December 14, 2006
Penny For Your Thoughts, Quarter To House Your Cell Phone
Wait a second, the Department of Education is trying to find a compromise in the neverending fight over whether students can bring cellphones to school? Apparently the DOE was approached by Celstor, who said that they could build a prototype that, as the Post reported, "could be built and maintained at no cost to the city." Hello, magic words! And Celstor is very clever, following the heated debate between school officials on one side and students and their parents on the other.
The DOE is putting a call out to other vendors to see who can build tiny storage locker units - sort of like small P.O. boxes - outside a few schools for a test to see if it's a feasible plan. To remind you, many schools have metal detectors at school entrances, so cell phones would have to be deposited prior to being checked. (And the DOE has had a rule banning cell phones for two decades or something and also say they are distractions during the school day; parents and students say cell phones are necessary in case of emergencies.) The DOE thinks they would charge 25-50 cents for storage, which brought mixed reactions from students who gave the Post some choice thoughts today:
"It sounds retarded. My parents would not want me putting a phone in a locker outside." - Aaron Noorani, student at Beacon High School (he sneaks his phone in!)This does seem like a decent alternative to paying $1 for bodegas to hold onto cell phones or to hiding them in strange places, but our question is whether the storage units will be guarded, because isn't a cell phone storage area a huge calling card for trouble?"Hell, yeah, I'd pay it. I'd pay $1 for that. People who can sneak their phones in don't know what it feels like to have no way to communicate with your parents and friends." - Mayte Gonzalez, student at High School for Law, Advocacy and Community Justice
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glad to see the nyc public school system is spending our tax dollars on cell phone lockers.
Well, the DOE is looking for options that don't require any outlay of money.
It won't work. These are kids we're talking about here. Kids are notoriously hard on public property. They'll lose their keys, jam the locks, bend the doors, etc.
I can believe I managed to make it to adulthood alive without a cell phone.
Jesus loves the entitled teens
The white government better make the lockers big enough for the "students" to store their knives & guns.
Put Cell Phone Jammers inside classrooms.
Problem Solved.
So you are telling me that we have to pay money for overweight fat urban kids who yell and talk real loud ghetto speak and don't study and will be working at Duane Reade or Mcdonald's for the rest of their life to house their cell phones?
anybody know how somebody with children can get their kids to not go to public school with thugs and hoodlums ie. black and hispanics?
i grew up in a suburb of NYC and during my time in middle school and high school (yes, i was born in 1985 - u do the math) mostly everyone had a cell phone and the rule was that if it rang in class, teachers were allowed to take it away and could pick it up at the office at their earliest convenience.
this was a simple solution to a simple problem and it worked.
kids had their cells, parents knew their whereabouts and teachers were not distracted.
"parents and students say cell phones are necessary in case of emergencies."
i remember being called to the principal's office to receive news that my mother had been in (what would prove to be) a fatal car accident. i didn't have a cell phone then, and thank god for that, as i doubt anyone could handle such a call from his father during calc class.
students claim need for phones for emergencies as a simple act of parental placation, knowing full well their intent to text and disrupt. modern parents consider an "emergency" to be that they won't be home until late tonight because they found something better to do than watch over their children.
despite the new common knowledge, emergencies did in fact exist prior to the cellphone, and this issue is just the latest sluice off the maladroit parent-teenager dynamic present in western society and i don't see why my tax dollars should go toward such nonsense. the city wouldn't be disenfranchising kids by restricting cell phone usage in public schools.