While many California classrooms already ban cell phones, Governor Gavin Newsom has called for stricter measures through a statewide restriction or ban on the favored devices. But many Bay Area schools remain divided over the proposal.

Newsom had already approved a law in 2019 that empowers school districts to limit or ban student cellphone use in class. He recently said he plans to further restrict student cellphone use in class based on that law – AB 272 – but offered no specific plans. His office declined to supply further details.

“I look forward to working with lawmakers to limit smartphone use during the school day,” Newsom said in a press release. “When children and teens are in school, they should be focused on their studies – not their screens.”

The announcement got here after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress to require warning labels on social media platforms warning that social media use can harm teens' mental health.

There continues to be disagreement amongst researchers as as to if digital media might be blamed for the deterioration of mental health amongst children and adolescents. Some have argued There is little evidence of a link between the usage of digital technology and the mental health of young people. Others say that smartphones cause a “Epidemic of mental illness.”

Many Bay Area districts already restrict or prohibit student cellular phone use in class. Often, students are allowed to make use of their phones between classes or outside of sophistication time.

“Cell phones are part of our culture and a necessary means of communication for many students and families related to transportation, extracurricular activities, child care and monitoring student health,” said Michelle Dawson, spokeswoman for the Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District. “Our focus is to teach students how to use their cell phones respectfully, responsibly and within our established policies.”

Former Fremont Unified School District Superintendent CJ Cammack said that while the district allows “reasonable” cellphone use, elementary school students are required to show off their devices during school hours. Cammack added that middle and highschool teachers are allowed to limit or prohibit cellphone use of their individual classrooms.

As executive director of the buyer advocacy group California for Safe Technology, Cheryl Matthews advocates for restrictions and bans on students' cellular phone and social media use. She says that while social media has some positive features, it is simply too distracting for college students and has gotten “out of control.”

“Cell phone bans … improve academic performance, encourage more face-to-face interaction (and) reduce cyberbullying,” Matthews said. “It promotes healthier habits and ensures school integrity because kids can't cheat on assignments.”

Some districts have already banned cell phones entirely throughout the school day. Just last month, the Los Angeles Unified School District — the state's largest — made headlines when its school board voted to ban students from using cell phones starting in 2025.

The San Mateo Union High School District banned cellphone use in schools in 2019 after teachers raised concerns about their students' social media habits and addictions, said Adam Gelb, former assistant principal at San Mateo High School.

The district has partnered with technology company Yondr to supply students with magnetic bags to lock their phones in throughout the school day. Once the bag is locked, students must tap it on a release base to access their phone.

Gelb said the highschool allows students to maintain their phones of their backpacks or on their desks, but teachers will occasionally unlock the phones to ascertain that students' phones are securely locked.

“All students (and) all classes had their phones in their pockets all day long from 8:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m.,” Gelb said.

But stricter cell phone restrictions have raised doubts amongst some parents and students about safety in schools.

Gelb said San Mateo High School incorporated the luggage into existing security drills so students and teachers can be prepared to unlock their phones within the event of an emergency.

But Zoe Touray, a member of the gun control group March for Our Lives, said it was her phone that saved her life when a 15-year-old boy shot and killed 4 students at a Michigan highschool three years ago.

Touray said she and other Oxford High School students thought the November 2021 shooting was just one other lockdown drill until they saw students running out of the constructing on social media and realized the danger they were in.

“I think that's the only major downside that the governor is suggesting, simply because my phone was the most important thing in my life that day. And it still is to this day,” Touray said. “Even now … I can look for an exit, but my first thought is, 'Where's my phone?' So I can contact my mom or the police if I need to. My phone is always my first choice.”

Sara Herrera, mother of a student at Valley Christian Schools in San Jose, said the concept of ​​tighter restrictions worries her if her daughter cannot contact her throughout the day.

“I have to have access to her in some way,” Herrera said.

“Given the significant demographic, topographical and ideological differences among California's 940 school districts and 58 county school boards, we should not leave this issue to lawmakers in Sacramento but address it at the local level,” said Troy Flint, the association's communications director.

Don Austin, superintendent of the Palo Alto Unified School District, agreed that decisions regarding student cellphone use should remain with locally elected school boards, stressing that it is mindless for schools in districts that provide students with computers and Wi-Fi access to limit or ban cellphones.

