Tupper Lake Central School District officialsn are seen at their regular June meeting on Monday. The board will hold a public hearing on July 7 for its cellphone policy, which will go into effect next school year. (Enterprise photo — Chris Gaige)

TUPPER LAKE — It’s coming, whether people like it or not.

That’s how Tupper Lake Central School District Superintendent Jaycee Welsh framed the statewide cellphone ban at the district’s school board meeting on Monday. The ban will go into effect at the beginning of the 2025-26 school year. It was signed into law on May 9 by Gov. Kathy Hochul and as a state regulation, Welsh said there’s not much wiggle room individual districts have if they wanted to skirt around the policy.

The ban requires personally-owned internet-enabled devices — including smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, earbuds and any other device that’s capable of connecting to the internet — not to be used from the beginning to the end of the instructional day. Welsh said this includes hallway time between class periods, study halls, lunch and after-school activities in the building.

This does not ban school-owned technology, including Chromebook laptops given to students for instructional uses. There are also a number of exceptions granted, such as personal medical devices that require an internet connection, or a cellphone if a student is a caregiver responsible for a family member’s well-being.

School districts are required to provide at least one method for parents to contact students during the school day, and issue a written notification at least once per year on how that can be done. There are also a number of areas pertaining to the cellphone policy that school districts retain local control over.

TLCSD scheduled a public hearing to receive community feedback as they look to create a policy that incorporates these district-specific details into the more rigid elements of the state regulation. That is set for 6 p.m. on July 7 at the L.P. Quinn elementary’s library. Welsh said the hearing was not meant to argue about if these devices should be banned or not during the school day — that’s already been decided.

“Whether we like it or not — it doesn’t matter at this point,” she said. “We need to talk about how this is going to work and how does this look for our school district.”

School districts control whether internet-enabled devices can be used on buses or during athletic events. Some districts have opted to extend the ban to cover those, while others allow it. Other areas of local control include whether or not students can store devices in their lockers, or in district-provided phone “cubbies” that remain locked during the day. Welsh also said each district is responsible for deciding the severity of the consequences if students violate the policies.

“There is a consequence if a student is seen with it, just like anything else that’s banned from school,” she said.

Welsh said the good news is that TLCSD has lots of information to base its policy upon.

“There are many schools around us who have already adopted this,” she said. “So while this is new to us, it has been done in, I would say, at least a third to half of the schools across New York state already. … It’s nice because we get to chat with people who have gone through the trials and tribulations of implementing this.”

TLCSD has until Aug. 1 to finalize its policy, giving the school board time to incorporate public feedback at the July 7 meeting. Welsh recommended it do at the Monday meeting. The district has already held listening sessions with its staff and students to gauge their opinions on the matters that the district can control.

Welsh said she was “super impressed” with how students handled the listening session she had with them on Monday. She said that included about a dozen students in grades nine through 11, who she noted are likely to be impacted the most by the ban.

“I thought it was going to be a ‘let’s argue about this regulation’ and ‘let’s debate why it’s important,’ but it wasn’t,” she said. “It was a very solutions-oriented meeting.”

TLCSD board members did not have any questions about the policy at Monday’s meeting, with both President Jane Whitmore and Vice President Jason Rolley expressing support.

“I’m all for it,” Rolley said, and Whitmore added, “I think it’s great.” None of the other board members spoke in favor or against the ban at Monday’s meeting.

Welsh responded to Rolley by saying that the state did not arrive at its decision to ban cellphones quickly.

“There’s been a lot of longevity research about what cellphones, what cellphone addiction, what technology addiction does to an adolescent brain,” she said. “There’s a lot of research behind it — and again, we can love it, we can hate it, but we still have to put a policy in place, though my hope is that (for) the things we can control on the policy, we control to make it right for us.”