Chancellor David Banks backed off his push to ban phones in New York City schools in a surprising turnaround on Wednesday — after administrators botched communications during a recent lockdown at an Upper West Side school.
The chief of the biggest school system in the country admitted New York has work to do handling communication with parents during emergency situations – one of the nightmare scenarios that has created anxiety over the possibility of locking up kids’ phones during the school day.
“While we see all the reasons to do it, now is not the time to do it. We want to study it a bit more the biggest concern is parents saying – ‘if an emergency happens I need to be in touch with my child,” Banks said on Fox 5 Wednesday morning.
The Department of Education concluded that administrators left parents in the dark during a lockdown situation at Louis D. Brandeis High School on the Upper West Side last month as their kids huddled in fear because a man was reported to be in the building with a gun. That report was later discovered to be unfounded.
“We had a school in this city earlier in the school year where there was word that there might have been a gun in the school and we went into all our safety protocols and parents were not notified properly,” Banks said about the Brandeis lockdown.
“That’s a major problem for us. We have to figure out how we fix those things before we go into a full on restriction of phones,” he added.
A Department of Education said in a statement families “deserve timely communications,” a principle being emphasized to all school leaders.
“It was determined that the schools on the Brandeis campus did not inform families in a timely manner, which led to a retraining of all superintendents and further retraining of principals to be scheduled,” the DOE spokesperson said in a statement.
Banks had said earlier this year that Big Apple schools would be moving toward a phone ban, but then shied away from elaborating on details for months.
Banks now says he and New York City Mayor Eric Adams thought it was premature to implement a policy.
“The mayor and I had talked earlier in the summer when we made a decision that while we see all the reasons to do it, now is not the time,” Banks said Wednesday.
The remarks come as Gov. Kathy Hochul has been gearing up to propose legislation to implement a statewide phone ban directive during next year’s legislative session in Albany.
Hochul defended implementing cellphone policies last month, even in the wake of the apparent mishandling of that situation at Brandeis High School. Her office didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on Wednesday.
City and state teachers union leaders have supported legislation regulating phone use in schools.
“The constant disruption of dealing with cellphone use and social media-related distractions is working against the primary mission of our schools, which is to educate our children,” New York State United Teachers President Melinda Person, wrote in a statement where the statewide union backed a bell-to-bell phone ban just last week.
The citywide arm of the teachers union – the United Federation of Teachers – similarly endorsed the idea this summer.
Banks, who has been caught up in the federal investigations engulfing City Hall, recently announced he plans to retire at the end of this calendar year.
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