As part of her state of the state agenda, Gov. Kathy Hochul is taking aim at social media use among young people.

The governor is pushing a multi-faceted approach when it comes to how to best tackle it: strategies for both in and out of the classroom.

Kimberly Kopko, an expert in parenting and child development at Cornell University, told Spectrum News 1 that the governor’s Unplug and Play initiative, which would invest in “social infrastructure,” represents Hochul taking a deeper dive into mitigating the negative impact of social media use on social development beyond the limits of the school day.

“What the governor is doing with these initiatives is not just saying ‘put your phones down, get off your phones,’ she has a very significant ‘and,” she said. “‘Put your phones down and do this’ and she’s putting the funding behind the ‘do this’ part.”

Unplug and Play would fund things like playgrounds, community centers, athletic programs and other opportunities.

“We must give them safe places to simply be kids,” she said during her State of the State Address Tuesday.

Kopko emphasized that there are clear scars from the impact of kids not getting out and making use of that social infrastructure in the years since cell phones have become common among school age kids.

“Employers are reporting that the young hires, they just don’t know how to communicate, and so I think there are a lot of downstream effects,” she said.

It’s building on the governor’s push to regulate algorithms and data use among children last year, and is coupled with an effort to create a statewide standard for cell phones in the classroom which the governor has yet to fully detail.

State Sen. Andrew Gounardes has been a legislative leader in that space, spearheading the fight against addictive algorythms in the state Senate. He insists the only solution is a statewide bell-to-bell ban.

“I think there should be one uniform rule so the students in Brooklyn and the students in Buffalo are able to go to school in the same healthy environment safe from the distraction of a cell phone or a social media platform,” he said.

Some lawmakers have argued that it should be left to school districts to decide, while others like Republican Assemblymember Keith Brown, support statewide action, but not bell to bell.

“We hear from parents that it should only be during classroom instruction,” he said. “They want their kids to have their phones available, right, wrong, or indifferent that’s how they feel.”

Kopko said surveys have found that parents had two separate sets of concerns when it comes to a bell to bell ban: how to contact their child in the case of an emergency at the school, and managing the logistics of not being able to contact their child for planning purposes like after school activities.

Many point out that there was a time when no one had cell phones in the classroom, and Kopko said there are workarounds that districts can develop to address parents’ concerns, though she argued that safety concerns are more likely to be taken seriously than planning related ones.

“I think that would be something the schools would have to work out with the parents,” she said. “This is how you can reach your child in an emergency and this is how we reach you.”