New York State Cell Phone Ban in Schools
 

New York is finally attempting to correct the cell phone issue in schools. They are now banned in all public educational institutions from “Bell to Bell”. I guess that’s like “Saved by the Bell”?

Anyway, the permission of cell phones in classes has really caused problems. Social media posts and bullying, cheating via phone, unauthorized recording, distraction as well as all the other negatives will be curbed. Kudos NY!

NY school phones: Hochul'''s proposed '''bell to bell''' ban draws mixed reaction across New York districts - ABC7 New York

A great start!

The next mass school shooting incident should be interesting.

Personally - I think students should have flip-phones, where the only thing they can do is text and call, nothing else. There's no need for them to have smartphones. But in the world we live in now where there are school shootings every year, some kind of communication with the world outside the classroom is imperative.

Teachers
 

Educational staff and administrators can have phones. I can’t think of an incident yet where a smart phone saved someone’s life in a school shooting. I guess it could happen someday.

It going to be hard to cut the umbilical cords. Cell phones are like pacifier’s and are attached by umbilical cord to brain. The brain will not function without texting and being pacified by iPhone. People can not stay off for 5 seconds let along 5 minutes.

NY legislature and governor have only ONE state mandatory job to do. Pass a budget on time. It is late again, contains boatloads of new laws and new regulations that have nothing to do with a budget.
If people approve or disapprove the cell ban, it had no business being shoved into the budget. Just another horrible example of how dysfunctional NY government is. It's a backdoor way to hide representative's actual voting opinion about that law.
One more reason why anyone that is smart enough, and can afford to leave that stench, has already moved away. Nice of them to have brought their wealth here.

My grandson lives in Pennsylvania; I had bought him a smart watch about two years ago.
The watch has the capability of keeping track where he is at all times, also if he leaves a prescribed area, the ability to alert his parents in case of emergency and a number of other features but does not have the ability to make or receive calls. Last year they banded these watches during school hours. Now I understand these watches can be a distraction and the children should face discipline action if the interrupt the class. But comes the day one child gets kidnaped and the very people who made this decision to band this type of watch will be nowhere to be found.

Ahh another opportunity for students to learn. How to communicate face to face and appropriately socialize. Just saying.

The "problem" here is that the kids don't need their "phones" for any of the above issues. They have computers that are used (and necessary) in class. If you have a Mac Book and some other computers, you don't need your phone to text or be on social media - it's on the computers too! Don't be naive and think this is a good thing, its just hype and absolutely nothing is different to the kids.

Quite easy to block any program other than school business on school owned computers.

Cell phones in NYC
 

There is a program/pouch (yondr) now being used in some NYC schools that locks the cell phone up while the student is in school and unlocks when the day is over. I’m not sure how it works but it does.

My son is a K-8 Principal and though all the above problems mentioned above are real, not having cell phones is beneficial in other ways. It cuts down on social media usage, bullying and going to the bathrooms to meet other students, rampant texting during lessons and so much more.

He has used this pouch for two years and it works.

My first thought was, how will they report a shooter in the school? How will they call their mom, for comfort and to maybe say goodbye. What a country.

There will be exceptions for those that don't speak the language???

THIS is your concern? There's a rule of logic called "The 2% Rule", i.e., if there's less than a 2% chance of something happening, you shouldn't concern yourself with it. What is the likelihood of a school shooting? 1/1000th of 1%?

Primary focus should be keeping kids focused on schoolwork.

I am pretty sure that the teachers and other school staff will be calling 911 if they see anyone caring a firearm and probably would be easy to turn the phones back on with a push of a button.


And they would probably be having drills for what happens with a school shooting in their school.

School shootings are a real worry to anyone with kids in schools as well as anyone who works in one.

!00% agree.
Now let's work on getting those dam things out of 5000-pound vehicles going
down the road @ 70mph.

It’s not the phones they worry about, it’s the many cameras and microphones.

How did they do it for the decades before the cell phone? Why are we raising such fearful children? How many will ever be kidnapped in their life time? But how many will worry about it?

Perhaps there will be an unintended benefit, they will be getting rid of the cause of many school shootings, social media access. Think about it, guns have been around forever, but the frequency of school shootings is a relatively new thing that coincides with the youth getting hooked on social media? Call it a coincidence, I think not.

It is usually the alienated teens and early twenty somethings who go on shooting sprees and not the well adjusted teens who are big on sharing stuff among their peers at school . Military weapons have not been accessible to teens all that long .

How did a thread on banned cell phones in schools devolve into a discussion of school shootings?

This is an overreaction. Students don’t need their phones in class, but any good teacher controls the phones in their room. When my kids were in school, many teaches had a shoe holder with pockets on the wall. Students were assigned a slot number. They put their phone in the slot on the way in and take it out on the way out.

