School Cell Phones: Lock 'Em Up

New York City approves plan to store electronic devices in outdoor lockers

By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 2/1/2007

New York City has a solution to its ban on student cell phones: store them in outdoor mini-lockers and charge kids 25 cents to 50 cents a day.

Critics are balking at the controversial plan, with some saying a school ban on electronic devices should be eliminated altogether and others objecting to charging kids to store them.

Regardless, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) is going ahead with its proposal, and the pilot program will be in place by September 2007. If all goes well, the entire school system will have outdoor cell phone lockers at the start of the following school year, says DOE spokeswoman Dina Paul Parks.

Like many districts nationwide, New York bars all electronic devices, saying they disrupt the school day. Former Schools Chancellor Richard Green adopted the rule in December 1988 as a way to keep beepers out of schools, and it still applies to this day—although it was loosely enforced.

The use of cell phones in city schools only became a problem in April 2006, when the DOE launched its unannounced scanning program, allowing the use of mobile metal detectors to check middle and high school students for weapons, says Parks. Only 82 schools in the city have permanent metal detectors. “As a result of that, the confiscation of cell phones was enforced,” she says.

The idea of storing cell phones in lockers came about when the company Celstor approached the DOE last summer after the city council requested a hearing to defend the cell phone ban. The DOE explained that phones were unnecessary because “we have measures in place that allow parents to contact their children during the day in case of an emergency,” says Parks.

After deciding that a cellular scrambling device was too costly a deterrent, the DOE concluded that the storage idea was too good to pass up. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an avid supporter of the schoolwide cell phone ban, gave his blessing to the idea of installing small metal lockers outside of a handful of middle and high schools next September. The lockers, with individual keys, will only be large enough to store a cell phone and perhaps another device such as an iPod, and they will be stationed outside of school buildings. The average price for daily storage will range from 25 cents to 50 cents a day, says Parks.

The department is now examining several proposals from other vendors before deciding who gets the contract. All proceed will go to the winner, and the DOE will have nothing to do with maintaining the lockers or profit from them in any way. “We are not aware of other school districts that are looking at cell phone lockers,” says Parks. Of course, there will be enough lockers to accommodate schools that have up to 4,000 students, she adds.