On August 27, the Watervliet City School District, a one-high-school system across the Hudson from Troy, posted a short item to its news archive linking to a Google Drive file. The file is the district's first enforcement report under New York's bell-to-bell phone law. A table on its second page lists an enforcement rate of 34.2 percent for Black high school students and 20.8 percent for white high schoolers. A page later, the district's written analysis reaches its finding on race in a single sentence: "No statistically significant disparity was identified by race."

Watervliet is among the first districts to publish what Education Law §2803 now requires of every district, charter school and BOCES in the state. The law calls for an annual accounting of how the phone policy was enforced and who was disciplined under it, due by September 1. Three weeks past that deadline, the reports that can be located run from a Long Island dashboard with a four-point mitigation plan to an upstate monthly tally with no demographic breakdown at all. Each report is posted on the district's own website and never filed with the state. There is no public list of who complied, and the law assigns no one to check whether the numbers hold up.

What the law asked districts to show

The phone restriction arrived through the FY2026 state budget. Most of the attention last summer went to its front end, meaning storage pouches, lockers, parent contact procedures and the ban on suspending a student solely for touching a device. The back end sits in subdivision seven of the statute, which requires non-identifiable demographic data on students disciplined for non-compliance and an "analysis of any demographic disparities in enforcement of the policy." When that analysis finds a statistically significant disparate impact, the district must attach a mitigation action plan.

The governor's office has described the reporting requirement as "helping to prevent inequitable discipline," and the state's implementation page restates the September 1 deadline. The policy FAQ posted alongside it covers backpacks, lockers, caregiver exceptions and whether an insubordinate student can be suspended. It contains no question about the enforcement report, no suggested format, and no word on which demographic categories count or which statistical test should decide significance.

The state handled the policy phase very differently. Districts that wanted storage funding, set at $10.90 per secondary student, had to submit the web address of their policy through the State Education Department's monitoring and vendor system by August 1, 2025. By late August of that year, the governor's office was announcing that a searchable public site carried policies from 99 percent of covered schools. A review of the state's implementation page, its FAQ and the department's aid guidance turned up no equivalent submission step, template or public index for the enforcement reports.

Three districts, three different documents

Hicksville: the fullest picture

Hicksville Public Schools in Nassau County published its report as a page on the district site, and it is the most complete one TheStandardNY has found. The district logged 698 documented responses involving 481 students, with 639 of those responses at the high school and 59 at the middle school. Enforcement peaked in September at 175 responses, fell to 79 in October and never returned to the opening month's level.

The demographic section is where Hicksville's numbers turn. English language learners made up 10.7 percent of enrollment and 37.4 percent of disciplinary responses. Hispanic students made up 42.1 percent of enrollment and 57.2 percent of responses, and the district identified disparities for both groups at both schools. Male students were overrepresented at the high school. Students with disabilities accounted for 13.9 percent of both enrollment and responses, and economically disadvantaged students were slightly underrepresented.

Hicksville measured those shares against responses rather than individual students, so a teenager written up four times counts four times, and the report notes that 14 students accumulated four or more infractions. The first item in its 2026-27 mitigation plan is a series of translated grade-level assemblies at the high school. The last requires any student with three or more violations to keep the phone in a district-provided secure storage device during the school day.

Watervliet: a finding the tables complicate

Watervliet's report, dated August 1 and posted nearly four weeks later, counts 412 violations involving 167 students, including 286 at the high school, 124 at the middle school and two at the elementary level. Tenth graders alone accounted for 118 violations. Of the 165 secondary students involved, 43 received four or more.

The district tested gender and found boys about 1.4 times as likely as girls to receive an enforcement action in the secondary grades, a gap it called statistically significant. The report closes with a mitigation plan built around staff calibration, family communication and review of repeat cases. The same tables list enforcement rates of 20.5 percent for Black middle schoolers against 16.0 percent for white middle schoolers, and 27.7 percent for Hispanic high schoolers. The report describes its method only as a preliminary statistical analysis.

TheStandardNY applied a standard two-group comparison, the same kind the district describes for gender, to the rates Watervliet printed for Black and white students across the middle and high school. The rates imply that Black secondary students were roughly 1.5 times as likely as white students to face enforcement, with a p-value below 0.01. That is a wider gap, and a stronger result, than the gender finding the district reported as significant. Watervliet does not publish cohort enrollment counts, so the comparison is reconstructed from its percentages. One column of its race table also fails to reconcile, listing a single Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander high schooler at 33.3 percent of total district enrollment. Nothing in the mitigation plan addresses race.

Fort Plain: a count and a narrative

The earliest report TheStandardNY located came from the Fort Plain Central School District in Montgomery County, posted July 27. Its introduction tells readers the report includes a review of whether the policy was enforced differently across student groups, but the report that follows contains no such review. What it offers instead is a month-by-month count of Device Intervention Lab sessions, a reflective program students attend after a violation. The labs totaled 48 for the year, from 10 in January to none in May.

Three students were placed on individualized device plans for repeated violations. The rest is administrative observation, including fewer unauthorized food deliveries to campus and more students visiting the nurse instead of texting home to be dismissed. Administrators also wrote that a few students likely kept using phones in "private restroom stalls." The report lists backpacks among the places students stored devices, an option the state's FAQ says is not permissible on its own.

Why nobody can say who complied

The state's own policy lookup lists more than 1,050 districts and schools, and every one of them owed a report this month. The statute's only publication requirement is the district's own website. A parent in Plattsburgh and a researcher in Albany therefore have the same tool for learning whether a given district filed, which is a search bar. Reports are posted as web pages, Google Drive files and PDFs, under titles that variously say enforcement report, annual report and distraction-free schools. Some sit inside news archives where they will scroll out of view within weeks.

Those differences in format carry differences in substance. Hicksville counted responses, Watervliet counted violations and students, and Fort Plain counted intervention sessions, so none of the three totals can be set beside another. Hicksville examined English learner status, disability and economic disadvantage, Watervliet examined gender and race, and Fort Plain examined nothing. The statute never says which groups a disparity analysis must cover, and each district filled that gap on its own.

TheStandardNY's July guide to year two of the phone-free rules flagged these reports as the next thing families should watch for. Whether the ban is working in classrooms has drawn surveys and press releases from Albany. Who is being disciplined under it has so far produced a scattering of district web pages that no state office has gathered.

What to look for in your district's report

Start on the district website with the terms enforcement report, device policy or distraction-free, and check board meeting agendas and minutes from August and September, where a report may have been presented before it reached the homepage. If nothing turns up, the statute gives families a straightforward question to put to the superintendent's office or at the public comment period of the next board meeting.

When a report does exist, the useful questions are concrete ones. Parents should check whether the figures count students or incidents, which demographic groups the district examined, and whether English learners and students with disabilities appear anywhere. It also matters whether the report names the method it used to decide that a gap was or was not significant. A district that found a disparity owes a mitigation plan, and a district that printed unequal rates while finding none owes an explanation of how it got there.

The next round of reports is due September 1, 2027, and will cover the current school year. Those filings will be the first chance to compare a district against its own prior numbers, which is possible only in the places that published real numbers this fall.