Governor considers smartphone ban in schools. What does Riverhead school policy look like?

Gov. Kathy Hochul is formulating a plan for the state to regulate — and possibly ban — the use of smartphones in schools, citing the harmful effects of personal electronics and social media on attention and mental health.

Over the past few months, Hochul has been on a listening tour across the state as she considers the particulars of a plan, which would be introduced by the end of the year for adoption at the beginning of 2025. While there is no formal legislative proposal endorsed by the governor, Hochul said to The Guardian early in her tour that the bill would allow schoolchildren to carry simple phones that can send texts, but cannot access the internet.

Teachers have raised concerns about the use of cellphones in schools, citing it as a major issue, according to surveys. National health experts, including U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, have issued warnings of the risks social media can have on youth mental health. And school districts across the country, including the Riverhead Central School District, have joined federal class action lawsuits against social media companies due to the harm social media platforms have on adolescent mental health..

The path to legislation now looks clearer than ever after the New York State United Teachers, the statewide federation of teacher’s unions including Riverhead’s, announced on Tuesday an endorsement of statewide restrictions on smartphones and other personal electronics in schools throughout the school day, with exceptions for instructional purposes and student needs. 

NYSUT said that the restrictions should be designed locally. Educators should not bear the “sole or primary responsibility for the implementation or enforcement of these policies,” the unions said, and the state should supply resources to implement the policy. 

The endorsement came after NYSUT held the “Disconnected Conference” on Friday, which focused on the impacts of the use of cell phones, social media and other personal electronics in schools. 

Hochul spoke at the conference, offering an appeal for the teachers to support a bill restricting cell phone use.

 “When it comes to the school day, I want our kids to be kids again. I want them to talk to each other in the hallways. I want them to yell and talk to each other in the schoolyard, I want them to communicate during lunchtime,” Hochul said. “I want them to develop the interpersonal relationships that are not occurring right now, because I’ve said this many times, our number one job is to raise adults, not raise kids. Our job is to raise adults, fully functioning adults who emerge from childhood with the social skills that they develop in school settings. They’re being denied that now, because the cell phone has taken over human interaction.”

Hochul noted that the state recently passed legislation to regulate the practices of social media companies by restricting algorithms and the data collection of people under 18.

Policies restricting the use of cell phones during the school day are already in place at the Riverhead High School and Riverhead Middle School, with certain exceptions made for health issues. Administrators in the Riverhead Central School District said in an interview last week that cell phone use is not a major problem in the buildings. Those who do violate the district’s policies are disciplined accordingly, they said. Under the district’s Code of Conduct, teachers and administrators are authorized to confiscate student cell phones when they violate the code.

At Riverhead High School, cell phones and other communication devices are not allowed in classrooms and must remain in a students’ backpacks, unless directed by the classroom teacher for instructional use, according to principal Sean O’Hara. Cell phones are also prohibited during testing and are collected when administering Regents exams, he said.

The use of cell phones is allowed before and after school, in the hallways and during lunch periods, O’Hara said. The policy started five years ago, he said.

“Having young adults in the building, I think it’s important for them to be with adults who can model appropriately when and when not to use a cell phone,” O’Hara said. He said the appropriate use of cell phones is a part of the school’s freshman seminar curriculum, along with discussion of cyberbullying.

Students are further restricted from using their electronics to record, transmit or post videos and images of people on campus during the instructional day, unless permitted by a teacher or administrator. There is also no wifi access for cell phones and other personal electronics in the building, O’Hara said, so any use of the internet would go on the data plan of a student’s cell phone. 

At Riverhead Middle School, students are not allowed to use cell phones at all from the start of the day to dismissal, principal Joseph Pesqueira said. The policy was decided after conversations with faculty, staff and parents two years ago, he said.

“We have a couple students who, here and there, have a slip-up,” Pesqueira said. “First time is just a conversation and a warning. Second time, we give a call home, and if there’s a third time, then they start dropping it off [to the main office]. That resets at the end of each marking period.” 

“But we really haven’t seen a lot of repeat offenders,” Pesqueira added. “If anything, it’s been [that] a kid uses it once, and we have a conversation and it’s fixed.”

Gregory Wallace, president of the Riverhead Central Faculty Association, the district’s teachers union, only allows cell phones in his high school physics classroom for educational purposes.

