SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Should Smart Phones Be Banned In Schools

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

So-called smart phones were not a problem for a teacher when I started out as a professor 45 years ago. The first cell phones, big and clunky, arrived in 1973, and the internet emerged a decade later, says, yes, an internet search engine which I just visited. But the smart phone, these slim devices providing email and internet access, small computers, have only been here in relatively recent decades. People being hooked on smart phones is widespread.

And what a problem for educators!

Currently, two Suffolk County school districts are considering steps to deal with them. 

The headline last month in the Shelter Island Reporter: “Will S.I. School ban cellphones?” The Shelter Island “Board of Education to explore the concept,” was the subhead.

The article followed a piece in October, also by reporter Julie Lane, about a teacher banning the use of cellphones in class. That earlier piece began with a quote from the teacher: “You cannot learn at the same time you are looking at other information.” Wrote Lane: “That’s the long and short of why Shelter Island School social studies teacher Peter Miedema has implemented a no-cellphone policy in his humanities classes….Without face-to-face communication, there’s a critical element missing in teaching, Mr. Miedema said.” And she added, quoting him: “Things don’t stick when you’re not paying attention.”

Last month’s article by Lane began, “When some Shelter Island teachers learned last October about social studies teacher Peter Miedema’s banning cellphones in his humanities class, they thought they would like to follow suit.” It reported on the school board meeting at which a ban on cell phone use would be “on the table at the request of teachers” and also, how “Board member Kathleen Lynch, a psychotherapist, said some of her young patients seek limits on phone use, realizing how much of their attention is devoted to text messages and alerts.”

The piece said: “District Clerk Jacqueline Dunning would be contacting officials in neighboring districts to explore their policies on cellphone use that will help to inform the Board of Education as it explores the issue this summer.”

In Sag Harbor, Cailin Riley for the Express News Group reported in March that a “new, more restrictive cellphone policy for students could be coming at Pierson Middle-High School, and if the initial response to a presentation outlining it at the board meeting on Monday night is any indication, it would be well-received by teachers and parents alike.”

“Andrew Richards, a representative from a company named Yondr,” wrote Riley, “gave a presentation at the meeting on a product sold by the company that helps eliminate the distraction of cellphones at events and concerts—and also in school districts. The company sells a patented pouch that locks when it is closed. The magnetic lock can only be unlocked by a small, handheld circular device similar to the mechanism used to remove security tags from clothing sold in retail stores.”

“Essentially,” she said, “students are required to place their phones in their pouches and lock the pouch at the start of the day, under the guidance of staff — to ensure they don’t find creative workarounds, like slipping a stick of deodorant in the pouch instead of their phone.”

“Several School Board members said they would support the implementation of the pouch system, and two parents weighed in during public comment say they would welcome the new policy,” continued the article.

These days, as a professor at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, I need to include in the syllabi for my classes this statement: Smart phones and similar electronic devices, because they divert a student’s attention, are not to be used during class. Please put your smart phone or similar device away and forget about texting or checking on email during class.

Allow me to note that my problem with smart phones being used in class is not personal. Having one of these devices—mine an Apple IPhone—I find indispensable. Every once in a while I can’t find mine and panic breaks out. But as I tell my students, I do not believe that using a smart phone and multi-tasking in class is possible. It will interfere with learning, I explain.

And it’s not just students with this problematic diversion.

Last month my wife and I were at a restaurant and at the next table were a woman and her daughter. The woman was on her smart phone throughout their dinner. The daughter went beyond that: she was at her medium-size IPad computer during the dinner only moving it slightly to eat. They did not utter a word to each other during the entire dinner, so immersed as they were for more than an hour on their respective devices.

This is some societal situation these days isolating people in electronic worlds. 

Should the use of smart phones be banned in schools? Yes 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Do You Have A Right To Clean Air, Water & Environment

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman 

Maya K. van Rossum, the leading figure nationally behind the Green Amendment, a constitutional amendment declaring “that each person shall have a right to clean air and water and a healthful environment” came to Suffolk County to give a keynote address at a three-day “Docs Equinox” celebration dedicated to Earth Day week. 

