And that’s how he found himself in Sacramento recently, wearing a suit and tie and sitting in a wooden chair at a small desk, facing nearly a dozen legislators and staff, asking them to support a bill that would prohibit students’ use of cellphones for the entire school day for kindergarten through eighth grade.
“Right now, learning is not just being interrupted; it’s being completely eroded,” Marwaha, a Newport Beach resident, testified before the Assembly Education Committee.
“Half of the room is trying to learn, while the other half is trapped, chasing notifications, videos and fake dopamine hits,” Marwaha said. “Even the students who want to focus cannot.”
From Assemblymembers Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, Josh Hoover, R-Folsom, Josh Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, and Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, Assembly Bill 1644 survived a key legislative hurdle last week, passing out of what’s called the “suspense file,” a process of quickly advancing or killing bills with large fiscal impacts.
Originally, the bipartisan bill was set to require “bell-to-bell” smartphone policies through 12th grade, but it has been amended down to only eighth grade. The bill also requires schools to ensure that classroom instruction for kindergarten through eighth grade does not require students to use a smartphone.
“I think it’s a great idea to ban phones in school because the addiction doesn’t automatically stop in the classroom,” Marwaha said in a recent interview.
Kids, he said, ask to go to the bathroom or contact their parents — excuses to check their phones throughout the day.
He is, though, disappointed that the bill has been scaled back.
Still, it was “gratifying,” Marwaha said, to shake hands with Assembly members in Sacramento, letting them know the cause he’s fighting for is personal.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, just two years ago, urged school districts to restrict the use of smartphones in schools. He later signed a law instructing school districts, charter schools and county education offices to adopt policies to limit or outright prohibit the use of smartphones by July 1.
There’s more, though, that needs to be done, Marwaha said.
He was pushing for another bill — although it’s already died this year, he said — that would require the state Department of Education to study the effects of nonconsensual artificial intelligence-generated images (known as deepfakes) on school-aged kids. He wants to see, perhaps, a hotline established eventually for students who are victims of bullying through deepfakes.
This was Marwaha’s first time testifying before a legislative committee in Sacramento, but he’s been involved in other advocacy work, including sitting on the statewide board for the California Association of Student Councils under the Department of Education.
Marwaha is interested in politics and political science, he said, but he’d like to go into the economics field one day to “make the world better for other people, make moral decisions for helping others in the economic world.”
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