Basic Cell Phone with GPS Enabled

Have you called t mobile or gone to the store and talked with the people that deal with the service and are trained on the phones to know what features each phone comes with?
They also make wrist watches that are basic. They call, they text. and can be located by gps. My friend got one for her son when he entered 3 rd grade because he would be walking to school. She loves it and recommends it. But I don't know where she got it or which phone service she has.

We use the Life 360 app as a locater on all of our family phones. I highly recommend it for peace of mind. You can set places (such as school and home) and get alerts when someone arrives or leaves. It costs about 3.50/month and I find it to be well worth it.

Not sure what you mean by basic phones. In our family of 4, 3 of us have iPhones, and one has an Adroid, all smart phones. We have Verizon, as I love their user friendly way I can track and label who my kids communicate with and set restrictions on contacts, times of usage, data, etc.

I think all cell phones made these days have some sort of locator - that's how emergency services can pinpoint where they are.
I'm not sure you can access that function.
We used basic phones until our son left for college - then we all got smart phones so we could skype easily.

When we had basic phones we loved our LG Cosmos 2 - we used this model for 5 years.
You could make/receive calls and text - and that's all we wanted from it.
And a charge on the battery lasted days - that was awesome.
It had a nice slide out qwerty keyboard which made texting just so easy.
I'm not sure what's available right now for basic phones - available models can change up quickly every few years.
This should help:

https://www.lifewire.com/basic-cell-phones-577534

I was going to suggest a Tracphone, since I saw a commercial for it this morning that mentioned that if you needed a phone with just a camera, some apps, and a GPS that this was an inexpensive, easy to use option, but if you already have T-Mobile and want to add them to your plan, the best thing to do would be to go into a T-Mobile store and speak to an associate about the most basic phone and plan. T-Mobile also has a pay-per-month plan, or used to anyway. My Greek friend had this, because he wasn't sure when he'd be moving back home and didn't want to be tied down to a Florida number and a contract. Your best bet is to go into a store. You could call, sure, but you may want to see the phone for yourself, look at its size, etc., and play with it a bit before deciding if that is the right phone for your kids or not.

Pretty sure all phones have GPS capability. Personally, I would never get my or any preteen a ‘smartphone.’