During the 2025-26 school year, Conroe ISD tracked the number of cellphone-related discipline referrals across its secondary campuses. This is the first year of the district tracking and implementing disciplinary measures for cellphone usage.
Mark Murrell, CISD assistant superintendent for high schools, presented the report to the board June 16. Some key findings from the report were that cellphone referrals were the most common disciplinary method, and that most students were one-time offenders.
Policy breakdown
The CISD cellphone policy was implemented last year in compliance with Texas House Bill 1481. The Texas Education Agency’s website states that the bill’s purpose is to “prohibit students from using personal communication devices (such as cellphones, smartwatches, and tablets) on public school campuses during the school day.”
Students found using their cellphones would be given disciplinary referrals by their teachers and have their phones confiscated till the end of the day. After a “high amount” of referrals, the students’ parents would have to come to the school to retrieve it themselves, Murrell said.
Murrell said that CISD issued 12,880 cellphone referrals this year, and 46.6% of all total high school referrals were cellphone-related.
“We’re going to tighten it up and make sure that everyone knows through our actions that we are in fact very serious about our policy,” Murrell said. “We do have the ability to charge fees by state law, but we have not done so at this time.”
By the numbers
The district tracks the cellphone referral numbers throughout the year in four periods, each lasting nine weeks. Period 3 saw the highest jump in high school discipline referrals at 3,316 before a drop to 2,570 at the end of the year. Murrell said that as of now, the district can’t draw too many conclusions from this drop, but officials hope it will be a trend going into next year as the policy becomes normalized districtwide.
Junior high saw the opposite, where referral rates continued to rise from Period 1 at 97 referrals to 302 referrals in Period 4 at the end of the year. Murrell said that a reason behind the relatively low number at junior high compared to high school is that many junior high students don’t have cellphones to begin with.
Despite issuing 12,880 total disciplinary referrals for the school year, the number of repeat offenders was “relatively low,” Murrell said. For the 2025-26 school year, 77.2% of all students at the high school campuses had no more than two disciplinary referrals. At the junior high level, 89.9% of students had no more than two referrals out of the 302 issued for the year.
Murrell said that from all the data they’ve collected, a key takeaway so far is that most students are only one-time offenders when it comes to the cellphone policy.