The Texas Education Agency has opened a second cycle of its Phone Free Schools Grant Program, offering roughly $2.39 million to school systems that did not receive an initial grant to help them buy the secure storage needed to enforce the state’s bell-to-bell cellphone ban.
According to TEA’s competitive-grant listing, about $2,388,037 remains available under the second cycle, funded through Senate Bill 1. Only districts and open-enrollment charters that did not receive and accept an award in the first cycle are eligible, and TEA set the grant period to run March 11 through August 31, 2026.
The grants exist to help schools implement HB 1481, which the 89th Legislature passed in 2025. TEA says the law requires every district and charter to adopt a policy prohibiting student use of personal communication devices on school property during the school day. Covered devices include cell phones, tablets, smartwatches and similar devices, and schools may either bar the devices from campus or require secure storage during the day.
The Legislature appropriated $20 million for the storage grants. TEA has set per-pupil funding rates of $12.50 for grades 9-12, $10 for grades 6-8 and $7.50 for grades K-5, with priority points favoring rural systems, socioeconomically disadvantaged systems and those on a five-day instructional week. The second cycle is aimed at systems that missed the first round, a group that skews toward smaller and later-adopting districts.
TEA has pointed to early results as encouraging. In releasing spring 2026 STAAR results for grades 3-8 on June 16, Commissioner Mike Morath said middle-school reading gains “may be associated with the statewide ban on the use of cell phones in schools,” an association the agency stopped short of calling causation.
Educator groups have reported a favorable early read: the Texas Classroom Teachers Association told lawmakers about three-quarters of surveyed members support the policy, and a May 11 House Public Education interim hearing drew generally positive testimony, including one librarian who cited rising book circulation.
A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by the University of Rochester’s David Figlio and RAND researchers found that a Florida district saw in-school suspensions rise in the first year of a phone ban — most sharply among Black students — before normalizing in year two alongside modest test-score and attendance gains. Figlio warned against over-reading a single study but said the bans still look like “the right move.” Texas Policy Research, which opposes the mandate, argues a statewide ban “oversteps” and that device rules are better left to parents and local districts.
For now, no statewide first-year enforcement or confiscation data has been released, leaving the grant uptake as one of the few hard measures of how districts are responding. The second-cycle application closes August 31, the same window in which TEA is expected to release delayed grade 5 and 8 science STAAR results on July 31 and 2026 A-F accountability ratings in August — the numbers that will show whether the first full year of phone-free classrooms moved student outcomes.