Earlier on July 23rd, Governor Kathy Hochul held a roundtable discussion with local educators and stakeholders in the Southern Tier as part of her statewide listening tour focused on addressing smartphone use in schools. This listening tour began last week in the Capital Region and will continue with additional roundtable discussions with key stakeholders over the coming months. As the Governor has emphasized, stakeholder engagement will play a key role as she develops a statewide policy proposal on smartphones in schools that will be announced later this year.

AUDIO of the Governor’s remarks is available here.

PHOTOS of the event will be available on the Governor's Flickr page.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Good morning. Well, I'm sitting here at an airport terminal, very disappointed that we couldn't take off this morning because of low-lying clouds and heavy rain in New York City. So, next best thing is to keep this conversation going because it's critically important. And I want to thank our friends from the Windsor, Norwich and the Vestal school districts for joining us. We also have representatives from the regional NYSUT offices. Thank you to our teachers and all you do. And my friends in the elective office, our great county executive, Jason Garnar, and Senator Lea Webb and Donna Lupardo. I was talking to them — they’re great friends of mine.

So, I hope to do a lot more listening today because that's the purpose of my tour around the State: to hear from educators and hear from school superintendents and everyone involved in the whole process of helping our young people be educated and emerge as fully functioning, thoughtful adults.

Two years ago, I started going on a listening tour to talk about mental health overall— it was just not long after the pandemic ended — and it became very clear to me in sitting down with our students in school classrooms and libraries all over the state that young people are still suffering from the effects of the isolation brought on by the COVID pandemic.

And while adults have gotten through it — they're more adept in resiliency and adaptation — It's been really hard for our young people. And their substitute for human contact, as you all know, really became social media platforms, connecting with others, often in the darkness of their own home, basements and bedrooms, and not really connecting with people.

And that's really, I would say, the genesis of a lot of the challenges we have now, that were already percolating because of addictive social media algorithms. But it really come into full play now. We see the effect on our young people. The fact that one out of three teenage girls has even contemplated suicide, the number of teenagers and young people feeling depression and anxiety, and just dark thoughts has gone up so much compared to what it used to be. And I'm just trying to get at the sources of this. And again, I think we'd all agree the pandemic was profoundly negative for our kids and our students, and certainly on the teachers who attempted to teach them in that environment.

But then you take it to the onslaught of addictive algorithms, which we've addressed in legislation. I'm really proud of working with our state legislature to sign into law nation-leading bills that would say to social media platforms, “You cannot continue bombarding young people with these addictive algorithms that are not requested by them.” It used to be chronological and now it's based on arithmetic and sending messages to young people all day long — sometimes 250 messages a day unsolicited. But also, what's happening with access to cell phones: this is how our young people are being so distracted during the classroom day, to the point where 75 percent of teachers in a survey said it has become a major problem in their classrooms.

This is a barrier to young people learning the way they should be and also communicating with others the way they should be. And the fact that 13 to 15, and 17-year-olds — 95 percent have access to cell phones. So, that is what I'm seeing as a driver of all of these challenges our young people are facing mentally, but also how hard it is for education to actually occur in our classrooms these days.

So, I've talked to a lot of people. This is now my third roundtable. We were up in Albany, we were on Long Island. I wanted to hear from our friends in the Southern Tier on what your experiences may have been with restrictions or banning cell phones. Even one school district in Schoharie talked about how they had banned all distractions, including the earbuds, the smart phones and the cell phones — flip phones and smart phones.

So, there's different degrees of policies around our state and I want to hear what you're doing, what you're contemplating, what your concerns are, and help build toward a consensus where I want to lead the state when it comes time to work with our legislators in addressing this in the next session.

This is something that requires legislative action if there is to be a full ban or contemplating those issues. And also, enforcement is really important as well. Having something in place that is not enforceable is more token than actually impactful and that's not what I want to do. So, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Jason Andrews, our superintendent to the Windsor School District. Thanks for hosting everybody and I'm very disappointed I'm not sitting there with you, but hopefully this is the next best thing. So, Dr. Andrews.