at the last of three hearings for the House study committee on smoking and vaping Thursday.
Committee members are considering other ideas, too, such as requiring ingredient disclosures on the packaging of vaping products and banning flavors. They also discussed increasing the $10 licensing fee for vape shops to suppress their numbers. (In Georgia, it costs $10 for a tobacco sales licensing fee and another $10 to sell tobacco vape products.)
“There are more vape shops now in Georgia than Chick-fil-A and Starbucks combined,” said Dr. Daniel Miller, a thoracic surgeon at the Medical College of Georgia who offered a buffet of statistics at Thursday’s hearing. “They pop up anywhere for $10. It’s incredible how they’ve exploded. It’s because it doesn’t cost anything.”
Miller said vaping products contain 25 times more nicotine than cigarettes, making them highly addictive for children.
It is illegal to sell tobacco products to children, but observers complained about lax enforcement. One in five middle school students and one in four high school students vape, Miller said, adding that one in three college students do, as well.
Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Savannah, said he floated a sales tax increase to the chairman and members of the House Ways & Means Committee, which holds jurisdiction over taxes.
He also disclosed at the hearing that his wife’s sister, a smoker since the 1970s, had died Wednesday.
“It touches a lot of families,” said Stephens, a long-time advocate for increased tobacco taxes.
Back in June, as the committee was getting underway, Stephens said the likelihood of federal budget cuts might decrease resistance to higher taxes on products like tobacco.
Georgia has one of the lowest cigarette taxes in the nation, the committee heard in June.
At 37 cents a pack, it is well below the national average of $1.97. Only Missouri, at 17 cents, charges less.
“Sometimes the pocketbook and the squeeze changes minds,” Stephens said in an interview that month, adding that the tax revenue could offset health-care costs that would be borne by Georgians in the event of federal cuts, which subsequently became a reality when President Donald Trump signed his “Big Beautiful Bill” into law in July.
“If you smoke long enough and hard enough,” Stephens said, “you’re going to get sick, and somebody’s got to pay for it.”
By then, federal actions were already having an impact, something anti-smoking advocates noted Thursday, saying Georgia should restore $2.1 million to the Tobacco Use Prevention Program.
The Georgia Department of Public Health shuttered the program in May due to federal cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention though the state agency said “core” tobacco and vaping prevention and cessation programs were still operating.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 20, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Anticipating federal cutbacks or funding freezes, Georgia lawmakers held a hearing Wednesday to explore a redesign of the state’s public health system, which protects residents from diseases and offers preventative health care in some places.
The state’s public health districts operate under the Department of Public Health. Most of the staff work for local government, but the amount counties must contribute has not changed in 50 years. Nearly $403 million of the $922.5 million budget for public health comes from the state while almost $465 million is provided by the federal government.
Some expect the administration of President Donald Trump to issue more “block grants” with less oversight, giving states an opportunity to redesign their systems for health services, such as dental hygiene, and for the tracking and the prevention of diseases, such as syphilis.
“These changes at the federal level are giving us an opportunity to really reimagine what public health can be,” state Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey said.
But cuts in services may have to accompany that flexibility as the federal government pushes more costs to the local level. So Rep. Butch Parrish, R-Swainsboro, asked Toomey to assess which programs merit funding from the state if federal dollars wane.
“We can help some, but I don’t think we can make up all of those dollars,” said Parrish, chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee.
“I think there can really be some challenges out there, and I know that y’all will be up to it,” said Parrish, who represents a district south of Augusta. He was among several lawmakers on the panel who expressed concern that rural areas get fewer services than urban areas.
A funding freeze could be less than two months away given Congress’ challenges in passing a timely budget, said Carolyn Mullin with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. Her group predicts a “high likelihood” of a government shutdown Oct. 1. If that does happen, she said, federal payments for public health could be frozen, pushing costs to the states.
That would further stress an already stressed public health system in Georgia.
The House Study Committee on Evaluating Funding for Public Health was created by a House resolution that said “public health has historically been underfunded.”
Rep. Darlene Taylor, R-Thomasville, who chairs the study committee and has a seat on the House Appropriations Committee, will hold two more hearings this year.
“We are all waiting to see final outcomes and what Congress does,” she said.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Centers that offer services to people experiencing addiction could face more regulation in Georgia, as lawmakers investigate how they operate and whether they are effective enough.
“There are rehab centers all over the state of Georgia that are not meeting the standard that we feel should be there,” state Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, chairman of the Senate Study Committee on Recovery Residences, said Monday during the panel’s first meeting at the state Capitol.
Robertson and a handful of his Senate colleagues from both sides of the aisle concurred that there is work to be done.
They heard from Dr. James Craig, a medical doctor and addiction specialist, during a three-hour meeting that explored the genetic and environmental links to substance abuse.
Craig said society treats addiction like an ethical or moral failing, yet it is a medical condition, marked by physical changes in the brain that stem from exposure to the stress hormone cortisol and other causes beyond a person’s control. A war on drugs would reduce the scope of addiction about as well as a war on candy bar sales would reduce the prevalence of diabetes, he said.
“The vast majority of people that are entering the penal system right now, the vast majority, meet diagnostic criterion for the disease of addiction, which is something that, at least as an addictionologist, I see as a massive human rights violation,” he said. “We’re putting people with a mental illness in a cage.”
Craig said treatment facilities too often return patients to their communities well before they have control over their addiction, whether to alcohol, a drug or something else. It can take a year or more to return the brain’s chemistry to a normal baseline, yet these programs typically last a month, he said.
Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick, R-Marietta, said residential treatment facilities are not regulated by the state. That is a concern for the retired orthopedic surgeon.
“The problem right now is we don’t even know where all these things are,” she said. “We don’t even know who’s running them.”
Sen. Kim Jackson, D-Stone Mountain, said the General Assembly has the power to require “fair labeling” of treatment facilities.
“It shouldn’t just be based on Yelp reviews,” said Jackson, the Senate’s minority whip.
Robertson, the Senate’s majority whip, said the General Assembly regulates too much but that this is “life and death” and too many of these facilities “have been run terribly,” so the issue merits a closer look.
Representatives of the facilities were not present to defend themselves, but Robertson said their leaders will be invited to the next hearing, which has not been scheduled. The hearings will eventually include the insurance industry and affected families, he said.