The Delaware Riverkeeper for three decades, van Rossum is the author of the 2017 book “The Green Amendment, Securing Our Right to a Healthy Environment.” She coined and defined the term Green Amendment as a constitutional guarantee equivalent to other constitutional guarantees.

She founded the national group Green Amendments For The Generations which is working for inclusion of the amendment in every state constitution in the United States and becoming part of the U.S. Constitution, too. 

Attending “Docs Equinox” was the prime sponsor in the New York State Assembly of the state’s Green Amendment, former Assemblyman Steve Englebright of Setauket. The amendment, which was on the state’s election ballot in 2021 and passed by 70% of the vote, took effect at the start of last year. Englebright said that it was “already making a difference” by providing the legal basis constitutionally in New York for a clean and healthy environment. 

After van Rossum spoke, Jacqui Lofaro, founder and executive director of Hamptons Doc Fest, declared: “I hope some of your passion rubs off on all of us.” The keynote address of van Rossum was indeed passionate and inspiring.

At the “Docs Equinox” celebration, which ran between April 14^th and 16^th, the documentary film “The Grab” was screened. In it, a team of investigative journalists, led by Nathan Halverson of The Center for Investigative Reporting, based in California, exposes manipulations now underway by several nations, including China and Saudi Arabia, to obtain and control water resources, land ownership and food production all over the world. It was directed and produced over a six-year period by Gabriela Cowperthwaite and released last year.  

After its showing, from the audience, Nigel Noble, himself an Oscar-winning filmmaker from East Hampton, declared that it was “the most important film I’ve ever seen in my life and everybody in the world should see the film.”

It is stunning and shocking, a must-see documentary.

After “The Grab” was screened, Cowperthwaite and Halverson were interviewed by Lofaro via Zoom. They detailed the difficulties of making the film and the importance of what it reveals. Halverson said what is going on is “still solvable” to stop, but if that does not happen it will be “disastrous for the human species.” Cowperthwaite said it was critical to “get the word out” about what is happening and for people to act. She described investigative reporting as “completely crucial to our democracy.” 

In her keynote address, van Rossum related how it was through the battle in Pennsylvania against the “highly polluting” process of fracking that the vision of a Green Amendment was born. An attorney as well as environmental champion, she said a long-overlooked Environmental Rights Amendment added in 1971 to the Pennsylvania Constitution protecting people’s rights to “pure water, clean air and a healthy environment” was how the vision of the Green Amendment was born. It was used in Pennsylvania by the Delaware Riverkeeper Network to bring a lawsuit against fracking. Fracking or hydraulic fracturing is a process in which 600 chemicals, many of them cancer-causing, are injected into the earth under high pressure, along with huge amounts of water, to break up shale formations and release gas and oil in them. The result has been widespread and serious contamination of groundwater all over the U.S. 

She said “we breathed legal life” into this amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution and that has led to the campaign to have “that kind” of amendment “in every state constitution” and the U.S. Constitution. Such a “Green Amendment,” she said, would “lift up environmental rights to other rights such as the rights of religion and free speech.” 

Also shown at “Docs Equinox” celebration was the documentary film “Invisible Hand.” It focuses on the “rights of nature,” a concept that a river or watershed or ecosystem, as examples, shall be granted personhood in courts of law and be provided with legal standing in their defense. Its executive producer is the environmentally committed actor Mark Ruffalo. A director, Joshua Boaz Pribanic, was interviewed via Zoom by Christina Strassfield, executive director of the Southampton Arts Center.  

The theme of this “Docs Equinox,” said Lofaro, was “All in for the Aquifer.” She noted that on Long Island, “We stand above our water. It’s all [the potable water] we’ve got. We have to preserve it.” And, also participating in “Docs Equinox” with tables in an area which Lofaro called “Water Central” were five area environmental groups: Group for the East End, The Nature Conservancy, Peconic Baykeeper, Peconic Estuary Partnership and the Surfrider Foundation.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : Governor Hochul's "Ambitious Goal"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

In announcing her New York Housing Compact in her “State of the State” address at the start of this year, Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled a plan setting what she termed “the ambitious goal” of building in the state “800,000 new homes over the next decade.”