Not Necessarily
 

There are obstacles that remove the power from a teacher to control the issue. For instance they couldn’t just grab your phone and put it on their desk and wait for a parent to pick it up. They would be fired. Also, there is likely more than one phone in a classroom, just how many eyes is a teacher supposed to have? 30 kids likely means 30 phones. They should be focusing on teaching, not putting out fires of annoyance. There is no reason a kid needs a phone in class. The phones are not helpful for a students focus of being educated.

When I went to school, calculators were expensive, and they were banned.

Although it was fun doing thousands of math problems by hand, just a few hours with a calculator would suffice.

Same with a phone and a computer. Get with the program, they're tools that give us an edge.

And as an added bonus the kids can make videos and take pictures to keep the teachers honest and on task rather than whatever they're doing these days with all that political crap.

I think that it is a good idea. I just HOPE that they can enforce it. There are a lot of people trying DESPERATELY to "dumb- down" America.

The NEWEST smart phones are coming out with a BEAR SPRAY capability.

Letting your mom know that you're alive and uninjured is kinda, I dunno, a good idea. Or that the killer is dead, and you think your foot is broken. Or that the teacher is dead and her cell phone is under her dead body otherwise maybe she would've called the police instead of waiting for you to call your mom. Your mileage may vary.

The likelihood of a school shooting is 100% for all schools where there have been a school shooting.

The likelihood has increased significantly since Columbine. In 2024 alone, there were 39 school shootings across the country. That's almost one in every contiguous state. So the odds of it happening in your state, in 2024, was over 80:1

Good for him. The good points of stopping cell phone use outweigh the bad points.

When I went to school, calculators were just starting to show up. I had a couple of friends with $400 HP35s. You could use them in exams but they weren't going to help when the questions were all of the form "show this" and "prove that". I suspect things haven't changed much in 50 years.

In the 1960's there were 19 incidents for that decade.
In the 1970's - 50 incidents.
1980's - 78 incidents.
1990's - 123 incidents (this was the decade of pocket pagers and flip-phones)

School shootings have always been a thing - Wikipedia has one listed in the 1700's.

But now that everyone and their kid brother has more guns than there are people in the country, it's become a much more prevalent thing to worry about than it was before cell phones.

I guess it really isn't a big deal at all, who cares right? Stop making such a fuss about it. Until your kid, your grandkid, your grandkid's best friend, your cousin's kid - your cousin the teacher - is the victim. Then maybe you'll care.

I’m sorry but I can’t see how it matters that much. As a teacher when we had an armed invader on school property we had a protocol we followed; children under desks away from door and window. Doors locked, lights off. Everyone silent. The librarian, in our case she used to be Mossad, patrolled the hallways, washrooms etc she was just a petite person. The police, fire department was notified with silent alarm. Honestly, I can’t imagine a parent, grandparent or relative reacting swiftly enough to be of much help.

Without cell phones in the classroom we'd miss out on seeing this, it's be student vs teacher's word:

https://x.com/dosedailyvideo/status/1666694931426185216

This is America. We're not an ancient, war-torn country. We're a very young country, and we're used to some facade of relative safety in our schools. You're not seeing the numbers in my post, that you quoted. In the decade when flip-phones and pocket pagers were first used by the multitudes, school shootings were up almost 80% over the previous decade.

I didn't even mention the number of injuries and deaths caused by those school shootings. In most of the previous ones before cell phones, it was usually one, two, maybe five deaths total, if any at all, and sometimes not even any injuries. Just someone firing a gun in the hallway, getting caught, and brought to a mental hospital for evaluation.

There has been no need or reason for the kinds of drills you're talking about here, in America. Until the last couple of decades. This is new to us. Our children are being brought up with a kind of violence that their parents never had to deal with. Being able to text your mother to tell her you love her before you die - is kinda important to us here, in America. Being able to tell your brother on the other side of the school that he needs to get out the window and run home before the shooter leaves your own side's hallway - is kinda important to us here, in America.

Maybe they should make the "Gun Free Zone" signs around the schools bigger. Surely it would cause the perpetrator to stop and think, right?

My opinion is teens that play the murderous games the affect their unbalanced mind.

Military weapons have never been accessible. AR-15 is NOT M-16. Now we can agree limit on magazine capacity but there are NO automatic weapons accessible. Actually the first so called assault weapon was Winchester model 94 repeating rifle or Henry repeating rifle. I am surprised the series “The Rifleman” reruns still allowed on TV. :22yikes:

Especially when they come on late and only show 1/2 of story.

Or invite more lunatics with guns knowing they will be only one with gun?

Metal detectors at doors, during classes lock all doors. But that still leaves them shootable outside. And they can keep their cellphones on to say their goodbyes as they are dying… What a society for the kids to grow up in!

Anything to do with students/schools always gets high jacked to guns and school shootings. There too many guns in world we will never be able to get rid of them, we can’t even get rid of illegal ghost guns. Like trying to ban shoes. :wave: