Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday set in stone plans for banning cell phones in schools as part of her executive budget. She also detailed long-awaited tweaks to the Foundation Aid funding formula.
“Every student will be required to disconnect from their devices during school hours, bell to bell,” Hochul said.
If enacted, cell phones would need to be put away for the entire school day starting next school year. The governor said the move will transform New York classrooms.
“Return them to a place of learning,” she said. “A new statewide policy to make classrooms distraction-free, so our children can focus on the things that matter.”
The governor announced more than $13 million in funding for districts to make the change.
Hochul said there would be some autonomy among districts as far as how phones are stored, and exceptions would be made for things like medical needs, English language learners and students with disabilities.
While a cell phone ban has support from many educators, some have expressed concerns about safety in the event of an emergency, as well as district choice.
Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt said he agrees with the governor that there is a problem, but criticized the allocation of millions of dollars in funding. He was also critical of superintendents for not more broadly stepping in to regulate cell phone use on their own, though he acknowledged that many districts have taken steps to limit or ban cell phone use.
“They wanted the governor to do this because if it goes awry, they can blame the governor. When you’re making $200,000 a year, you should be able to make these decisions.” he said. “So we’re going to make the decision for them, and then give them money to implement it. They’re going to get an increase on top of it.”
That increase would be coming in the form of a revised Foundation Aid formula.
The governor proposed two relatively minor data tweaks as part of a highly anticipated update of the formula: Switching out severely outdated 2000 Census poverty data for 2020 numbers, and changing the way the state calculates how many lower-income students a district has.
Historically, the state has relied on how many students receive free and reduced school lunches to calculate that need, but would move instead to use economically disadvantaged data if the governor’s proposal is enacted.
The state also had to step in with an additional tweak to ensure districts don’t lose money after a run of the updated formula resulted in flat numbers for hundreds of districts. Under the current plan, every district will see at least a 2% increase, and additional aid was funneled to low-wealth school districts.
“Three hundred-and-eleven districts would get zero but for this intervention,” said Budget Director Blake Washington “So we’re reinvesting dollars into the Foundation Aid formula just to make sure.”
Educators like Bob Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, are still digesting the changes and what they mean for districts.
“Not surprised, somewhat encouraged,” is how he summed up his reaction.
Lowry said the changes don’t dig very deep into what was recommended in the Rockefeller Institute’s Foundation Aid study completed in December, but given that the study was prompted by Hochul’s proposal last year to cut the Hold Harmless provision that stopped districts from losing funding year over year, he argued it’s a step in the right direction.
“Approximately half of the districts in the state would have absorbed reductions in Foundation Aid with what the governor proposed a year ago, so this is a dramatic change,” he said.