At the BOSS entrance on West 49th Street on the morning of September 4.
Photo: Colin Schappi
To kick off New York State’s school cell-phone ban, Governor Kathy Hochul dropped by M.S. 582 in East Williamsburg on September 4. She brought along Frankie Focus, a hairy green spokescreature who (fittingly) does not speak. “You are going to be smarter because you’ll be paying attention more,” Hochul told students. “Your teachers will have a better experience teaching you … and ultimately, you’re going to be better than anybody else.” And day one did not turn into the Freak-out of the Gen Alphas that elders might have predicted. At worst, there were glitches owed to habit. Schedules had gone out by email, and students who didn’t think to print them out or (imagine!) write them down on paper had to regroup. Parents had to adjust, too: If you got an alert that your child had been marked absent, you could neither call nor check the location tracker.
The real labor fell to administrators and staff, who had to seal up hundreds of phones and still get students to class on time. Many schools issued Yondr-style pouches with magnet clasps. (“There are aerospace students here,” one kid at a big STEM high school said wearily. “They’re going to figure out how to open them right away.”) Other schools used labeled bubble-wrap bags and returned phones at the end of the afternoon.
Inevitably, a few students were surreptitiously checking smuggled screens that day. But by and large it worked. At the building on West 49th Street that houses, among others, the Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology and the Business of Sports School, “they were all pretty chill,” said the photojournalist Colin Schappi. UAGateway’s principal, Kristina Dvorakovskaya, had conducted a dry run in which the staff figured out how to, in an emergency, redistribute 400 phones in about five minutes. Only the occasional kid tried to get by the checkpoint, saying “I didn’t bring my phone today.” You can guess whether it worked.