Cellphone Crackdown In Effect; City Children In Danger Of Returning To The Bad Old Days Of Overprotective Parents

Will the Board of Education crackdown on cellphones lead to a return of the bad old days of children not being allowed to take the subway to school? Parents are concerned:

During the final stretch of David Ritter’s hourlong trip to middle school, he pulls a cellphone from his jeans and calls his mother in Washington Heights to say he is out of the subway and moments from the Salk School of Science on East 20th Street.

“It’s one thing I can cross off my list of things to worry about,” his mother, Elizabeth Lorris Ritter, said. “It’s a required part of our everyday life. We have a refrigerator, we have running water, we have cellphones.”

Cellphones are the urban parent’s umbilical cord, the lifeline connecting them to children on buses, emerging from subways, crisscrossing boroughs and traipsing through unknown neighborhoods.

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Some of these parents, also fearful of child predators and terrorist attacks, say that sending their children to school without cellphones is unimaginable. “I have her call me when she gets out of school, and she’s supposed to get on the bus right away,” Lindsay Walt, an artist, said of her daughter, Eve Thomson, 11, a sixth grader at Salk. “Then I have her call me when she gets off the bus, and I have her call me when she gets in the house. The chancellor will have civil disobedience on his hands. No one in New York is going to let their child go to school without a cellphone.”

. . .

“We sit here and we tell our parents, ‘Care about your kids, do this, do that,’ and then you say, ‘You’ve just lost that safety net that you rely on,'” said Jane Reiff, a Queens parent whose daughter Nikki, 12, uses her cellphone to call for a ride if the friends she usually walks home with are out sick. “It’s just not safe out there.”

Other items included in the crackdown — besides obvious things like boxcutters — include MP3 players:

Dumbfounded students said cellphones were essential, so familiar they were like an extra limb. But they had different reasons from their parents’. “I feel so empty,” said May Chom, 14, speaking wistfully after hearing of the policy and leaving her phone at home in Queens. With no cellphone, May said, there was also no way to listen to music on the way to the Lab School, on West 17th Street, making for a “really, really boring” trip.