Before political leaders could take action against cell phones in classrooms, the school supervisor at Shaw Harry, New York, a rural district about 40 miles west of Albany, was on track with his crusade against Big Tech's adolescent mind command. By the beginning of the 2022 school year, David Blanchard, who had been appointed director seven years ago, had implemented Bell2 Bell policy. This meant that students would not be able to use their mobile phones (or smartwatches or earphones) at any point during the school day, rather than lunch or the transition period to a learning hall or a class.
The effort certainly seemed extreme. This was before Jonathan Hyde's book, The Anxiety Generation, promoted a consensus on the destructive impact mobile phones had on teenage mental health, before the former surgeon general's call for warning labels on social media platforms. Mr. Blanchard was troubled by all the mutilations he had seen. His experiments quickly benefited.
“I've found a transformative environment,” he told me recently. “We expected the kids to cry and be broken. We quickly saw them talking to each other and having a conversation in the lunchroom.”
One unexpected outcome is that students flooded the counselor's offices for help in how to directly resolve the current conflict. Previously, if they found themselves in some sort of battle with someone online, they would have called or texted their parents for advice on how to deal with it, Blanchard told me. “Now, students were realising that their friends were in front of them, not social people, but in front of them, not in towns of a few people they had never met.” Enrollment in elective classes rose when the option to scroll your path through a 40-minute free period was eliminated.
The success at Schoharie was an exhibit from Gov. Kathy Hochul's recent campaign banning mobile phones at schools across New York. At least eight states, including Florida and Louisiana, have enacted various types of restrictions. In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Call-free Schools Act, which required by July 2026 to devise a policy restricting smartphone use by all California school districts.
Governor Hochul's proposal follows the Schoharie Bell-to-Bell approach. In a rare example of a deal between labor and government, it is supported by the Federation of Teachers, a union representing teachers in New York City. As UFT President Michael Mulgleu said, “It's easy and we know what everyone expects.”
Yet, the formulation of all constraints in the proposal does not make it an obvious or simple sell. It was introduced in January as part of the state's current budget negotiations and is being opposed by several groups, such as the state's Board of Education Association. These groups support another strategy that comes out of the Capitol, which supports the notion that local jurisdictions should say about how policy-restricted phone use is devised.
Studies comparing students with or without a classroom mobile phone generally show better academic performance among mobile phones. The advantage of protecting the device from the hands of middle schoolers a day is that it reduces the time teachers have to waste phone use and minimizes the chance that a snapchat eruption at lunchtime will kill the chances of paying attention to the “Moby Dick” argument in the afternoon. At Schoharie, students put smartphones with magnetic locks in their pouches. This is the type used in stores to prevent theft.
In recent years, parents across the country have demanded more and more control over what their children are reading and doing at school. The members most opposed to the ban on all-day calls are mothers and fathers who appear to be obsessed with constant parent-child contact. Gov. Hochul spoke to an intense first-grade teacher who told her he was overseeing a classroom full of kids wearing smart watches. “Mom and Dad were checking all day long, saying, 'I miss you, I can't wait to see you,'” the governor told me. “That's a parent's needs,” she said. “It's not a need for students,” she said, and the continuation of these patterns was bound by preventing children from appearing as fully functional adults.
Sadly, it is too rational fear for many parents, and catastrophic things can happen in school without reaching the child. It is fantasy that communication saves them. Throughout the development of the proposal, the governor's office came in and spoke to the school group to explain how the concept was wrong. In emergencies, calls can be distracting because they focus on children being entrusted to keeping themselves safe. Calls and text create an added panic.
If the governor's proposal passes, it will take effect in September. Shaw Harry's parents were very resistant to the ban at first, Mr. Blanchard told me. But they came when they realized that their addiction had broken and it was much easier to manage a child's digital life at home, and that it was far more pleasing to see them interacting with the world without staring at their hands.
