New Jersey students are starting the year under a statewide law that locks phones away from the first bell to the last, and parents are split down the middle. One camp says the classroom finally got quiet again; the other says no law should stand between a parent and their child during a school day. Which side are you on?
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Add your commentTo the person who said "what if there's an emergency" — schools have had landline phones since before any of us were born. The office exists. The nurse exists. The protocol exists. The emergency plan does not begin and end with your child's Instagram-delivery device.
To the person asking about health conditions — yes, there are exemptions written into the New Jersey law for documented medical needs. Please look up the actual text of what was passed before assuming the legislature didn't think of the obvious thing.
My daughter forgot her phone was locked up and she came home and just... talked to me. Sat at the kitchen table and talked to me for forty minutes about her day. I didn't know what to do with myself. I almost cried. I'm not exaggerating. That hasn't happened since she was in sixth grade.
I'm the parent of a kid with severe anxiety. The phone is her anchor. She texts me twice a day just to check in and it genuinely keeps her regulated. She has a 504 plan and her therapist has documented this. The school has accommodated her. So yes, the law has carve-outs, and yes, they work, but only if you fight for them, which not every parent has the time or knowledge to do. That inequity matters.
I'm a school counselor. The data on adolescent anxiety, self-image, and in-school conflict is not ambiguous. Social media use during school hours correlates with measurable spikes in all three. This isn't a philosophical debate to me. It's a clinical one. And the clinical picture says: take the phones.
To the person whose kid can open the Yondr pouch — your kid absolutely told twelve friends how to do it by lunchtime, so maybe be a little mad.
I'm a teacher in Bergen County and I will tell you, without exaggeration, that the first week under this policy has been the best week of my career in eleven years. Kids are looking at me. They're looking at each other. One boy who hadn't spoken in class since September of last year raised his hand twice on Tuesday. Twice.
Something nobody's saying out loud: a lot of this parental panic isn't really about safety. It's about anxiety. The parents are the anxious ones. We've been conditioned over fifteen years to believe that not knowing exactly where our kid is and what they're doing every second is negligent parenting. That conditioning is the problem, not the law.
I'm going to push back on the teacher from Bergen County. One good week doesn't make a policy constitutional. Parents have a right — a fundamental, established legal right — to be in contact with their children. A state law that severs that connection for seven hours is worth at least a serious legal challenge.
Nobody is answering the real question here: what is the actual emergency scenario people are imagining? A shooter? The school is already in lockdown, your call isn't helping. A medical event? The nurse calls you. A car accident? You're calling the school, not a thirteen-year-old. Walk me through the specific emergency that requires the kid to have a live phone and I'll take the concern seriously.
I taught for three years in the 2010s before leaving the profession. You know what I dealt with daily? Kids filming fights, kids texting answers during tests, kids posting about other kids mid-class while that kid was sitting three feet away. It was a misery. I genuinely don't understand the parents who are framing this as oppression.
I changed my mind on this, which I don't say lightly. I was loudly against it when it was proposed. Then my son got into a conflict that started on TikTok at 11am, escalated through texts by noon, and was a full-blown hallway confrontation by 2pm — all while he was supposed to be in geometry. I get it now.
The social services comment is the most important thing in this entire thread and the fact that it has the fewest likes says something depressing about how we weigh child welfare against our desire to have peaceful classrooms.
Wait, the law doesn't mean the school confiscates the phone, right? Kids still have it, it's just in a pouch or something? Because "unreachable" in the headline isn't quite accurate and that framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Respectfully, that's a pretty glib read on what parents have been through. Parents who lived through Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde did not simply "develop anxiety" out of nowhere. Some of that vigilance was taught by actual events. Dismissing it as conditioning is unkind.
The person who said "nanny state nonsense" — I'd love to hear you explain how you square that with the fact that the same parents cheering government out of their lives are usually the first ones demanding schools solve every behavioral problem their kids have. Pick a lane.
The bus thing is a real gap in this conversation and I'm surprised the law apparently doesn't address it more clearly. Anyone know if bus time counts as school hours under the statute?
I keep seeing "the classroom got quiet." Cool. At what cost and to which kids? That question deserves an answer before we declare this a victory.
Nobody has mentioned the bus yet. Kids are on buses before first bell and after last bell, sometimes for an hour each way. Is the pouch locked during the bus ride? Because THAT is actually a situation where I want my kid able to reach me.
the inequity point from the parent above is real and I haven't seen anyone else acknowledge it. who gets the exemptions? families who know how to navigate bureaucracy. same as always.
What I haven't seen anyone address is what happens to the kid who's being abused at home and uses school as the one place they could quietly text a trusted adult or a hotline. I work in social services and that use case is real. I'm not saying the law is wrong. I'm saying it's not simple.
my kid's school did this voluntarily two years ago and honestly the first month was rocky but now nobody's fighting it anymore. they adapted. kids adapt, that's kind of their whole thing.
both things can be true. the trauma is real AND the constant contact has costs. those aren't mutually exclusive.
y'all are acting like kids never survived school before smartphones. they did. they were fine.
my kid already knew how to pick the lock on the Yondr pouch. I'm not even mad I'm kind of impressed
adapted to what though, being unreachable? I don't call that adapting I call that compliance
I asked my son what he thought about the new rule. He shrugged and said "it's fine, we just talk to each other now." I don't know whether to laugh or write a letter to the governor saying thank you.
been reading this whole thread. the teacher at the start and the social worker near the end are both right and the fact that those two things are in tension is why this is actually hard. anyone who's totally certain is missing something.
what about kids who use their phone to manage a health condition, like a glucose monitor app or something
free range parenting was a whole thing like eight years ago and now we can't handle kids being offline for one school day. make it make sense
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