The city has not yet finalized its plan for complying with a statewide cellphone ban in classrooms, but Gov. Kathy Hochul and Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos say schools will be ready by September.
“This is starting this fall. I’m impatient,” Hochul said.
“Habits are built on day one, so we are going to be ready on day one,” Aviles-Ramos said.
They appeared together at a roundtable in the Bronx to hear from a school community about the ban.
State law will require a bell-to-bell ban on smartphones this fall, meaning students cannot use them during class, in hallways, or at lunch. Each district has until Aug. 1 to submit its plan to the state, and the city’s plan is awaiting a vote by the Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP, later this month.
Essentially, the proposed plan would leave it up to each of the city’s roughly 1,800 schools to determine how to store phones during the day. About half of schools already ban their use.
Some collect phones, or store them in locked magnetic pouches made by the company Yondr, whose system costs about $30 a student. But there are low-cost options, Hochul noted some schools use over-the-door shoe organizers to hold phones.
The state is giving the city $4 million toward implementation, and Mayor Eric Adams has budgeted $25 million.
“The law is very flexible, and it does not state that we must collect, and so there are a number of methods that schools can use,” Aviles-Ramos said. “So we are working with schools based on their size and their practices and their culture to identify the method that is best for them.”
In recent comments criticizing the mayoral control system of governing city schools, United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew said the city isn’t ready for the rollout, due in part to the PEP process.
“1,800 schools don’t know what we’re going to do with cellphone bans because we have to wait for all these timelines,” he said.
But Hochul says the ban shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
“School districts like New York, and you’ll hear from the chancellor, have been preparing for this. So I will say this: change is always hard. It’s always hard to do something differently,” she said.
The first day of public school is Sept. 4.
