For more than a year of Santa Fe school board meetings, the 55-year-old Capital High teacher has come before education officials to air one consistent complaint about his job: cellphones.
The student-teacher relationship has turned “adversarial,” Spray told board members during a September meeting, as his efforts to police phone use in class have proven largely futile — evidenced by stories he has shared over months of public comment.
“I was called names that I can’t repeat here” after telling one student to put away a phone, he told board members.
That incident, he said, launched a cascade of mandatory phone calls and paperwork, during which he “was having to ignore other students’ needs … all of this for one phone.”
“No wonder that teachers give up the fight,” Spray said. “No wonder that our middle schools and high schools have devolved into cellular cesspools.”
New Mexico schools are part of a nationwide push to curb phone use in classrooms, driven by teacher concerns about disruption and growing worries about record daily screen time. New Mexico’s cellphone approach, largely left to school districts and charter schools, has produced a patchwork of policies meant to address what many parents, teachers and youth specialists say has become a problem.
‘A Crisis’
“We as legislators need to come in and probably address this as a crisis — and quite frankly, an addiction to these cellphones,” said state Sen. Crystal Brantley, an Elephant Butte Republican, when introducing her bill last legislative session.
Her Anti-Distraction Policy bill, co-sponsored by Albuquerque Democrat state Sen. Antonio “Moe” Maestas, made New Mexico one of more than 30 states that “passed or advanced new policies” on cellphones in schools between fall 2024 and mid-2025, according to a report from the Parents Television and Media Council, a media advocacy group.
Those efforts, the report notes, are often bipartisan and driven by similar health and behavioral concerns as those shared in New Mexico.
According to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, U.S. youth ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 7½ hours a day on screens, a trend it links to lower grades and mental health concerns.
Dr. Kristina Sowar, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico, said attention to the issue has grown.
“There’s been more curiosity and conversation over the past several years,” she said. “Now, we realize [phones] are a fairly important factor in kids’ day-to-day health.”
While research is ongoing toward mental health and cognitive impacts, Sowar said in her experience, many patients with eating disorders report influence from online content. She also cited a 2024 warning from then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy noting 95% of teens use social media and that evidence points to “profound risk of harm” to mental health.
Sowar’s advice: balance. Encourage youth to spend time outside and get active, interact socially — and don’t be part of the problem, she said.
“If parents are spending a lot of time with their kids sitting there on social media,” Sowar said, “kids are gonna get messages indirectly about that.”
Brantley, who drew on her experience as a mother of teenage girls, noted when introducing her legislation, the issue extends beyond “education standards” to the mental health impacts of social media and addiction to devices.
Hard to Enforce
Brantley’s bill requested $10 million to help districts purchase equipment to lock phones away, based on the cost of Yondr pouches — magnetically locking pouches Santa Fe Public Schools piloted with 50 units across four schools for students with higher levels of in-class phone use.
“Many school districts already do have a policy in place,” Brantley told lawmakers, “but it’s difficult to enforce because they don’t have locked devices.”
Though the bill passed, legislators removed the $10 million request, and left the language flexible enough to “require” districts and charter schools have device policies, which many already had, without strong language dictating the content of those policies.
Still, many local schools have opted to rethink their policies, even without the state forcing change.
The Academy for Technology and the Classics, a Santa Fe charter, approved a policy months before Brantley’s bill, requiring students to place phones in shoe-caddy holders at the front of classrooms at the start of class.
“We always had a policy that stated personal electronic devices should be off and invisible during instructional time,” said Principal Jason Morgan. “But … kids would violate that policy.”
Students would use phones under desks or pull them out while teachers were distracted, he said, creating “friction and frustration and headaches” due to inconsistent enforcement.
Prompted by teacher complaints, the governing board took “an extra step” by purchasing shoe caddies for every classroom.
“You can have a policy on paper, but don’t put your teachers on an island as far as enforcement,” Morgan said, noting an “immediate” increase in peer engagement, better focus and fewer conflicts for teachers.
Broader Efforts
Santa Fe Public Schools, meanwhile, approved a revised cellphone and mobile device policy in July 2024 requiring devices be turned off and out of sight during class. With limited exceptions, the policy states, phones and personal electronic devices are “prohibited” at all grade levels.
But given complaints over implementation, the district is now reexamining how the policy works in practice.
District administrators said in a recent interview a task force will convene in late January or early February to determine whether policy changes are needed for the 2026-27 school year.
That could include expanded “secure storage solutions,” like the Yondr pouches piloted at four schools, said Kenneth Stowe, the district’s chief of staff. Or it could result in the district’s approach staying the same.
“We may not even be changing policy,” Stowe said. “We may just be working on developing guidance for our principals, teachers and families.”
The task force will focus on safety, academic success and wellness, he said, and include teachers, parents and other stakeholders.
“What we want to do is create more guidance for our teachers and for our families — but we want to do so with our community and not for our community,” Stowe said.
Vanessa Romero, deputy superintendent for teaching and learning, said the district’s policy already aligns with Brantley’s law, but the task force will focus on “realistic implementation.”
“Some teachers are helping students use phones in a healthy way,” she said. “Others find that cellphones are problematic.”
For Spray of Capital High, the announcement is welcome news.
“Instead of just making an executive decision without consultation, it’s good that district admin is going to check with the stakeholders,” he said in a recent interview.
The longtime teacher said he has watched the “takeover of the schools by the cellphone” accelerate — particularly after the pandemic, when students relied on screens for remote learning.
Even “good kids” who understand his cellphone rules, he said, will ask to photograph the board rather than read it.
“They cannot conceive of not using their phones,” Spray said. “If [non-educators] were to see what goes on now, their chins would just drop.”
Other Approaches
At Hermosa Middle School in Farmington, Principal Kyle Haws said a stricter approach has been surprisingly effective.
Students must place phones in lockers at the start of the day. If a phone appears in class, teachers email the front office rather than confronting students directly.
The policy works “99% of the time,” Haws said, and has led to a “crazy decrease” in classroom phone use.
“The teachers love it because they don’t have to confront the kid,” he said. Parents and students, he added, have also responded positively — after some time getting used to it.
The approach also aims to equip students with a sense of responsibility once they leave school, Haws added, so “they’re not gonna get shocked when they get a job someday and the boss is like, ‘You can’t be on your phone.’ ”
In Hobbs, enforcement looks different.
Superintendent Gene Strickland said his district leaves cellphone rules to individual classrooms — sometimes using visual signals, like green or red cards at the front of the room, to indicate whether phones are allowed.
Though some issues arise, a permanent ban, he said, is unrealistic.
“Students are gonna do what we did when we were students,” Strickland said. “Our responsibility is to help them make informed decisions.”
Phones are sometimes confiscated, he said, and students occasionally turn in “dummy phones” like calculators or old flip phones instead of their own devices, a similar issue shared by other school staff across the state.
But unlike many others, Strickland finds hope in the rule-breaking.
“The ingenuity of kids will never go away,” he said. “Even when it’s against policies, I get to see the creativity and uniqueness of our students every single day.”
© 2026 The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
