Going into New York’s 2025-26 academic year, school administrators, parents and students alike knew it was going to be different.
All of the state’s K-12 public and charter schools opened in September with a new law banning students from possessing cell phones and internet-enabled devices during the school day, with the exception of school-issued laptops. Under the new initiative, only students with health complications or who require translators can use such devices during school hours.
To help implement the regulation, districts statewide were granted a total of $13.5 million to purchase storage for their students’ devices.
“For too long, students have sat in schools with their cellphones in their hands, distracted by looking at TikTok dance videos,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said at a New York City middle school in September. “You don’t realize it right now, but by the end of this school year, you’re going to be happier, have more friends, be smarter and that’s what we’re here at school for.”
For many school districts, the biggest challenge going into the year was getting parents and children on board with the law. In anticipation of this, its, then future, implementation was announced in early 2025 by Hochul, and school districts also quickly began communicating with parents about how their schools were going to handle the new changes for the upcoming academic year.
Parental concern stemmed from the new reality of no direct contact being allowed between students and guardians during the day, and going into September, this was something that Kings Park Central School District Superintendent Timothy Eagan understood.
“I have a high school age kid," Eagen said. “We were used to just texting our kid during the school day, and we can still do that. They just don't get it until the end of the last period. If there is a true emergency, we had a great system in schools before cellphones. It was ‘call the main office’. They get a wonderful person on the phone who takes the message, they pull the student’s schedule up and the message gets relayed to the student.”
While Eagen has seen his district’s transition into the new policy as "pleasantly surprising” and described the current academic year as “smooth sailing,” Nassau-Suffolk School Boards Association Executive Director Robert Vecchio sees it slightly differently.
“We've heard from the kids that they're kind of glad that they are not allowed to use their devices for the most part,” Vecchio said. “Some parents, I think, are glad about it too. Some parents still have concerns, and those concerns might be individualized and specific to the needs of a child, which, of course, there are a set of exemptions if somebody needs it for medical purposes.”
Despite its overall success, Vecchio noted that the initial view of his office that works to represent districts across Long Island was that rules such as a cell phone ban should be left up to local district boards. However, he says that once the rule became law, they were open to doing everything in their power to help implement it.
New York state’s initiative to remove students’ ability to access internet-enabled devices comes at a time when mental health concerns surrounding the overuse of cellphones have come to public attention.
According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, children and adolescents aged 8-18 spend an average of over seven hours per day staring at screens.
“It’s really difficult to focus when you have a device that is constantly giving you pings,” said Anthony Anzalone, the Director of Outpatient Child and Adolescent Behavioral Services at Stony Brook Medicine. “On a social level, it becomes almost like a form of avoidance for a lot of children if they have a phone on them. It becomes their safety blanket, where they don’t have to engage with other children or even have to deal with boredom. Boredom becomes something they become allergic to. Because if they feel a state of distress, discomfort or boredom, they can just go on their phones and alleviate that stress.”
Due to not having access to their phones during lunch and recess, school districts such as Eagan’s Kings Park have provided students with board games and card games to pass the time. This has also largely combatted the antisocial effects of the overuse of devices that have been seen by many districts.
“Kids are talking to each other again,” Eagen said. “You walk into a cafeteria, and it's a loud, busy place again, whereas last year it was quiet because kids were all sitting next to each other but not actually talking to each other. They were buried in their phones.”
But while students are largely guarded from the effects of overexposure to screens during the school day, they are still exposed to their devices outside of academic halls.
According to Utah Valley Pediatrics, 70% of surveyed adolescents said they used their phones within 30 minutes of going to sleep, 89% reported having a device in their bedroom at night, 36% sleep with their phones in their bed or on their pillow and 35% check their phone in the middle of the night.
These habits could be tied to seven out of 10 high school students reportedly not getting a healthy amount of nightly sleep.
“I don’t believe this bell-to-bell policy is enough by itself,” said Anzalone. “It needs to be complemented with education starting from preschool, straight to college, on different themes about what a cell phone is. So, the earlier we can teach kids about it, and especially teach parents about it, the better. Because the ban doesn't teach our children anything, it's just a ban. We need to supplement that with education and frank discussions with children and then I think we'll get the most return on our investment from this policy.”