“I am convinced that addictive social media applications are harmful to students. There are many ways to address this problem that go beyond bans or restrictions on mobile devices,” Austin said. “If social media is the enemy, perhaps the restrictions should be tailored to the social media channels.”

In 2006, Leslie Noel Hansen was just 25 years old and thriving within the Bay Area music scene, teaching singing lessons, dreaming of Broadway and preparing to move to New York.

That all modified when she learned that Steffen Ryge, one among the Lafayette teenagers Noel Hansen had taught, had died in a automotive accident. The Acalanes High senior played the role of Peter Pan in Noel Hansen's original musical “Wish Upon a Star,” staged by local teenagers who donated the weekend's proceeds, about $20,000, to UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland .

“It was a very quirky, collaborative and fun project with me and a few teenagers who wanted to do something special,” she says.

The troupe then performed the show for young patients on the hospital and had planned to placed on one other performance before Ryge left for school. That day never got here.

At the time, Noel Hansen was set to play Christine in a touring production of Broadway's “Phantom of the Opera” after training with Franc D'Ambrosio, who played the Phantom within the Tony Award-winning musical for greater than six years. When she was booked to perform at Ryge's memorial service and open a concert for D'Ambrosio the identical day, the distraught Noel Hansen realized she couldn't leave this community.

So she began that Peter Pan Foundationwhich provides mentoring, performance and philanthropic opportunities and inspiration to young musicians and actors – a brand new generation of Peter Pans.

“There are people who need music for much more than just entertainment,” she says. “You need it for hope, health and joy. I want to show children that they can change the world through their talents.”

She had actually seen the facility of those hospital performances for the young patients, but additionally for the singers who bring joy and hope while giving back.

Noel Hansen was a young patient herself and suffered sudden paralysis from Guillain-Barre syndrome on the age of 17. It was a scary time, she remembers. At one point, doctors expressed surprise that the paralysis had not spread to her lungs, which was what had happened strengthened by years of music training. They told her that singing probably saved her life. The memory stayed along with her: If singing had saved her life, then perhaps it could help other young people in powerful ways, too.

More than 20 years later, musical kids of all ages still gather to rehearse, brainstorm and hang around at The Treehouse, the nonprofit's Lafayette home. They host annual profit performances of “Wish Upon a Star,” volunteer as hospital visitors and performers, sing at monthly open mic cabaret nights and take part in a teen leadership council called the Bay Area Magic Makers.

The Peter Pan Foundation helped William familiarize himself with the audition process, says his mother, Jiin Son, while ensuring a theatrical atmosphere that was more inclusive than competitive. William has worked with a wide range of theater, dance and music programs within the East Bay, she says, but as he performs in venues across the country, it’s the inspiration's cabaret nights that he misses essentially the most.

“I have been placed in unique spotlight positions where I can highlight the beauty of American Sign Language alongside the wonderful voices of the Peter Pan Foundation,” says Wilder. “I was able to be a different Disney character while also embracing and acknowledging my deaf identity.”

And for Justin Campo, who joined the inspiration a decade ago when the then-12-year-old's cancer was in remission, the inspiration provided a option to share the enjoyment others brought him during his hospital stays.

“I was visited by characters and was able to watch shows in the hospital,” he says, “and just a few years later I went there dressed as princes, Peter Pan and superheroes.”

Today he uses the leadership and social skills he learned through the inspiration at college, at work and in his relationships. What keeps him coming back as an adult, he says, is that “we don’t just put on shows. It feels family.”

Campo will play Peter Pan this 12 months.Wish for a star,” which hits the stage over Memorial Day weekend with a musical program that features songs from Disney’s 2023 “Wish.”

“It’s a collection of all the Disney characters and songs you know and love,” says Campo. “It’s just a warm embrace of a show.”

Columbia University canceled in-person classes on Monday and latest demonstrations broke out on other campuses across the U.S. as tensions proceed to rise over Israel's war in Gaza.

Protesters gathered throughout the weekend on the campus of the Ivy League school in New York City, where police last week arrested greater than 100 pro-Palestinian protesters who had arrange an encampment.

Since those arrests, pro-Palestinian protesters have arrange camps on other campuses across the country, including on the University of Michigan, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University, where several dozen protesters were arrested Monday morning after officials said they’d surrendered abandoned despite warnings.

The developments got here hours before the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover on Monday evening.

