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Mayor Adams: No schoolwide cellphone ban this year — possibly next September
By
Michelle Bocanegra
Published Sep 7, 2024
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Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
By
Michelle Bocanegra
Published Sep 7, 2024
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New York City’s sprawling public school system won’t see a systemwide cellphone ban this year but one could take effect next September, Mayor Eric Adams said this week.
Adams said definitively for the first time that no ban would be implemented this school year, despite earlier expectations that new rules were forthcoming. The mayor said his administration was currently reviewing “best practices” in hundreds of city schools where individual principals have already established rules around phone use.
“We want to spend an extensive amount of time looking at those hundreds of schools that's already doing it,” Adams told Pix11 on Friday. “We want to get feedback from children, feedback from parents, and this way we can roll it out together.”
Schools Chancellor David Banks said in June that plans for a forthcoming ban would be announced later in the summer. But students returned to classrooms this week without citywide rules restricting phone use, drawing mixed reactions from school communities. Adams on Friday said he would like to keep a means for parental communication intact, citing a school shooting in Winder, Georgia where a student killed two other students and two teachers.
“Children were texting their parents, calling their parents, they were afraid, and parents had a level of uncertainty,” Adams said. “And so when we take this action, we want to make sure we maintain a method for communication with parents, and also make sure we don't have to go backwards.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio lifted a Bloomberg-era ban on phone use in schools in 2015, arguing that the rules were more heavily enforced in low-income communities where schools have metal detectors. Opponents of a ban have likewise voiced concerns that a ban will be a new way to punish already vulnerable students.
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department of edcation
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Mayor Eric Adams
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Michelle Bocanegra
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