AUDIO & RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
Governor Hochul: “One girl told me, as I was sitting in her high school library… she said to me, ‘You’ve got to save us from ourselves. Can you take this from us?’ I realized at that moment, I am the adult, I’m a parent, and these are all my kids as well — and I want to make sure that we start having better outcomes. So on this journey, I learned that we need to do something dramatic.”
Hochul: “I think it’s going to be enormously powerful. Our workforce will be more well adjusted, ultimately, and I do think it’s going to give our students a competitive advantage because they’ll just be smarter.”
Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul was a guest on NY1’s “In Focus” with Lori Chung. The Governor discussed her distraction-free learning policy, which requires all K-12 public, charter and BOCES schools to have a plan in place for students to be phone-free “bell-to-bell.”
AUDIO: The Governor’s remarks are available in audio form here.
\A rush transcript of the Governor’s remarks is available below:
Lori Chung, NY1: Let’s begin today’s conversation with Governor Kathy Hochul. Governor, so great to have you here on In Focus again.
Governor Hochul: Thank you.
Lori Chung, NY1: You were here almost a year ago, almost to the day. You were talking about this vision you had for addressing mental health for the youth in schools. I know this is an important issue to you, not just as Governor, but you’re a mother and a grandmother.
Governor Hochul: That’s right.
Lori Chung, NY1: Tell me a little bit about what’s been accomplished so far. Bring us up to speed on what’s happened since then.
Governor Hochul: Sure. It’s been a long journey, and it was important for me to take the time, a year, to go out and have round tables and conversations with everyone — from the students themselves, to their parents, to school superintendents, teachers, principals — and to really just dive into what is happening in our classrooms and our schools today because of the constant bombardment of messages on children’s cell phones when they’ve not able to put it down. It’s in their hands all day long.
So, a couple things occurred. I learned that teachers are enormously frustrated because they’re trying to teach a math class and they’re competing with a TikTok dance video — and they know they lose every time.
Lori Chung, NY1: Right.
Governor Hochul: So they’re not teaching and making connections with students. So I believe our educational outcomes are not what they should be. Also, you have to ask why half of all teenagers are feeling hopeless and some sort of sadness and, beyond that, even depression and some suicidal thoughts.
Teenage years are always tough, but what we’re learning is that with the bombardment of these algorithms — which are sending messages — a lot of them are negative. It takes them to a dark place, but in addition, the peer pressure that goes on all day long.
One girl told me, as I was sitting in her high school library, she goes, “I have to keep an eye on my phone because sometimes they mock out my clothes and sometimes the girls are meeting in the restroom to make plans for Friday, and they’re not including me — and I need to know what people are saying about me.”
And so she says, “I can’t put the phone down because FOMO, and I’ll miss out and I won’t know. I’d be a social outcast.” But she knew it wasn’t good for her. So she said to me, “You’ve got to save us from ourselves. Can you take this from us?”
And I realized at that moment, I am the adult, I’m a parent, and these are all my kids as well — and I want to make sure that we start having better outcomes. So on this journey, I learned that we need to do something dramatic, and that’s what we’re talking about today.
Lori Chung, NY1: It’s such difficult terrain for young people to really navigate, and this is a tool to help them. You have other mental health initiatives that you’re working on. Tell me what you’re looking at right now.
Governor Hochul: I realized as a new governor a few years ago, enough has not been invested in mental health services. I put $1 billion out there to have everything from mental health supports in schools — which we had not needed in previous generations, even in grade school.
There’s therapists and counselors who are dealing with something they’re not accustomed to seeing. Some of it is the outcome of the pandemic. But our kids are struggling, and if they can’t just have the freedom of a normal childhood and be liberated instead of having all this pressure that none of us had as adults when we were children — we never had to deal with that.
So there’s a lot of ways we’re hitting it, and making sure there’s more services and removing the stigma of asking for mental health services. But, I want our kids to have healthy minds. And at the same time there was an increase in the use of cell phones in schools, that’s when the algorithms were being developed, and promoted and pushed hard by these social media companies. So, we stopped them last year. We said, “You can no longer monetize our children’s mental health.”
\Put a dead end to that, but they’re still on the phones all day long, and so I think this is going to be a game changer; what we’re doing here.
