Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul held a roundtable discussion with local educators and stakeholders in the Hudson Valley as part of her statewide listening tour focused on addressing smartphone use in schools. This follows several recent sessions in the Capital Region, Long Island, Southern Tier and Western New York, and will continue with additional 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.

VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of the Governor’s remarks 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:

Mayor, I've come to this city for many, many years and it has literally transformed before my eyes. I was just commenting on the daylighting — the project that I came to see as a brand-new lieutenant governor to unveil years ago. And just to see the vibrancy of downtown Yonkers, it is so exciting. The flowers, the bridge, just the energy — and I want to just commend this great city for really punching through some hard times and coming out in a very, very positive way.

And to have our Leader here as well in her hometown — I want to thank Andrea Stewart-Cousins for being such a tremendous partner in government. I don't say that lightly. It's sometimes overused, and I mean it sincerely. We are — we've deepened a friendship that has really served the people of all of our communities across the State of New York. I want to thank you for being here.

And the many members who've attended here today — this is a great turnout of our elected leaders. I want to make sure I don't miss anybody. We have our Senator Shelley Mayer, Assemblymember Nader Sayegh, Gary Pretlow, Assemblymember Chris Eachus, Assemblymember Chris Burdick, of course our County Executive, and I think the Mayor of White Plains is here as well. Tom Roach — right here, maybe on his way up. Alright, well we'll get to Tom when he gets here.

Why are we here? I want to thank the people who've come, I want to thank the school districts for attending here. You'll be hearing from everybody in a couple minutes and our partners from the teacher community, NYSUT, represented here, as well as many parents.

And this is a conversation about the future of our children. It's that simple. What I have heard in these five roundtables now in every corner of the State is that we have a real crisis on our hands. It started when we worked with the Legislature to deliver funding for mental health services. Why did the State of New York have to do that? Because we're seeing that people of all ages, all walks of life — but particularly our children — were so adversely affected by this pandemic. And if you talk to a teenager today, whether they were in fifth grade when it hit, or whether they were in 10th grade, it has still had a profound effect on their psychological wellbeing. That security blanket of everything being normal and the rituals and the routines and the graduations and the friendships and the classrooms — it all dissipated at an important time in their own development and they're just not back yet.

At the same time, we had this confluence of the algorithms that are coming from social media feeds — addictive algorithms — something that we talked about, not just funding mental health services, but also saying, “What is happening with our children where they feel so compelled and this compulsion to have that cell phone in their hands all day long, including the school day?” And we look back at this, and I joined a number of members of the Legislature. We worked with Tish James, our Attorney General, last fall, and proposed nation leading social media legislation that I'm proud we got through. The Legislature signed into law just a month and a half ago, and what it says to the social media companies is number one: you can no longer monetize our children's mental health. That you cannot collect data about them and sell it to others for your personal gain. But also, you're not allowed to be able to bombard these young people with messages that they have not asked for. They can still go to social media sites — but to have this all day long, a stream of content intentionally bringing them in to hold them captive and not release them — whether it's during the school days, or after hours or in the middle of the night.

And we have to stop that, and that's exactly what we're doing. And the legislation was passed, signed into law and now the regulations are being developed.

So why are we here today? The reason that the young people are so addicted and cannot let the phones down or these feeds down, is because they have the phone, they have the vehicle.

They say, 13- to 17-year-olds, 95 percent of them have access to a cell phone. And they're not putting it down when it comes to school time. School districts are struggling. Some have already taken some bold measures. I want to hear about that, I want to know what those have done. And I've heard this around the State.

It is going cold turkey in some districts where they've said, “No distractions, no smartphones, no earbuds, no cell phones at all in the classroom during the day.” And the results have been profound, but I want to hear from you what you're seeing in your districts about how we should be shaping policy with one objective in mind — let our children be children. Let them learn in a classroom, let our teachers be able to have the attention that they've been denied for a long time with children that are distracted — and let the parents get their children back.

The carefree young ages that they should have had — and now kids are not even able to look up at the dinner table and make eye contact because it's had an effect on their social and personal development. When they're not interacting with students during the day or friends after school in person, and that's the big difference.

So, I'm ready to kick it off and thank our moderator here for hosting us. And we have Dr. Michelle Yazurlo, the Associate Superintendent of the Yonkers City School District, to moderate the conversation and call on our principals with some questions. And I'm here to listen. I'll jump in every once in a while, but again — this is a listening session for us in elected office.