BOSTON — “Electronic cocaine.” “A youth behavioral health crisis on steroids.” “Nothing’s more aggravating to me as a parent.”

When it comes to cellphones in classrooms, lawmakers are not shy about just how dire they believe the circumstances have become.

A steady stream of elected officials on Tuesday pitched the Education Committee on action to rein in the use of phones and other electronic devices in K-12 schools, warning in sometimes-colorful language that the near-constant access some students have is undermining their education and fueling mental health problems.

“We have a youth behavioral health crisis on steroids in this commonwealth,” said Westfield Sen. John Velis, who filed a proposal (S 461) aimed at tackling the issue. “The cellphones present a clear distraction during lessons. Students only have roughly 180 days a year in school, a lot of material to cover. [With] texts, calls and social media notifications constantly buzzing, staying focused is much more difficult for everyone in the classroom. Social emotional intelligence — constantly being on phones results in children missing key life skills and stunts relationship-building.”

Several bills before the panel would craft a statewide policy limiting or outright banning most cellphone use by students during the school day, with some differences in scope and whether to simultaneously implement major restrictions on how — and when — children and teenagers use social media.

More than 20 states have laws in place limiting student use of cellphones in classrooms, according to Ballotpedia. Members of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education here have previously suggested it could be tricky to balance the upside of a statewide policy with concerns about local control and about parents being able to reach their children.

Both the Healey administration and Attorney General Andrea Campbell are vocally pushing for statewide restrictions on student cellphone use in schools.

The outlook in the Legislature is less clear. Senate President Karen Spilka signaled last month that she wants to “explore ways to keep our schools distraction-free — and more precisely cellphone-free.”

House Speaker Ron Mariano took a less definitive stance. At an unrelated event Tuesday, Mariano said he recognizes both that phones are a distraction to students and also why opponents are hesitant.

“I can understand why people would want to consider it, but I also understand the parents’ concerns,” he said.

Fellow Quincy lawmaker Sen. John Keenan put his concerns more bluntly.

“Experts call screens ‘electronic cocaine,’” Keenan said during the committee hearing, urging the panel to quickly advance a bill that “reflects what needs to be done to protect children in classrooms and to promote a better education.”

State Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler declared “strong support” Tuesday for legislation (H 666 / S 335) that would both require Massachusetts public schools to prohibit students from using cellphones and other smart devices during the school day and also implement significant new guardrails around social media use by minors, including at home.

“The research is clear: cellphones in classrooms aren’t just a distraction. They’re contributing to the rise of anxiety, depression and disengagement among students,” Tutwiler told the Education Committee. “The concern isn’t abstract. We hear it directly from parents and caregivers, from students themselves, from teachers and school leaders across the state.”

That version of the bill, filed by Rep. Alice Peisch of Wellesley and Sen. Julian Cyr of Provincetown with Campbell’s support, reaches beyond cellphones in classrooms. It would also create major new regulations limiting social media use by Bay Staters younger than 18 years old.

Social media platforms would be required to verify a user’s age and activate “default” privacy settings for minors. Under those default settings, a platform would need to limit a minor’s communication only to connected accounts, restrict a minor’s social media use between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. as well as between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., and prevent a minor from using the platform for long stretches at once.

Users aged 16 or 17 could change the default privacy settings, and anyone 15 or younger could do so with parental consent, according to the bill. Even with those tweaks, platforms would still be required to prevent anyone younger than 18 from more than two hours of use in any 24-hour period under the bill.

Campbell, who has joined lawsuits against Instagram, Facebook and parent company Meta Platforms as well as TikTok, said the legislation “places specific restrictions on social media companies themselves to ensure essential protections on youth accounts.”

“This complements our active and current litigation against social media companies, but recognizes litigation can take a very long time, hence why a legislative fix is so important,” she said. “Recognizing that social media companies make billions of dollars off our young people that are using their product, we feel it is absolutely necessary to keep our young people safe.”

Rep. Jeffrey Turco of Winthrop argued the Tutwiler- and Campbell-backed bill “conflate[s] two issues.”

“It seems to me sort of big government,” Turco said. “We allow our children in this state to make medical decisions for themselves starting at age 16, some of them at 14. I can’t even access my kids’ medical charts at 13, yet we’re going to tell them that the Legislature of the commonwealth has decided they’re not intelligent enough to use social media after hours?”

Still, Turco made clear he supports limiting cellphone use in schools, pointing to a similar bill he filed (H 720).

“Nothing’s more aggravating to me as a parent than to receive a text message from my kid during the school day when the school has a policy that says they can’t use the cellphones, and if they get caught using them, they’ll lose them,” he said. “This is bad for the kids. It’s bad for their ability to talk to their friends and develop social skills.”