Council Rallies Behind Bill Aiming To Skirt School Cell Phone Ban

The mayor's refusal to compromise on a citywide ban on cell phones in public schools may meet resistance as the City Council rallies behind a bill that aims to skirt the rule.

Parents, students, and the teachers union have attacked Mayor Bloomberg for not allowing students to carry their mobile phones to school.

"There will be a battle," the chairman of the education committee, Robert Jackson, vowed yesterday at the council's first hearing on the issue.

While a ban on beepers and pagers has in place since 1988, many schools adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding cell phones. The issue flared up in April, when Mr. Bloomberg mandated random metal detector searches at city schools to crack down on guns, knives, and other weapons in classrooms. Safety officers so far have confiscated 3,027 cell phones and just 36 weapons.

Parents say their children need to carry cell phones as they travel around the city, that it's a matter of safety. Mr. Bloomberg argues that the phones disrupt learning in the classroom and can be used for cheating, starting fights, and taking illicit photos.

While the council is taking a hard line on the ban, it does not actually have authority to pass laws on what happens inside the city's 1,400 schools.

To skirt the state's authority, about 40 members have signed onto a bill that guarantees parents the right provide their children with cell phones on the way to and from school and prohibits anybody from interfering with that right. It does not address what happens once the children arrive at school.

"We're trying to back him into a logical corner," the main sponsor of the legislation, Lewis Fidler, said about the mayor.

Stopping short of saying that Mr. Bloomberg would veto the bill if it passed, the deputy mayor for education, Dennis Walcott, said the administration would not budge. In fact, he said the Department of Education was meeting with principals across the city to make sure that they are enforcing the prohibition.

State lawmakers are also stepping up to address the cell phone issue. The chairwoman of the Assembly's education committee, Kathy Nolan, introduced a bill asking the state's education department to draw up guidelines for New York's more than 700 school districts.

"We're not trying to browbeat the city," Ms. Nolan said. "But state ed - they're not business people, they're educators, and hopefully they will weigh in."

As Speaker Christine Quinn navigates her first budget negotiations with the mayor, she is one of a dozen members who has refused to commit to the bill, even though she is opposed to the prohibition.

"Honestly, students should be able to have their cell phones as long as they turn them off during class," a spokeswoman for the speaker, Maria Alvarado, said. She said the speaker had not signed onto the bill because she was reviewing it.

If a deal is not made with the mayor before the bill comes up for a vote, it could be a rare confrontation between the two sides of City Hall, which have been making nice since Ms. Quinn took office six months ago.