Montclair students are walking into school under a new rule: phones off from the first bell to the last, with no exceptions for a backpack or a back pocket. The change follows New Jersey’s statewide bell-to-bell cell phone law, signed this January. Montclair’s version was laid out in the K-8 Technology Usage Plan that was sent to parents accompanied with a letter from Superintendent Ruth B. Turner on August 25.
Jordan Goldberg has spent two years pushing on exactly those questions. She is a founding member of Screen Aware Montclair, the parent group that came together around 2023 as concern over classroom technology reached a tipping point, after a handful of parents who had been raising the same worries separately started working together to push the district and the Board of Education towards a real policy. Screen Aware Montclair takes no position on whether a family should give a child a phone at all, only on what happens once that phone is in a classroom. “The question of whether your child needs their smartphone during math class is not so much an individual decision as something that is research-based,” Goldberg said.
Goldberg, a Montclair native who returned to raise her own kids after years in New York, is a policy attorney and has sat on the group’s policy committee since it started. She now has a rising ninth grader and a fifth grader in the district herself. She sat down with The Montclair Pod’s Mike Schreiber to explain what’s actually different this year and where the gaps still are.
Off and Away vs. Bell to Bell: What’s Actually Changing in Montclair Schools
Montclair’s previous rule, passed in June 2025, was known as off and away. “Off and away means your cell phone is off and it is away,” Goldberg said. “But that could be in your backpack, in your pocket, easily accessible, and nobody’s checking if it’s off.”
To Goldberg, the stakes go beyond enforcement details. “We’ve done this kind of unintentional social experiment on our children by putting them in classrooms with devices that are programmed to distract them,” she said. “That is the whole point of a cell phone, right? Like the pings, the constant buzzing. It’s not an accident.” Goldberg pointed to reporting on Meta and other tech companies showing that products are designed to hold a user’s attention, a design goal she said works directly against a student trying to concentrate.
The new rule comes from a K-8 Technology Usage Plan, built on New Jersey’s bell-to-bell law and the district’s revised Board Policy 2363. Personal internet-enabled devices, a category that covers phones, smart watches, smart glasses, tablets and earbuds with any communication capability, have to be powered off and stored in a school-designated location for the entire instructional day, not just kept out of sight. What also changed is the timing. It now runs from the first bell to dismissal, with limited exceptions for things like an Individualized Education Program, a 504 plan, translation needs or documented caregiving, arranged through the building principal. Notably, the plan is K-8 specific. A separate framework for the high school has not been published yet.
How Enforcement Differs From School to School
Goldberg has a firsthand look at the biggest gap. As the mother of a rising ninth grader, she attended the high school’s orientation, where the policy described sounded close to last year’s system with a stricter phone-off window layered on top: phones off entering the building, back on only at lunch, and handed into a cubby at the start of every single class. She doubts that it actually reduces how much students think about their phones. She pointed to research on attention and smartphones that has found that a phone’s mere presence nearby, even switched off, can pull on a person’s cognitive capacity. “Even if it’s not on your desk, it is occupying about 10 percent of your brain power just knowing it’s there,” she said.
Below the high school, each K-8 school is following up with its own building-specific instructions, and it’s still early to say how much those differ in practice. Buzz Aldrin Middle School has told families that unauthorized use could mean confiscation, with a parent or guardian required to come in and retrieve the device. In terms of storage, the likely default is the cubby model already in use in at least some classrooms last year, rather than a locker or a Yondr pouch, the lockable pouch some other districts use for older students.
Co-host Mike Schreiber raised a practical worry about that setup: if teachers are collecting phones block by block rather than students stashing them in a locker for the day, dismissal could turn into a scramble, kids rushing to grab a phone before the bus, with no clear system yet for how that’s supposed to go smoothly. Goldberg didn’t dispute the concern, but she was not especially bothered by it either. “I’m sure that implementation at the beginning will be a little bumpy, because implementation of anything will be a little bit bumpy,” she said. She’s confident the district’s principals will work through it rather than abandon the policy. “Every principal is really aligned behind this,” she said. “We’ll figure out a way that works for their students that does not involve just giving up and giving the phones back because we can’t figure this out.”
