A School Year Like No Other
From no phones to La Grange’s new four-day hybrid schedule, county schools underwent changes this past year under the pretext of improving student performance and overall well-being.
The 2025-2026 school year was the first since Texas House Bill 1481 passed in April 2025, requiring all Texas school systems to adopt and implement a policy prohibiting the use of personal communication devices by students on school property during the school day.
La Grange ISD had a nophone policy prior to the bill being passed, but whether or not students actually put them away was up to the discretion of the teachers. Now that the policy is enforced by Texas Law, administrators said that there’s a noticeable difference in the students’ interactions.
“I feel like it helped with student engagement in most classes,” said Nathan Truex, the assistant principal at La Grange High School. “The biggest change that I saw was in the cafeteria: conversations were taking place. Kids were bringing games like Uno, and people even brought Settlers of Catan and a couple of other games. There was a lot more peer-to-peer discussion than I’ve ever seen in my life, at least in this school. You take away their access to phones, and then they’re more engaged with their peers. It was really cool to see.”
LGISD wasn’t the only school in Fayette County that had a policy against cellphones prior to the change in Texas Law. Dr. Jeff Harvey, the superintendent of Fayetteville ISD, said their district made the change back in 2023, and the bill only required them to tweak the verbiage of the school handbook. Student push-back to the new law was minimal.
“All I did was change our language from saying our local policy says you can’t do this to saying the law says you can’t do this,” Harvey said. “We have good kids and we have good parental support. They understand what the rules are, and they were able to adapt to it.”
The stronger enforcement of the no-phone policy wasn’t the only change that LGISD implemented this school year. In March 2025, the LGISD school board approved the adoption of a hybrid schedule for the 2025-2026 school year, where students and teachers are at school for five days of the week for some months and four days of the week for others.
“In my five years of being here, this was our best attendance rate, holistically, with the entire district,” Truex said. “January and February were our toughest numbers, and we were still as close to a 95% attendance rate as possible. I would say our attendance rate is directly attributed to less days, because you can take care of appointments on Friday and you can take care of any type of family arrangements or any family requirements on Friday” In addition to attendance improvements, the number of disciplinary incidents improved as well. The standardized test scores neither increased nor decreased.
“My discipline numbers across the board were lower,” Truex said. “My tardies were higher, but we also brought a 7:55 start time down to 7:50. Discipline wise, my major infractions, like the AEPs, were down; ISS placements were down across the board. They were a lot better.”
Not only is Truex responsible for the 608 students walking through the halls of the high school, but he also has three kids of his own at home who were affected by the new schedule. He said they enjoyed the four-day weeks, but the transition back to the fiveday weeks in the spring was a struggle.
“When we went back in January, it was an adjustment,” Truex said. “They had more lethargy, and they weren’t as willing to want to be there on a Friday because they liked that four-day week.”
LGISD is set to have the hybrid schedule again for the 2026-2027 school year.
“Year one is kind of ripping the band-aid off,” Truex said. “Year two is where you start collecting data, so I think you have to do a minimum of three years before you can make a decision of going back to fiveday week or adapting to a true four-day week.”