www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27...chools.html

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.

Though the phones have been banned in New York City schools for years, parents say that many schools without metal detectors have operated under a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy, with the cellphones ignored as long as they do not ring in the middle of class.

But as the city began random security scanning at middle and high schools yesterday in its latest effort to seize weapons, the gap between school rules and parents' expectations has set off a furor. Some principals recently sent home letters reminding parents that cellphones are not allowed, and at the one school searched yesterday, 129 cellphones were confiscated.

Anxious parents say that cellphones are not a frill but the mortar holding New York City's families together in these times of demanding schedules, mounting extracurricular activities, tutoring sessions and long treks to school.

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."

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etc etc etc as to how the lack of cellphones will lead to the breakdown of families and the modern way of life indeed a total dissolution of the western hemisphere if not the universe.

sob sob sob.

Yes, terrorists and predators are a legitimate concern, but, uh, three calls on the way home from school? Somebody needs to cut the apron-strings a bit and wean the kid from the teat. There's going to be muy therapists bills for these kids.