She pointed to research on similar bans elsewhere, where academic results are mixed in the first year and better in the second, while kids themselves tend to come around faster than adults expect. “The kids themselves will say beforehand, ‘I think this is a terrible idea’, and you go back six months later and they’re like, ‘this is kind of great, I’m talking to my friends, I’m sitting with people at lunch, I’m not as distracted.’” Whatever the bumps, she said, nobody seriously argues that unlimited phones and streaming in class was working better.
For Goldberg, the harder work is not writing the rules It’s building a culture around it. “You can set the rules, but you also have to create some sort of culture of compliance and understanding of why do we have these rules, how is it helping society to do this thing,” she said, a distinction she thinks about constantly in her own work as a policy attorney. The district has tapped one person she thinks can help with exactly that: Maria Francisco, the former Renaissance principal, who has moved into a new districtwide role and has studied student engagement with technology as part of her own graduate work. “I am hopeful that she might be able to be a good influence on how we create a culture where everybody understands … we’re not on our phones, we’re not here to play games,” Goldberg said.
That same argument, that a rocky rollout still beats the status quo, is shaping the district’s other big tech fight: Chromebooks.
Chromebooks, AI and the Policies Still Being Written
The K-8 Technology Usage Plan does not stop at phones. It pulls back hard on classroom screens too, including Chromebooks. Kindergarten through second grade can use Chromebooks only for official assessments. Grades 3 through 5 need a specific instructional reason written into the lesson plan. Grades 6 through 8 are capped at 20 minutes per course per week, with no games, no time fillers and no homework that requires a device.
Goldberg sees the same dynamic behind the Chromebook rollback that drove the phone policy in the first place: a small district up against companies whose business model depends on maximizing screen time. “We’re coping with small towns, or even states, that have limited resources up against corporations whose whole business model is to exploit things that they understand make people want to use their products,” she said. “It’s very challenging because the technology moves so fast.” Cheap classroom devices, she argued, get adopted because they are inexpensive and marketed as forward-thinking, not because anyone has studied whether they actually help kids think more clearly.
That gap between what gets installed and what the district actually approved showed up directly in Goldberg’s own house last spring. Her then-fourth grader came home unhappy about a writing assignment, saying words kept appearing on the screen before she could type them herself. A predictive text feature had been switched on district-wide through a Google Classroom update nobody at the district had signed off on. “We were able to get the fourth grade in that classroom to turn it off,” Goldberg said. “But when we brought it to the district, back in I think May, the whole board and the superintendent was like, we didn’t know this was happening.” The setting itself was a minor fix. The bigger issue, in Goldberg’s view, is that a vendor can change what’s running on a student’s screen without the district finding out until a parent notices.
That’s the same gap Screen Aware wants closed before AI tools spread any further. A district tech committee, which Goldberg served on, has been drafting an AI policy since last year, and nothing has been published yet. She wants it finished soon. “A 14-year-old or a 12-year-old who hasn’t quite figured out how to do the critical thinking themselves really shouldn’t have the machine thinking for them,” she said. “So we need that policy done.”
On the lower-tech end, Turner has also pushed to put a physical book in every student’s hand this year, a change Goldberg calls overdue. “The research shows that when you read on paper, you’re more likely to retain it, you’re more likely to understand it, and you’re more likely to be able to retell it,” she said, and she’s hoping the commitment holds through twelfth grade, not just the younger grades.
Parents navigating the new rules alongside the rest of back-to-school logistics can find bus routes, tax bill changes and the full 2026-27 calendar in the Pod’s back-to-school guide. For updates on the phone and Chromebook policies specifically, or to get involved, visit Screen Aware Montclair.
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