Under the plan, “every single locality across the state will have a target for building new homes. Upstate, the target is for the current housing stock to grow by 1% every three years. Downstate, 3% every three years.”

She said “many localities are already hitting” state housing targets. “This is not a one-size-fits-all approach,” she added. “Local governments can meet these targets however they want and shape the ways they expand building capacity, such as redeveloping old malls and office parks, incentivizing new housing production, or updating zoning rules to reduce barriers.”

The governor said “localities will get help from the state to accomplish this shared objective. We will offer substantial new funding for infrastructure like schools, roads, and sewers needed to support growing communities. And we will cut red tape to allow projects to move forward quickly while still protecting the health, safety, and environment of our communities.”

“But,” she declared, “when communities haven’t made good-faith efforts to grow when proposed housing projects are languishing for no legitimate reason, the state will implement a new fast-track approval process. Because to do nothing is an abdication of our responsibility to act in times of crisis.”

“Today,” said the governor, “we say no more delay. No more waiting for someone else to fix this problem. Housing is a human right. Ensuring enough housing is built is how we protect that right. There’s a saying, ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’ And we will not waste this opportunity. We just need everyone and every community to do their part. Solving our housing crisis would be a huge step toward making New York more affordable.”

This intervention by New York State government with a “new fast-track approval process,” if there is what the state considers a lack of action, became a huge sticking point instantly. 

Everybody agrees that we have an affordable housing crisis in New York State. But there is major disagreement in government as to how it should be met. 

Local and state lawmakers have been pressing for incentives, not mandates. 

But will simply incentives work? A headline last month of an article in “The Real Deal,” a publication covering the real estate industry, was: “Incentives won’t make dent in housing crisis, groups say.” It began: “The suburbs prefer carrots. That is, incentives to grow their housing stock, rather than mandates that trigger penalties if not met.” And following the Hochul announcement, the piece noted, the State Legislature advanced a measure that “offers carrots—$500 million for municipalities that meet certain housing growth targets—rather than sticks.”

Cited in the article was a 2020 report by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, a joint center at the at NYU’s School of Law and the NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. The Furman Center in summarizing its report, titled “Ending Exclusionary Zoning in New York City’s Suburbs,” said: “New York stands alone among its peer states—coastal states with high housing costs and healthy regional economies—in giving its local governments such broad authority over local land use. The result is a state with fewer homes, more expensive rents, and starker segregation than it would otherwise have. By some measures, New York has the most exclusionary zoning in the country.”

Ian Wilder, executive director of Long Island Housing Services, based in Bohemia, which says its “mission is the elimination of unlawful housing discrimination and promotion of decent and affordable housing,” supports the governor’s plan.

The “current system,” says Wilder, “gives a developer the ability to build a 13-bedroom home”—a megamansion—“but makes the builder of a 13-unit affordable housing development jump through years of expensive legal requirements to build. Yet the local officials continue to defend the home rule zoning scheme that fails to serve our communities.”

“My experience working at a housing counseling agency is that nobody comes to us looking for home rule zoning, they are looking for a home. Recently I had two experiences that drove that home. I know a young entrepreneur who sold his business on Long Island and moved to Florida so he could realize his goal of owning a home by age 25,” said Wilder. “I also was at a beach cleanup recently and came across two of my neighbors discussing how an entry level worker cannot even afford a basement apartment.”

“We cannot solve our housing problems by relying on the tools that caused them,” Wilder comments. “Governor Hochul has looked at the tools that other states have developed already to increase housing and forged them into a plan to address our housing crisis.” 

Also backing the plan is Michael Daly, affordable housing advocate from Sag Harbor. “The New York Housing Compact will not take away local control but give local officials the tools they need to tackle the housing crisis that is happening in every town and village on Long Island. Elected and appointed officials locally are handicapped today by the overly restrictive zoning rules that they inherited from previous administrations. Almost everyone says they need to do something about housing but loud and angry NIMBYs object to local zoning changes. The officials should appreciate the New York Housing Compact for the leverage it gives them to tackle the housing crisis,” said Daly, founder of East End YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard).

