I woke up this morning to the grating sound of Mayor Bloomberg’s voice coming from the clock radio with another sanctimonious pronouncement telling the unwashed masses how to live.
The news item was about $4 million cottage industry at some of the poorer schools in New York City. Bodegas and trucks charge students who attend schools with metal detectors a dollar a day to hold their cell phones during school hours. The subject is in the news because a Safe Mobile Storage Corp. truck attendant was robbed of cash and cellphones at gunpoint outside Columbus High School in the Bronx last week.
“The kids in school should be focusing on the person in front of the classroom and not on their smart phone, or playing games or texting,” Bloomberg said. “Nobody is going to take care of your cell phone, I suppose, when you’re in school…unless they get paid for it. And the easiest thing is just to leave it at home.”
This makes me so angry. Billionaire Bloomberg doesn’t know what he is talking about. Obviously these kids wouldn’t be paying strangers $20 to $40 per week to hold their cell phones during school if they only used them to play games and socialize when they got bored during algebra class.
Imagine you are a single working mother with a couple of kids. Now imagine your oldest child is 13 years old and leaves your apartment at 6:30 every morning (in the winter it is still dark) to make her way to school by bus and subway. You depend on this young teenager to pick up your 6-year-old at the end of her school day and escort her to the neighbor who watches the first grader until you get home from work so that the 13-year-old can go to basketball practice and perhaps play a game at another school after which she will be coming home (again after dark) via public transportation and then walking home alone from the bus stop. Do you really want this girl to be without a cell phone in the event of an emergency? No! I didn’t think so!
Only 88 of the 1200 school buildings in New York City have permanent metal detectors. They were installed to find guns and knives in schools with high crime rates. But, since 2006 they have been used to confiscate cell phones.
Most of the rest of the schools in the city have adopted a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
My daughter has a cell phone and she takes it to school every day. We bought it for her before she began middle school so she would be able to come home on her own. She allowed to do this until she was in 6th grade! How old were you when you started making your own way home from school? I was six? Did you go to your a neighborhood school? My kid doesn’t.
Even if a child is eligible to commute to school via safe, chaperoned yellow school bus, the New York City Department of Education does not provide such transportation beyond 6th Grade. Students are issued free or discounted Metrocards. You’re on your own kid.
When I was a tween, my friends and I carried dimes and quarters so we could call home from a pay phone, in the event of an emergency, but more often for a ride. Someone was always there, at home, ready to jump in the car and come pick us up from the movie or the basketball game or rehearsal. My friend Tina even had a signal worked out so she could save her money. She called home let it ring twice and hung up before anyone picked up the phone. That let her dad that it was time to pick up the kids from the movie theater. This system requires someone to be waiting for the signal and for there to be a pay phone available. When was the last time you saw a working pay phone? When was the last time you stayed at home while your child was out and about in the world? When we first moved to New York there were still pay phones outside every diner and deli and even on the subway platforms. As cell phone use has increased the pay phones have disappeared. Now, I don’t want my daughter going anywhere alone without her cell phone.
She takes it to school. She turns it off. She doesn’t dare use it or even bring it out of her bag during school because if she does the teachers can confiscate it. But she has it with her and I’m glad.
At the end of the school day she turns on her cell phone. Incidentally the security guards won’t let the kids back into the building once they have gone out the door so there’s that as a safety issue. My daughter calls me three times on the way home from school. She calls me to tell she has left the building. At that point she lets me know if she will be stopping for a snack with her friends, or going to the bookstore. She calls me again before she goes down the stairs into the subway station. She calls me the third and final time as she comes out of the subway station in our neighborhood to let me know she is walking the last two blocks home.
I need her to do this.
Last fall a team with a portable metal detector showed up at my daughters school, complete with a 6-foot display of real guns to show the kids what they weren’t supposed to be concealing in their backpacks. Needless to say that scared the crap out of brand new 6th graders. My husband was walking my daughter to school that morning, so she handed him her cell phone and he called me to tell me she didn’t have it that day and I made sure I was there to meet her when school got out. Her purse size umbrella was confiscated after a search of her backpack and she never got it back.
A week or so later there was another surprise visit from the search and seizure team and my husband watched as some girls approached the school, saw the metal detector and turned right around to get back on the subway and go home. I know they didn’t have any weapons in their pink backpacks. But, I’ll bet they knew their parents would be more concerned if they lost their cellphones than if they missed a day of classes.