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Dismissing parents' assertions that students in New York City Public Schools need cell phones for safety reasons and communicating their locations to parents, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declares students don't need cell phones period. The mayor declared school staff can handle emergencies and that parents only want their children to have cell phones so that parents can decide on chicken or fish for dinner:
If your question is do you want to have fish or chicken for dinner tonight, that’s not something we should pull your kid out. If it’s an emergency, call the school. If it’s not an emergency, it has to wait. There’s nothing more important for our children than getting them the education they’re going to need to survive and you can’t have both. (Source: City blogs at The New York Times)
He made this statement during his radio show. You may listen to the full show at this link.
You see, New York City Schools banned all mobile electronic communications devices, and parents and the mayor have been battling ever since. Bloomberg believes that in addition to discussing dinner plans with parents, students use cell phones to cheat on tests and to look at pornography, according to the blog post at The Times:
We have a rule in our schools: no electronic devices, no cellphones, BlackBerrys, iPods, PDAs, whatever. Schools are for learning and our teachers –- we have 80,000 of the best teachers in the world. They work so hard. They’re trying to do the best job they possibly can. We have 1,400 principals doing a great job and the last thing they need is another diversion. (Bloomberg per The New York Times "City Blogs")
He doesn't want to lift the ban and replace it with a rule like the one at my son's previous school as well as his new school, which is cell phones must remain out of view and turned off during school hours, and any student seen using a cell phone during school hours will have that phone confiscated. Some schools add detention in addition to cell phone confiscation. Bloomberg says such rules won't work with NYC Public School students because students will not turn off phones but leave them on vibrate, sneak under desk and use cell phones anyway.
However, he hopes to appease parents in a huff over the cell phone ban with his own solution to help parents plan dinner. The blog NYC Public School Parents reports that the mayor suggests the following system:
The new plan would mandate that schools set aside three minutes of homeroom period each day for children to select their dinner options from a printed list. Children will choose appetizer, entrée and dessert, as well as a beverage option, and, using a number two pencil, will enter their choices by filling in bubbles on a computerized answer sheet. The sheets will be collected and fed into the DOE’s ARIS supercomputer, which will analyze the choices and then either email, FAX, or phone the information to parents in time to cook dinner. The Mayor said that the plan would insure that students no longer will need to bring cell phones to school, since determining dinner plans is the only reason they were needed in the first place. (Source: NYC School Parent)
My son, who has never been an NYC Public School student, received his first cellphone at age 16. I didn't buy him one earlier because I didn't want unexpected text messaging bills or calls to China, and so I waited for him to show that he was more responsible.
Okay, he'd never called China in the past, but I'd heard about other tweens and teens saddling their parents with skyrocketing cell phone bills by calling China and I definitely wanted to avoid that. However, my son's cell phone has actually been helpful. He's not only used it to text his sister or friends, but also to call me with the exact time to pick him up following off-hour school events or to ask for permission to go out with friends on the spur of the moment.
Maybe I was wrong to get him the cell phone. I read a post today at A Place I call Home in which Smalltown RN, age 46, confessed she didn't understand why today's school students need cell phones. She didn't need one when she was in school, she said.
I mean I am not
