CROSS RIVER, N.Y. - For many Katonah-Lewisboro students, next month will mark the first time they are not carrying their smartphones into classrooms.
Deemed a serious distraction, the state enacted a bell-to-bell ban this past spring on virtually all students’ internet-enabled devices, including smart watches and ear buds. Albany left it up to each school district to decide how to carry out the embargo.
John Jay students, grades 6 through 12, will have to power down their devices and keep them in lockers all day. At KLSD’s three elementary schools, backpacks and cubbies will be the repository.
Days before an Aug. 1 due date for telling Albany how it will carry out the new restrictions, the district adopted a formal policy.
Drawn in broad strokes to meet a deadline imposed only a few months ago, the document defines KLSD’s ban and contains a handful of exceptions to it. But it leaves specifics on such topics as monitoring and enforcement to building principals and the new school year’s student handbook.
Schools Superintendent Ray Blanch outlined KLSD enforcement plans at the school board’s July 24 meeting. “We’re not going to be checking students for their phones,” he said. Later, still discussing smartphones, he added, “We won’t be looking in lockers and see whether they’re in there or not.”
Under regulations being considered for the student handbook, a forbidden device would face confiscation only if a teacher or other school official sees it in a student’s possession during the school day. While the device would be returned at day’s end for a first offense, a repeat could require parents coming into the office to recover it.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has long maintained that students “succeed when they’re learning and growing, not clicking and scrolling,” urged lawmakers in January to enact the K-12 ban in all state public schools. Her proposed law was approved by the legislature in April as part of the state’s new budget and signed into law in May, giving school districts less than three months to develop local rules to implement the ban.
Trustee Marjorie Schiff, the school board’s 13-year veteran and former president, chaired the Policy Committee, which drafted the KLSD ban’s language.
“What you see before you tonight,” she told the July meeting, “is our best effort to provide our school district with a distraction-free school policy that would create a learning environment where students are engaged and we are compliant with the new law.”
In the tight window provided for drawing local compliance policy, Schiff and her committee met with parent-teacher organizations in the spring before bending to the task of saying how KLSD will implement the new strictures.
While some had predicted an uproar from students, parents and others, over the proposed ban, no community members attended last month’s meeting, at which the policy was unanimously adopted.
Still, the board’s president, Lorraine Gallagher, made clear the door remained open for future revision. “I don’t think this is a one-and-done conversation for the school year,” she said. “If need be, we can come back at any time and revisit this.”
Board members attributed the community silence to changing attitudes toward the phones and other gateways to the internet.
At least some of that shift is being attributed to “The Anxious Generation,” a book by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, which has been a runaway best-seller for a year and half. Called “an eye-opener” by Trustee Arwen Thomas Belloni, it contends that smartphones unleash “a firehose of addictive content,” transforming devices like the iPhone from useful instrument to “tool of mass distraction.”
“It’s not just the kids,” Blanche said. When it comes to distraction, calls can originate from home as well.
“The reality is parents—knowing the children are in school, knowing the children are in class—and texting them and trying to call them during the school day,” the superintendent said. “That’s when it becomes a problem.” It would help, he said, “if that stopped, too.”
The 2025-26 student handbook and other matters pertaining to the new year—including exceptions to the phone ban—are expected to be distributed before school doors reopen Sept. 2.
Exceptions will be allowed if an internet-enabled device is needed in a student’s Individualized Education Program or where required by law. Additionally, the district permits use of the devices in an emergency, and:
Where necessary to manage a student’s healthcare needs;
For translation services;
For students routinely responsible for a family member’s care.
Trustee Belloni, an outspoken supporter of the ban, questioned the adequacy of phone storage, saying students had told her of a shortage of lockers.
Blanche said the district planned to “repurpose” vacant compartments in the men’s and women’s locker rooms. “We’ve got lots of unused lockers in those spaces.”
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