Parents Ask for School Cell Phone Ban To Be Lifted

A group of parents asked an appellate court yesterday to lift a ban on cell phones in public schools, which they say violates their constitutional right to keep in contact with their children.

One of the judges on the five-judge panel that heard the case, David Saxe, seemed to disapprove of the ban for its lack of conciliation to parents' security concerns, but did not hint at whether he believed the court should overturn the ban.

In a smaller school district, Mr. Saxe said, parents might fire an "entire school board" over a cell phone ban.

The ban, which was put into effect by the Department of Education in 2006, allows students to carry cell phones up until they enter the school, but mandates that they surrender them at the door. Schools have been using metal detectors and random checks to keep the phones, which they say are disruptive to teaching, out of the classrooms.

A lawyer for the parents, Norman Siegel, said that the ban is more concerned with making the jobs of police officers responsible for those searches easier, and is not a matter of improving education.

A city attorney, Alan Krams, said the DOE has a right to make decisions about which devices students are allowed to bring into school, and that schools had recorded more than 2,000 incidents of cell phone disruption before the ban was implemented.

Outside the courtroom, Mr. Siegel argued that the city's statistic is misleading, translating into fewer than two incidents per city school, and that a ban on using cell phones, rather than possessing them, is a more acceptable policy.