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\n At the BOSS entrance on West 49th Street on the morning of September 4.
\n Photo: Colin Schappi\n <\/p>\n
To kick off New York State\u2019s school cell-phone ban<\/a>, Governor Kathy Hochul<\/a> 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. \u201cYou are going to be smarter because you\u2019ll be paying attention more,\u201d Hochul told students. \u201cYour teachers will have a better experience teaching you \u2026 and ultimately, you\u2019re going to be better than anybody else.\u201d 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> with magnet clasps. (\u201cThere are aerospace students here,\u201d one kid at a big STEM high school said wearily. \u201cThey\u2019re going to figure out how to open them right away.\u201d) Other schools used labeled bubble-wrap bags and returned phones at the end of the afternoon.<\/p>\n 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, \u201cthey were all pretty chill,\u201d said the photojournalist Colin Schappi. UAGateway\u2019s 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 \u201cI didn\u2019t bring my phone today.\u201d You can guess whether it worked.<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the September 8, 2025, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n