“Just because I don’t allow it doesn’t mean that they don’t appear,” Wallace said. “So you can be walking around and kids are surreptitiously on their cell phone. And that’s just a matter of [saying] put your phone away, put your phone away, put your phone away. So it does happen. It is a distraction.”

“Smartphones are like a blessing and a curse, because you can use them in your classroom. They have educational value,” he said, adding that students can use their smartphones to video their science experiments. He also doesn’t need to buy stopwatches anymore, because students can just use an app on their smartphones. 

It also changes how bullying is done and students communicate with each other, he said. Other teachers have told him that students might come into the classroom in a particular emotional state because of incidents that transpire over social media, he said, which could cause them to have a difficult time learning.

“It creates a new social dynamic that is concerning,” he said. “And now more things that happen outside the classroom spill over into the classroom, inside the school buildings, because it’s a continuum. There is no reprieve from that connection.”

A common concern voiced by some parents in the debate over banning cell phones during schools is the ability to contact their child in an emergency situation. A child having a cell phone in care of an emergency at school was the top reason why parents want kids to have cell phones at school, according to a survey by the National Parents Union, a coalition of parents organizations.

“When there are emergencies at school, being able to directly communicate with your child to ensure they are safe is critically important and too often schools are dropping the ball on effective communication,” Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union said in a statement accompanying the group’s survey results. “Cell phone bans fail to take into consideration the tragic, real-life scenarios that unfortunately play out all too often in schools.”

Rodrigues encouraged a “holistic approach” to cell phone use that includes regulating social media content and ensuring teachers are “confident and skilled at effective classroom management so kids are engaged and not interested in cell phone shenanigans.”

Administrators in Riverhead noted that, if an emergency were to occur, students who keep their phones in their backpacks or their pockets would have access to their cell phones.

“I think for safety reasons, there is a need for students to have a phone available to them, especially after school activities,” Interim Superintendent Cheryl Pedisich said. “Let’s say a parent, something happens to a parent, they’re going to be late, or whatever the case may be.”

“I also feel like — and I don’t want to be macabre — but I’m going to take a moment to talk about this. When you know police are getting Intel, let’s say, in an active shooter situation, and students are giving really important information that is going to 911,” Pedisich said. “Or speaking to their parents, especially if they’re in a dangerous situation, parents could be a very calming influence for students who are feeling very anxious and I wouldn’t want students to not have that opportunity.”

Hochul, speaking at the Disconnected Conference, tried to counter that criticism. 

“When I listened to law enforcement who said, if there is a crisis on the school grounds, there is a shooter running loose. The last thing you want happening is for your child to be looking at their cell phone, maybe videoing, sending messages, trying to go viral, and not paying attention to the adult in the room who is trained to get them to safety,” she said.

Wallace said the issue is a “double-edged sword.” 

“Do parents have a right to say, ‘I want my kid to have a cell phone because if something happens within the school I want to know?’ Sure,” Wallace said. “But as a former incident commander and a fire chief, if I was running a scene, the last thing I would want would be 700 parents descending onto a scene which is already in chaos. It would create more chaos.”

A national survey by Pew Research Center found that 72% of U.S. high school teachers think students being distracted by cellphones is a major problem in their classroom. Roughly 33% of middle school teachers think the same for their classrooms, according to the poll. 

While 82% of K-12 teachers say their school or district has a cell phone policy, 30% of that group think the policies are very difficult or somewhat difficult to enforce — with high school teachers facing particular difficulties, according to the poll. 

A NYSUT survey conducted earlier this month found that 85% of its members support banning cellphones and personal electronics for the school day, according to NYSUT. A large majority of the teachers also said that cellphone use contributed to students not developing adequate social skills, bullying; distractions in class and other learning difficulties, NYSUT said.

“Our Disconnected Conference confirmed what we’ve heard from our members across the state: the constant disruption of dealing with cellphone use and social media-related distractions is working against the primary mission of our schools, which is to educate our children,” NYSUT President Melinda Person said in a statement with the group’s endorsement of a state-wide policy.  

Teenagers have a more nuanced view of their smartphone habits, according to another Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens ages 13-17 last year. Forty-five percent of teens say smartphones make it easier for people their age to do well in school; 23% who say the phones make it harder and 30% say smartphones have no effect at all.

Seventy percent of teens also believe the benefits of smartphones outweigh harms for people their age, especially when it comes to pursuing hobbies and interests, and being creative, according to the survey. But the teenagers were more divided when asked whether phones help teens develop healthy friendships and learn good social skills.