Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul and Central New York School Leaders Highlight Plans to Implement Bell-to-Bell Smartphone Restrictions This Fall

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul held a roundtable with Central New York school leaders to highlight their plans for implementing bell-to-bell smartphone restrictions when school resumes this fall. The roundtable was hosted in partnership with North Syracuse Central District, which has already finalized and submitted its distraction-free policy, and included Superintendent Dr. Terry Ward and other administrators, teachers, parents, and students from the district. This follows previous roundtables hosted by the Governor this month in New York City and the Capital Region, and additional roundtables will take place in the coming weeks.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining as we embark on a historic journey to finally help our teachers be able to teach again without distraction in the classroom, help our children regain their childhood and have a less stress-free experience, certainly, at least during these school hours, and something that I've been wanting to do for some time.

But we took a year and a half of me going out to round tables and listening to people in every corner of the state listening to superintendents — and I want to thank Dr. Ward for hosting us here today — administrators, teachers, parents, students, everybody. I did a lot of listening, and my position evolved dramatically from wondering if this was in the realm of possibility to “we must get this done.” And that is the urgency that I approach this with as we become the largest state in the nation to have a full distraction free environment for school students from K-12, bell-to-bell.

And the reason we went bell-to-bell is because — speaking to the superintendents and the teachers and students in schools where they already went ahead — you don't want to have the challenge of having a cell phone put away, and then it's lunchtime and it comes back out and study hall it comes back out because guess what? The students stop communicating, and that's when they should be getting the opportunity to develop interpersonal relationships and friendships and to be able to, without that distraction, actually speak to other students again.

And you'll hear this — actually, you won't hear this, what you'll hear is silence disappear. Because right now our school hallways are quiet because students are not speaking to each other, and you're going to hear life again and laughter in the cafeterias and in the gymnasiums and that's what it's all about.

And our young people, especially the teenagers, especially teenage girls, are under so much stress right now and the numbers are chilling, the number of young people reporting depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts. And if you want to draw a through line from 10 years ago when these addictive algorithms were being developed, and it's around the same time that somebody thought it was okay to let students have cell phones in schools. Not sure how that happened because you couldn't bring board games in, you couldn't bring your toys in, you couldn't bring anything else, but somehow cell phones were allowed, and there's a generation that is suffering.

And my job as a governor, but also the first mom-Governor who knows this effect directly, it is to do something about it. I have to do something about this. And I thank all of you for partnering with us and what is going to be a bumpy road. I understand speaking to a lot of people who have gone through this, the first three months are tough as people transition to this, but after that, there's no looking back. You'll say, “Why didn't we do this earlier?” And one young girl told me that she, for the first time — she was in middle school — the first time she has friends in person now. She says, “I'm so happy now.” I'm like, “That's what we're going for.”

So, Dr. Ward, I want to thank you again for giving us this opportunity and finishing your plan. The deadline is Friday. I know everybody likes to procrastinate, but you got to get your homework done. We have actually now, as of this morning, 400 school districts that have complied out of the 700. So, I know we'll be seeing compliance by Friday. So that allows people to get the information out to their school districts, PTA, the parents in any way you communicate with them.

And one last thing I'll say about the parents is it's really important that parents continue to be engaged, get their questions answered. Number one question parents have, because I had the same question, what happens if there's a crisis on the school grounds? There's a shooter, it's something where we want to reach our children? What I learned, this is from law enforcement, sheriffs, district attorneys, police chiefs who said — The last thing you want if there's a crisis is for that child to be distracted fumbling through the phone. The phone may go off — or they're trying to video it or try to talk to them — they need to be laser focused on the adult in the front of the classroom — who is a trained professional on how to get them to safety, get that message out to anxious parents, and they'll understand that their child is far better off safety wise.

And every school has a path to make sure that there's ways for parents to be able to communicate throughout the day. Those of us who were old enough to remember the days where if you forgot your lunch, you probably didn't forget it the next day because you're a little bit hungry or you borrowed lunch money from your buddies, right? Or you need to make after school plans to learn how to do it after hours. So that's what we're entering into and I'm excited about it, and we're just a couple months away — and Dr. Ward I'll let you take it away.

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We'll be sending around pointers. And if you have some other ones we'll talk about — and it's about the weaning. It's about your children are used to playing maybe till nine or ten at night on a summer night, and you want them to be settled down by eight o'clock. You start calling them in earlier a couple weeks out, right? You start getting them conditioned. So I think the cell phone ban is a great idea and also whatever ideas we come up with, make sure we get them out to you. Before we get started I also want to recognize two elected officials who are champions of this, who helped us get it over the finish line in our Senate and our Assembly which is Senator Chris Ryan has joined us. Thank you Senator Ryan, as well as Assemblymember Al Stirpe, and all the participants that are here today.