City Weighing Banning Cell Phones In Schools, Adams Confirms

NEW YORK CITY – In an interview on Friday with J.R. Giddings of “The Reset Talk Show,” Mayor Eric Adams revealed that officials are continuing to consider banning student cell phone use in New York City’s schools.

Chancellor David C. Banks is “mapping out exactly what that’s going to look like,” Adams said. “He'll be doing an official announcement on it.”

The first day of school is Thursday, Sept. 5.

“If we make any policy changes they would not go into effect this fall,” a Department of Education spokesperson told Patch.

The spokesperson did not have a timeline for any policy announcement on the subject.

How Would A Ban Work?

It’s unclear what a phone ban in schools would look like, or how it would be enforced.

Earlier this summer, Chalkbeat reported that a ban could begin in February 2025. Schools would develop their own policies, but some options under consideration reportedly involve collecting phones at the beginning of the day – returning them to students at dismissal – or placing phones in locked pouches, which students could carry with them throughout the day.

While he’s sensitive to concerned parents, who are accustomed to their children being a quick text message away, Adams appears to believe phones are “major distractions to learning.”

“We have to find that sweet spot,” Adams said, according to a transcript of the interview released by his office.

“We have to find how we balance being able to reach a child during a time of emergency, but how it does not continue to distract with the learning environment. And that's what the chancellor is working on right now.”

It would appear that Adams is somewhat phone averse.

“These phones have been introduced in our lives for the last 20-something years without realizing how they have had a major impact on our social and emotional stability,” he continued.

“I'm surprised the federal government has not done a major blue-ribbon commission to look at what the impact of social media and phones have done to our entire country.”

‘Just As Damaging As Tobacco’

By the time they turn 13, more than two-thirds of children in the United States own a smartphone, according to Bloomberg.

In particular, concern over the impact of social media on kids and adolescents has grown in recent years.

In 2023, Gallup found that more than half of U.S. teenagers spend “at least” 4 hours per day on social media. Usage peaks at age 17, when teenagers spend an average of 5.8 hours per day on apps like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.

In June 2024, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for warning labels on social media, in an opinion piece in the New York Times.

“It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents,” Murthy wrote.

Closer to home, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, called social media “just as damaging as tobacco, lead paint, or air pollution,” in a June 2023 opinion piece in The Hill.

“Social media has undoubtedly changed our lives. But we still have the power to determine what a healthy online environment looks like, especially for young people. That will require a public health response that treats social media like the toxin it is,” the piece concludes.

In the New York Post, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg called for Adams to reinstate a phone ban his administration enforced, a policy which was undone by Mayor Bill De Blasio. Some city schools banned communication devices as far back as the 1980s.

New York City’s school system is the largest in the United States.

Do you have thoughts about a phone ban in the city’s schools? Email michael.mcdowell@patch.com.