Karns City Junior-Senior High School officials made the right call with an announcement Tuesday that student cellphone use will be restricted during the school day.

Other than for instructional purposes as determined by teachers, students can carry cellphones to school, but they must be turned off during the day.

Although the cause of the restriction — use of phones is causing Wi-Fi connectivity issues at the school — isn’t the reason we’d hoped, the fact that it’s going into place is a good thing.

It’s naive to think smartphones or other devices won’t someday soon play a larger role in classrooms. Regardless of whether one believes that’s good is beside the point. The modern workplace — and world at large — has incorporated social media and electronic devices to a significant degree.

But unless teachers are asking students to use devices to complete school assignments, their presence in classrooms is distracting.

A Pew Research Center study found that 95 percent of teenagers have a smartphone or access to one. More alarmingly, 45 percent of them said they are online almost constantly.

It’s likely teenagers are mimicking the behavior of their parents, whom the Pew study found to be using devices at similar rates. It’s understandable that parents want their children to have access to their phones during the day in case of a family emergency or if they would need to contact the authorities in the event of a dangerous incident on school grounds.

But in the case of the former, family members should first contact a school’s office to report an emergency affecting a student, while the latter could be addressed by merely requiring — as Karns City has done — that students turn off their devices during class.

Because of the sense of immediacy our society has created through social media, smartphones and other technology, parents always feel the need to be able to contact their children at any given moment.

And yet, for decades before cellphones existed, parents were able to get messages to their children by contacting a school’s office.

Parents might have a genuinely good reason — an update on who is picking them up after school — to get in touch with their children during the school day, but the easy access might also tempt them to text about less important matters — such as what they want for dinner. From there, it’s a relatively slippery slope to students texting friends, cheating on tests, even bullying on social media.

We’re glad Karns City Junior-Senior High is restricting students’ cellphone access. If students have their phones out during the day — and haven’t been given permission to do so by their teacher — that device should be confiscated and given back at the end of the day.