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : Affordable Housing Crisis

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

What everyone agrees on is that we have an affordable housing crisis.

It’s not simply a problem. It’s not just a situation. It’s a full-blown crisis impacting on many people.

One window I have on it is as a professor looking at the faces and being engaged in discussions with scores of young people every week—and when the conversation turns sometimes to housing, their expressions and comments turn gloomy. They wonder how they will ever be able to afford a house on Long Island now with the mean cost of one in Suffolk County at more than $500,000? How will they ever be able to afford a house in Nassau with a mean cost there of more than $600,000?

In both counties, that’s a payment of more than $3,000 a month—more than $700 a week—on a 30-year mortgage with a 6% fixed interest. And that’s before property taxes and costs of utilities and upkeep.

For those who dream of owning a single-family home—the housing standard for better and worse on Long Island—that requires a salary of $1,000 a week or more than $50,000 a year just for housing.

My students from New York City who figure that they’d be living in an apartment someday wonder how they could ever afford the average rent of an apartment in the city now at more than $3,000 a month.

The crisis has overtones that hark back to the Great Depression. Consider the important Riverhead-based homeless services initiative Maureen’s Haven. It provides at houses of worship in Suffolk County, free, seven nights a week, shelter for homeless men and women. (Our synagogue, Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor, participates in it. My wife is among those who cook meals for folks cared for by Maureen’s Haven.) But the program only runs from November 1 to March 31. An article last week by Express News Group reporter Michael Wright in the Sag Harbor Express was headlined “With Spring’s Arrival, Homeless Lose a Lifeline.” For one participant in the Maureen’s Haven program, the piece began, “this past Friday was probably the last night for some time that he would sleep in a bed.”

Where will he and others now go? Will many sleep in the woods on Long Island? Yes. Their plight is a modern-day variation on “Grapes of Wrath.” 

What a comment it is on our society today!

Housing is a basic human need. 

In her “State of the State” address in January, Governor Kathy Hochul declared that “we must improve the quality of life for New Yorkers. But you can’t really talk about quality of life without talking about cost of living. With inflation soaring, prices are going up on everything families need to buy. And on top of that, paying the monthly rent or mortgage— it’s just overwhelming. So let’s talk about everyone’s largest expense: housing.”

“Over the last 10 years,” said the governor, “our state has created 1.2 million jobs—but only 400,000 new homes. Many forces led to this state of affairs. But front and center are the local land use policies that are the most restrictive in the nation. Through zoning, local communities hold enormous power to block growth.”

“Between full-on bans of multi-family homes, and onerous zoning and approvals processes, they make it difficult—even impossible—to build new homes.”

“Between 2010 and 2018,” she said, “Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and Putnam Counties, each granted fewer building permits per capita than virtually all suburban counties across Massachusetts, Connecticut, Southern California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Northern Virginia.”

The governor spoke about how “too many of our people are struggling to find a place to call home, and they are looking to us for bold leadership. Decisive action is called for now.”

“Today,” she said, “I’m proud to introduce the New York Housing Compact, a groundbreaking strategy to catalyze the housing development we need for our communities to thrive. For our economy to grow. And our state to prosper. The compact pulls together a broad menu of policy changes that will collectively achieve the ambitious goal of 800,000 new homes over the next decade. The compact sets clear expectations for the growth we need while at the same time, giving localities plenty of tools, flexibility, and resources to stimulate that growth. Every single locality across the state will have a target for building new homes. Upstate, the target is for the current housing stock to grow by 1% every three years. Downstate, 3% every three years.”

More next week on the affordable housing crisis.  

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : F14 Tomcat A Walk Down Memory Lane

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It’s amazing how history bends and turns. In recent days, with tension between the United States and Iran heating up again, this time in Syria, I thought of the fighter jet which has been a mainstay to the Iranian Air Force—the F-14, built here on Long Island, in Nassau and, yes, Suffolk County.

