The City Council overwhelmingly voted yesterday to override Mayor Bloomberg‘s veto of a bill lifting the cellphone ban in public schools.
“No rule trumps my child’s safety,” said Lew Fidler (D-Brooklyn), the prime sponsor of the measure, which passed 46-2.
Fidler said his son takes two buses to school each morning and carries a mobile phone in case of an emergency.
“We want to know if he’s late, why he’s late,” he added.
Other council members argued that a cellphone that is out of sight and turned off isn’t a problem in class.
Last July, the council voted to give parents the right to send their kids to school with phones and made it illegal to interfere with that right.
The city’s 1.1-million-student school system has prohibited electronic devices like phones and pagers since the late 1980s.
But many schools chose not to confiscate phones if they were kept hidden in bags.
In recent times, metal detectors installed in schools to ferret out weapons have forced the issue to the forefront, as phones were being detected and confiscated as students entered school.
Furious parents flooded lawmakers with calls and held rallies leading to the law passed over the summer.
Aides to Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have repeatedly said phones interrupt teaching, even if they’re used for text messaging or browsing the Web.
Yesterday, when Bloomberg was asked if he would go to court to keep from implementing the law, he said there’d be no legal action to take because the bill was essentially symbolic.
“This is a bill that doesn’t change anything. You just don’t have the right to bring it into the school, and that’s not changing. Our teachers have a tough enough job,” the mayor said.
But Fidler said the new law was for more than show.
“It’s an expression of exasperation of tens of thousands of parents,” Fidler said. “If the mayor thinks it’s symbolic, he will be very much mistaken in 90 days when the bill goes into effect.”
Oliver Koppell (D-Bronx), who joined James Sanders (D-Queens) in voting against the override, said the law is impractical and would lead to cheating.
“Now the proctor is going to have to figure out whether [a phone is] on or not on,” Koppell fumed.
“We all know that cellphones can be used for text messaging . . . to watch movies, to access the Internet.
“We don’t need to make the teacher or the proctor a policeman to make sure that the cellphone is off.”
Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Queens) said recently his daughter called him because her bus driver got lost and that another child called her parents because she got on the wrong bus.
“You do not punish the good kids and tell them you cannot be as safe as you can be because you cannot control the bad kids,” he said.