The Brief

The Los Angeles Unified School District will ban student cellphone and social media use during the school day amid rising concerns about the impact of the technologies on youth mental health.

The board voted 5-2 Tuesday to develop a policy to roll out in January 2025.

“I understand that you can't put the genie back in the bottle to some extent when it comes to kids having their phones and social media,” said the resolution’s primary sponsor, board member Nick Melvoin. “But I think that we can do more to monitor the school day to make sure that kids are focused.”

LAUSD joins California lawmakers and districts from across the country in trying to limit technology use that distracts students from learning and that educators say amplifies conflicts.

This week U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for social media labels like those on cigarettes and alcohol warning young people of the mental health harms associated with the platforms.

Researchers are still trying to determine how and whether the increase in smartphone and social media use is connected to rising distress and suicide attempts in young people.

Board members George McKenna and Scott Schmerleson, both former principals, voted against the measure, citing concerns about how the policy would be enforced and whether it will increase students' awareness of how technology has impacted their mental health.

“Simply taking away the cellphone does not mean that every student's anxiety or addiction goes away,” Schmerelson said.

LAUSD banned cellphones. Now what?

The resolution directs district staff to gather input from experts, educators, students, and parents and present revised rules about phone use to the board in the fall, for implementation in January 2025.

The new policy does not need board approval, although Melvoin told LAist that he expects public and board feedback may be incorporated when the revised policy is presented later this year.

The prospective policy must also consider the needs of different grades and students with disabilities. Board member Kelly Gonez amended the resolution to also include accommodations for students who use cellphones for translation when an interpreter or educator who speaks their home language is not available.

Reseda Charter High School rising senior Neel Thakkar predicted student pushback to the school day ban and asked the board to allow student input to shape the new policy.

“That way, LAUSD can not only have a platform to explain to students exactly how and why and to what scale this policy is helping students and increasing academic performance and increasing mental health,” Thakkar said at Tuesday’s board meeting. He also serves on Melvoin’s youth advisory council.

How will the ban be enforced?

One of the biggest unanswered questions is how the district will enforce the ban. Educators say there’s often a gap between the district’s current policy restricting cellphone use during class and what’s happening on each school campus.

“If it’s up to individual teachers and principals more and more time is just going to be spent enforcing it,” Melvoin said. “The idea is to remove the onus on the individual staff members.”

Students may be asked to secure their phone in a locker or other device to prevent them from using it.

The Bay Area’s San Mateo-Foster City School District started requiring middle school students to seal their phones in magnetically locked pouches in 2022. The pouches are unlocked at the end of the school day and teachers can provide access in case of an emergency.

“What we've seen is a really, really substantial increase in the number of kids working collaboratively with one another and paying attention to their teacher when they're in their class,” Superintendent Diego Ochoa told LAist’s public affairs program AirTalk.

In West L.A., Katherine Johnson STEM Academy Principal Kyle Hunsberger said the benefits extend beyond the uninterrupted classroom. The school became a “phoneless campus” in spring 2022. Students are expected to leave their phones at home or secure them in a locker

“Kids are learning how to talk about their feelings, how to engage with others, how to engage in productive conflict resolution,” Hunsberger said. “Rather than, you know, venting about it on social media or engaging in a negative group chat.”

What is the current policy?

The district last revised its student cellphone policy in 2011 and its rules governing social media use in 2018.

But educators say implementation of the existing policy varies from campus to campus and even from classroom to classroom.

“The time I have spent policing phone use could have been better spent on helping students recover from COVID learning loss through reading, essay writing, and group projects,” said Malinda Marcus, an English teacher at Mulholland Middle School’s robotics magnet program.

Venice High English teacher Hazel Kight Witham worked with colleagues for the last year to try and implement a phone-free school policy, but was hampered, in part because of a lack of resources to store confiscated devices. Even efforts to bolster enforcement eroded as the school year went on.

School publication The Oarsman reported “some students feel nothing has changed,” in May.

Rising Hale Charter Academy eighth-grader Raquel Ramirez said her school bans cellphones throughout the day.

“Usually we don't really follow those rules and the teachers don't really care,” Ramirez said. For example, she tends to pull her phone out during groggy first-period P.E. classes.

But she’s also used her phone during school to call her mom when another student harassed her in sixth grade.

“That made me feel a lot safer and it made me feel a lot better, the fact that my mom was there to protect me,” Ramirez said.

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Thousands of immigrants who are lawfully in California are set to lose their food assistance benefits, known as CalFresh, starting this month.

The new restrictions stem from H.R. 1 — also known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — which Congress passed last year.

The changes remove eligibility for certain noncitizens, including people with refugee status and victims of trafficking. It also applies to immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan who have special immigrant visas for helping the U.S. government overseas.

 ”These are folks … many of whom have large families that we have a commitment to as a country because we welcomed them and invited them here to find a place of refuge,” said Cambria Tortorelli, president of the International Institute of Los Angeles, a refugee resettlement agency. “They’re authorized to work and they’ve been brought here by the U.S. government.”

The federal spending bill, H.R. 1, made sweeping cuts to social safety net programs, including food assistance and Medicaid. In signing the bill, President Donald Trump said the changes were delivering on his campaign promises of “America first.”

Officials estimate 23,000 people in Los Angeles County will be affected. The state estimates about 72,000 immigrants with lawful presence will be affected across California.

CalFresh is the state’s version of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Undocumented immigrants have not been eligible to receive CalFresh benefits.

State officials say noncitizens who are currently receiving benefits will continue to get them until it’s time to renew their benefits — adding that people might be able to receive benefits again if their legal status changes to lawful permanent residents.

Who the changes apply to:

• Asylees
• Refugees
• Parolees (unless they are Cuban and Haitian entrants)
• Individuals with deportation or removal withheld
• Conditional entrants
• Victims of trafficking
• Battered noncitizens
• Iraqi or Afghan with special immigrant visas (SIV) who are not lawful permanent residents (LPR)
• Certain Afghan Nationals granted parole between July 31, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2023
• Certain Ukrainian Nationals granted parole between Feb. 24, 2022, and Sep. 30, 2024