F-14 Tomcat (Wikipedia)My mind went back to 50 years ago when there was a press event at the Grumman facility in Calverton, a manufacturing and the final assembly plant for Bethpage-based Grumman as well as its site for test flights.  

Reporters were invited to be there as U.S. Representative Otis G. Pike of Riverhead was to take a ride on what was a prize new product of Grumman, its two-seater F-14 “Tomcat” fighter jet. (It’s the plane featured in Tom Cruise’s 1986 movie “Top Gun.”) Pike, outfitted in a flight suit, who represented the lst Congressional District from 1961 to 1979, was no stranger to warplanes. During World War II he served as a Marine Corps dive bomber and fighter pilot through the war in the Pacific. 

Walking into the huge Grumman plant, I wasn’t surprised to see a bunch of F-14s with U.S. Navy markings. Grumman for the decades following its founding in 1929 as Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation by Leroy Grumman and partners, it became a prime manufacturer of airplanes for the Navy.

But I was surprised to see a bunch of F-14s with strange markings. 

They were being produced for Iran. Indeed, Iran was the only foreign nation to which the F-14, considered a highly advanced fighter in its time, was ever sold.

In fact, the sale of those jets to Iran was considered pivotal to Grumman. It was “the contract that really saved it,” relates David Hugh Onkst in an exhaustive 640-page Ph.D. dissertation on Grumman history presented in 2011 at American University. (It is online.) “In 1974, the Shah of Iran signed a $2 billion contract for eighty F-14s.” It “would be” the “contract that rescued the company” at that point deep in debt, he related.

But then came the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the ouster of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the Iranian hostage crisis after the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was seized that year with 50 Americans held hostage for 444 days. Relations between the U.S. and Iran have never, to say the least, been the same. From allies, the countries became enemies.

Meanwhile, Iran has through the decades been using those made-on-Long-Island F-14 jet fighters. “The F-14 Tomcat is the Backbone of the Iranian Air Force,” was the headline of a 2019 article in the publication The National Interest.

The article provided background for the interest of the shah in the F-14. He “wanted weapons. And not just any weapons. Himself a former military pilot, the king wanted the latest and best U.S.-made warplanes, with which the Iranian Air Force might dominate the Persian Gulf and even patrol as far away as the Indian Ocean….The administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon was all too eager to grant the shah’s wish in exchange for Iran’s help balancing a rising Soviet Union…That’s how, starting in the mid-1970s, Iran became the only country besides the United States to operate arguably the most powerful interceptor jet ever built—the Grumman F-14 Tomcat.” 

The piece continued: “It’s fair to say American policymakers quickly regretted giving 

Iran the F-14s….The Islamic revolution transformed Iran from an American ally to one of the United States’ most vociferous enemies….For the next five decades, the United States would do everything in its power—short of war—to ground the ayatollah’s Tomcats. But the Americans failed. Through a combination of engineering ingenuity and audacious espionage, Iran kept its F-14s in working order—and even improved them. The swing-wing fighters took to the air in several conflicts and even occasionally confronted American planes. Today Iran’s 40 or so surviving F-14s remain some of the best fighters in the Middle East.”

Despite efforts to prevent replacement parts for the F-14 from getting to Iran, they’ve  gotten there. “The parts war escalated after the U.S. Navy retired its last F-14s in 2006…In 2007, U.S agents even seized four intact ex-U.S. Navy F-14s in California—three at museums….Even so, the underground trade in Tomcat parts continues, with shady companies scouring the planet for leftover components.”

“Five decades in, Iran’s F-14s are only getting better and better,” the article concluded.

Back on Long Island, an F-14 has just been fully restored to be displayed at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City. (The restoration costs were covered by Northrop Grumman. In 1994 Grumman merged with Virginia-headquartered Northrop.)  “We are the keeper of the legacy of Grumman,” the museum’s president, Andy Parton, has said. It is the 711^th of the 712 F-14s built by Grumman on Long Island. 

Yes, Long Island’s F-14 still hangs on in these parts—and in Iran.