As part of this week’s continuing series on my son’s friends’ siblings in the news, here’s an interesting story from today’s NYT:
When Olivia Lara-Gresty saw the metal detectors at the entrance of Middle School 54 on the Upper West Side, she turned around and ran home to ditch her contraband before joining her sixth-grade class.
The cellphone police had arrived.
Not everyone was so savvy. The Police Department was there to carry out a random sweep for prohibited items, requiring all 900-plus students at the school to walk through metal detectors before entering.
Their total haul included 404 cellphones, 69 iPods, 23 other electronic devices, two knives and one imitation gun.
Good for Olivia! And I’m on the side of the many parents who think the Bloomberg administration has gone way over the line with this no-cellphones-in-schools thing. In Manhattan, parents generally start letting their kids roam the streets unaccompanied (for brief periods, at least) around 5th grade. They give the kids cellphones so they can call them every five minutes because they’re worried. What’s so wrong about that?