Parents Answer Cellphone Ban in N.Y. Schools

With Liz Willen’s eldest son about to finish elementary school and move on to middle school in the fall, she thought she knew the perfect graduation gift -- a cellphone.

It made sense with a home in Brooklyn, work on the Upper West Side and the children’s school in Lower Manhattan. Already, keeping track of schedules, soccer practices, rock music lessons and other whereabouts was complex -- and due to get more complicated in September with the eldest off to a new school.

“The idea of not having a cellphone to contact him, or him not contact me, is insane,” said Willen, who works at Columbia University.

And that puts her on the side of those balking at the crackdown on possession of cellphones by students in New York’s public schools.

“Parents are livid,” she said.

Although most school districts across the country ban the use of cellphones in the classroom, New York has for years been a notch stricter.

It mandates that students not even have cellphones -- or other electronic devices -- in their pockets or backpacks. The ban, adopted in 1988, has been routinely ignored as the cellphone has become ubiquitous.

That winking acceptance ended last month when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg endorsed bringing portable scanners randomly into city schools to find unauthorized objects.

After the scanners first were used April 26 at the ACORN High School for Social Justice in Brooklyn, district authorities reported that they had confiscated one box cutter, one knife “found in a trash can,” 10 CD players, 13 other electronic devices and 129 cellphones.

Over the next two days, an additional 103 cellphones were confiscated at the school, which has about 700 students.

The scanners went next to intermediate schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Authorities said no weapons were found, but 153 cellphones and a scattering of CD players, iPods and GameBoys was seized.

The pattern has been the same, up through the sweep last week at a performing arts high school in Manhattan, where 180 cellphones were confiscated. Authorities also found one knife and 27 “other weapons” under a definition that included “metal hair picks, costume belts, chains [and] metal forks.”

Weapons are not returned, but so far students have been able to reclaim their phones.

The crackdown has set off parent protests, threats of lawsuits by public interest lawyers, demonstrations at City Hall, a push for City Council legislation -- and a strong defense from Bloomberg, who declared: “You can’t use cellphones in school, and you can’t use iPods. Why can’t you get the message?”

On his weekly call-in radio show, the mayor said that suggested compromises -- such as allowing students to check phones before school and pick them up afterward -- were impractical in a district with 1.1 million pupils.

“Schools are for learning,” he said.

“We’re sympathetic to the objections,” said Keith Kalb, a spokesman for the Department of Education. “However, our experience is if cellphones are allowed in the school, they will be used, [and] they inevitably interrupt the school environment.”

The issue has split even the district’s administrators, said Jill Levy, president of the city’s principals’ union, which decided not to take an official stand, though its members are required to enforce the crackdown.

Principals have reported a range of problems caused by cellphones in schools.

Levy said principals told of students using phones to text-message exam questions and answers to others, taking pictures in locker rooms and creating safety hazards while walking through the halls and up and down steps.

“I’ve seen students walk into the street into oncoming traffic,” Levy said.

Use of cellphones by gangs also is a concern in some areas, “where we have had altercations in the school” that spill out off campus, Levy said.

“There are all kinds of issues.”

Yet many principals share parents’ unhappiness with how the crackdown has been carried out.

“The stakeholders were not brought to the table and trusted to have an adult, reasonable conversation,” Levy said. “This was just one issue rammed down their throat without trusting their good thinking.”

The New York crackdown comes at a time when the Los Angeles Unified School District is considering toughening its stance toward cellphones, but not to the same degree.

Los Angeles allows students to have a phone as long as it is turned off and “stored in a locker, backpack, purse, pocket or other place where it is not visible during normal school hours.” And though individual schools can impose stricter policies, the district policy states that students generally “are permitted to use cellular phones, pagers or electronic signaling devices on campus during their lunchtime, nutrition break, and before and after school.”

A committee in Los Angeles has studied the issue, though, and recently recommended a uniform policy that cellphones and other electronic devices only be used “prior to the start of the school day and after the close of the school day.”

That’s a policy that would satisfy New York parents such as Willen.

“Manhattan’s different from other places,” the mother of two said. “There aren’t neighborhood schools.... You’re sending your middle-schoolers off on subways, [and] a kid might be traveling an hour and a half to go to [select high schools]. I don’t understand why they can’t have a compromise -- let them use them for safety.”

Some parents say that if the mayor and schools Chancellor Joel Klein don’t budge, they will send their children to school with the phones anyway and risk occasional confiscation, trusting local school officials to continue the “don’t ask, don’t tell” practice that seems to have been in place over the years.

Also to be reckoned with is the determination and ingenuity of teenagers -- some of whom attend schools with airport-style security.

One such school is Manhattan’s Norman Thomas High School, where student Allen Brunson said on a recent morning that he didn’t dare test the metal detectors by trying to hide a cellphone in his backpack.

“But we get some kids sneak ‘em in,” he said. “I don’t know how. They find a way.”