Friday, July 18, 2025
Parents in Elmont expressed mixed reactions to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s smartphone ban for the upcoming school year after Superintendent Regina Agrusa hosted a community meeting at Sewanhaka High School to hear comments from the public on how the district should enforce the ban during the school day.
Hochul’s legislation, passed last month as part of the state budget, will prohibit students statewide from using their phones during school hours, citing youth mental health and academic distraction as key factors.
At the meeting, Agrusa presented three options being considered by the district: locking phones in pouches for the day, keeping them in lockers or having teachers collect them at the start of each period.
“(The) parent meeting was a great opportunity to engage in open dialogue and hear directly from our school community regarding Governor Hochul’s ban on cell phones in an educational setting,” Agrusa said in a statement to the Herald. “Our goal is to ensure any future policy decisions prioritize student well-being and support a positive learning environment.”
For Yewande Ogun, an Elmont resident and a parent of a middle school student, phones are a problem, and a ban would be a step in the right direction — though she said she preferred the term “restriction” rather than “ban,” which seemed misleading.
“It gives their brain a little bit of rest from the phone,” Ogun said. “A lot of kids, they don’t know how to live without their phones.”
She favored the locked-pouch approach, saying it would offer structure and minimizes disruption. She pointed out that phones are already banned in many elementary school classrooms, and children manage without them just fine.
Ogun emphasized that distractions caused by phones extend beyond the classroom, disrupting sleep patterns, impacting students’ vision and encouraging late-night scrolling that leaves them exhausted. Her hope is that discouraging phone use during the day will lead to healthier habits outside the classroom.
Jazmine Rivera, who has children in both Dutch Broadway Elementary School and Elmont Memorial High School, said she left the meeting feeling uneasy about the direction the phone ban might take in the Sewanhaka district. While she agreed that phones can be a distraction, she sees them as an essential tool for both communication and self-expression — especially for her older son, Anthony Rivera, a junior at the high school who manages the baseball team’s Instagram profile, posting announcements, game results and memorable team moments.
“If a player achieved something, he’ll go on there and post it,” Rivera said of her son. “So that’s all important. I mean, I think it brings us together instead of pushing us away.”
Rivera said she supported a middle-ground approach: teachers collecting phones at the start of each class period and returning them at the end. This compromise, she said, would preserve the integrity of instructional time while still allowing brief access between classes for important messages or club responsibilities.
She also raised concerns about student safety, worrying that there has been no investment in additional security measures at the schools in the event of an emergency.
“As parents, we feel like we have to have communication with our kids,” Rivera said. “God forbid something happens, they have access to a device.”
She also challenged Hochul’s mental health argument, saying the governor was focusing only on the negative impacts of social media use.
“They’re only seeing it one-sided,” she said, explaining that one of her son’s friends often reaches out to him when he’s struggling with mental health issues in school. “If there’s a child with mental health needs, he’ll feel disconnected. He’ll feel like he has nobody to reach out to.”
Shobha Narine, a middle school teacher at the Brooklyn Environmental Exploration School and an Elmont parent, brought a dual perspective, as an educator who has implemented a phone ban and as a mother of a rising eighth-grader at Elmont Memorial.
“Since September, we take phones in the morning,” Narine said, saying there is less fighting, less TikTok filming in bathrooms and far fewer distractions. “It’s been good.”
While she recognized that the initial implementation of a ban could take time to adjust to among students and school staff alike, she believes that the key to success is transparency from the district and consistency and support from parents.
“We have to be supportive of the administration and leadership,” Narine said. “Nothing gets done when we’re not supportive.”
Among the concerns discussed by parents was trust in the school district to handle communication not only during emergencies, but also on a daily basis. “We should have some trust in the school system to make it good for our kids,” Ogun said. “If we all work together as parents and administrators and teachers, it can go smoothly.”
Narine added that in her experience, school staff has facilitated communication between her and her son effectively. “If I ever need to get in touch with him,” she said, “I call the school, and in five minutes he’s on the phone with me.”
Rivera, on the other hand, said that phone access is necessary for children to communicate acts of bullying or threats to their safety. She also questioned the extent to which student voices were being considered, saying that at the very least, high school students’ opinions should be taken into consideration, because they are learning to be independent adults.
“A lot of these kids are juniors and seniors with jobs,” Rivera said. “They’re going into adulthood, and cellphones are something that is a huge part of our lives. It’s a huge transition.”
After considering the feedback from the meeting, Agrusa said that a first draft of the district policy would be detailed at the Board of Education meeting on July 8, at 8 p.m., at Sewanhaka High.