Lori Chung, NY1: To that end, there’s a phone ban that goes into effect this upcoming school year. How do you hope students will benefit?
Governor Hochul: I’ve heard from them themselves. It’s not hypothetical. I did a round table in Middletown School the other day, and it’s a large district in a rural area. I talked to the students themselves.
They actually had gone to this a few years earlier. I wanted to ask them what the experiences were, and they said there’s a tough transition at first. But what each one told me is that they’re making friends in person; they’re having conversations in real time with the person sitting next to them at lunch; they’re engaging. The noises in the halls are back because it’s no longer silent as students sitting right next to someone else or walking next to someone else is so distracted by that phone that they’re not even developing normal human connections that we expect our kids to develop, and make eye contact and have a social side of them — which is being suppressed when they’re finding their whole social life and their whole being is in this cell phone, and it’s not with people around them.
And that’s a loss for these kids. So I believe that without this, there’ll be children that are more fully well adjusted. And when they leave school and enter the workforce, or go to college, they’ll just be more normal. They won’t be depressed students, young people who’ve been spending their teenage years in their basement addicted to a phone.
Now, I can’t help what goes on at home, but I really encourage parents to look at their behavior, because children watch their parents and what’s happening at the dinner table? Are you having conversations with your children, or are you checking your work emails and texts? And that’s something we need to watch our own behavior.
Lori Chung, NY1: It’s interesting how much of this, someone my age and older took for granted, or even younger than me. This distraction-free environment that you’re trying to create, there’s research that bears out the benefits of this, that kids will have better social relationships, like you mentioned, their attention spans, knowledge, retention.
How much do you hope this will bring kids back to basics, like you say, and just focus on being regular kids in school and have that experience that maybe you and I had coming up.
Governor Hochul: I believe it will. I not only hope it will. I think there’s enough documentation from schools that have taken the plunge earlier who did not wait for this.
And the reason I had to step in is that this is hard to do. There’s opposition for a school board or a superintendent from people who are not quite sure what this is all about, they don’t want to be told what to do. Some parents don’t understand as they worry about their children when they go off to school as I did as a mom.
Something happens to my precious baby, I could never live with that. So there’s a thought that they need to be connected with their child all day long in school as well. And when I learned from law enforcement, police chiefs, and sheriffs and others who said, “If there is something going on the school campus or in the building,” an active shooter, for example — worst nightmare, “the last thing you want is for that child to have their cell phone go off and reveal their location, or for them to start videoing and giving information out there that could be misdirecting law enforcement to where to go.”
It’d be unintentional, but they cannot be doing this, and they need to be following the trained professional in the front of the classroom. The teacher, they know what they’re doing. They’ve had many drills over years to deal with this. And your child is safer — if they do not have that phone with them throughout the day, they’ll be better off.
You’re not going to recognize your child after a few months, but help them get through this. This is an important message, I’m glad we’re doing this. Now you have to tell your children, “Get ready for this.” It’s one day you’re addicted to cigarettes — you have to have that pack with you all day long, and the next day you can’t have it. It’s going to be hard for the children. And so parents, start now like I used to put my kids to bed earlier as summer was starting to come to an end. You can’t stay out until nine o’clock at night. You’re going to bed at seven o’clock by, eventually, the night before school. So it wasn’t a hard adjustment.
Start weaning your kids, get them engaged in other activities — like our whole initiative “Get Offline, Get Outside” is about promoting the great outdoors. And whether it’s opening more swimming pools, and clubhouses, and sports and just passive recreation, walking through parks and letting kids kick a ball again — hang out with their friends in the playground like they used to.
So I think it’s going to be enormously powerful. Our workforce will be more well adjusted, ultimately, and I do think it’s going to give our students a competitive advantage because they’ll just be smarter.
Lori Chung, NY1: Right.
Governor Hochul: They’re absorbing more throughout the day. I’m really excited about this.
Lori Chung, NY1: Being a kid again is such a novel concept.
Governor Hochul: Yeah.
Lori Chung, NY1: And, like you mentioned, it’s so hard to put the phone down even for the parents. It all starts with the example we set.
Governor Hochul: That’s exactly right.
Lori Chung, NY1: Governor Hochul, thank you so much for coming in and talking this through.
Governor Hochul: Thank you.