Columbia President Minouche Shafik said in a message to the college community Monday that she was “deeply saddened” by what happened on campus.

“To defuse the resentment and give us all an opportunity to consider next steps, I am announcing that all classes on Monday will be held virtually,” Shafik wrote. She said faculty and staff should work remotely when possible and students who don’t live to tell the tale campus should stay away.

Protests have erupted on many university campuses since Hamas' deadly attack on southern Israel on October 7, through which militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 hostages. In response, Israel has killed greater than 34,000 Palestinians within the Gaza Strip, in keeping with the local health ministry. The Health Ministry doesn’t distinguish between combatants and non-combatants but says not less than two-thirds of the dead were children and girls.

The demonstrations on US campuses have tested the road between free speech and inclusivity. They have also stoked tensions, with some Muslim students and their allies calling on schools to sentence Israel's attack on Gaza, and a few Jewish students saying they not feel supported or secure on campus as anti-Semitic sentiment runs high.

Prahlad Iyengar, an MIT graduate student studying electrical engineering, was amongst about two dozen students who arrange a camp with greater than a dozen tents on campus Sunday evening to call for a ceasefire and protest what they called “MIT’s complicity in what happened” refers to genocide in Gaza.”

“MIT has not even called for a ceasefire, and that is a demand we certainly have,” he said.

Iyengar also said the college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, issued confusing rules for protests.

“We are here to show that we reserve the right to protest. It is an essential part of life on a college campus,” he said, adding that they’ve received support from each graduate and undergraduate students.

On Sunday, Elie Buechler, rabbi of the Orthodox Union's Jewish Learning Initiative at Columbia, sent a WhatsApp message to almost 300 Jewish students recommending they go home until it was safer for them on campus.

Nicholas Baum, a 19-year-old Jewish college freshman who lives at a Jewish theological seminary two blocks from Columbia's Morningside Heights campus, said protesters over the weekend were “calling on Hamas to blow away Tel Aviv and Israel.” He said a number of the protesters who shouted anti-Semitic slurs weren’t students.

“Jews are afraid of Columbia. It's that simple. There has been so much denigration of Zionism, and that has extended to the denigration of Judaism as well,” he said.

The protest camp emerged in Columbia on Wednesday, the identical day Shafik faced intense criticism at a congressional hearing from Republicans who said she had not done enough to combat anti-Semitism. Two other Ivy League presidents resigned months ago after widely criticized testimony before the identical committee.

In her statement on Monday, Shafik said the Middle East conflict was terrible and she or he understood that many were in deep moral distress.

“But we cannot allow one group to dictate terms and attempt to disrupt key milestones like graduation to advance their point of view,” Shafik wrote.

In the approaching days, a working group of deans, school administrators and teachers will try to search out an answer to the university crisis, noted Shafik, who didn’t say when in-person classes will resume.

Several Columbia College and Barnard College students said they were suspended for his or her participation in last week's protests, including Barnard student Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar.

At Yale, cops arrested about 45 protesters and charged them with trespassing, said Officer Christian Bruckhart, a New Haven police spokesman. All were released on a promise to look in court later, he said.

Protesters arrange tents in Beinecke Plaza on Friday and demonstrated over the weekend, calling on Yale to stop all investments in defense firms that do business with Israel.

Nadine Cubeisy, a Yale student and one in every of the organizers of the protest, said the protesters were calling for Yale to divest from defense contractors since it was troubling that “this university that I'm going to attend, that I'm contributing to, and that's mine.” Friends donate money for the usage of that cash to finance violence.”

“Constructing structures, ignoring orders from university officials, remaining on campus areas beyond permitted hours, and other actions that violate university policies and guidelines pose safety risks and hinder the work of our university,” he said.

School officials said they spoke with protesters over several hours and gave them until the tip of the weekend to go away Beinecke Plaza. They said they warned protesters again Monday morning, telling them they might face arrest and disciplinary motion, including suspension, before police moved in.

A big group of protesters gathered at Yale after Monday's arrests and blocked a street near campus, said Bruckhart, the police spokesman. There were no reports of violence or injuries.

Last week, the University of Southern California took the weird step of canceling a planned commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian, who had publicly supported the Palestinians. The university cited security concerns in a choice that was praised by some pro-Israel groups but criticized by free speech advocates.

Associated Press writers Steve LeBlanc and Susan Haigh contributed to this report.