Remember the time when someone from the main office would stop by your classroom to tell you one of your parents called the school? If you had to make an important call, you would go to the office or find a payphone. Cell phones have completely transformed this experience for today's teens. Ringtones or buzzing sounds go off in the middle of class with teachers looking around frantically trying to decipher the source. Sometimes it's the teacher's own phone. Most schools have some type of policy either mandating that phones remain off during class, but most don't or can't enforce it. A few schools will collect the phones and force parents to pay a fine to get them back.

Not in New York City. In Totally Wired, I cover the decision by Mayor Bloomberg to enforce the ban of cell phones in New York City public schools. The ban originated as part of a 1987 decision to prohibit all electronic devices that was part of a metal detector process meant to discover weapons. School safety officers began confiscating all electronic devices including phones, pagers and iPods being brought to school. The ban has parents up in arms because they are afraid they won't be able to reach their children in case of an emergency or terrorist attack and is being challenged in court.

Students will still try to sneak in their phones or pay a nearby bodega to babysit them for the day, but the most recent development in this saga is the proposal that the city build cell phone lockers. According to the Associated Press, "They are exploring whether to install special lockers outside schools to store the devices, a development that delayed recent court arguments on the ban."

Almost every teenager in New York has a cell phone. So for a school with 4,300 students, that means finding the space for 4,300 new cellphone lockers.

Part of me gets where the Mayor is coming from -- we all survived high school without cell phones and they are a definite distraction. But they have also become an integral part of modern life.

The biggest problem is enforcement, and teachers literally not knowing how these phones work and not feeling confident enough to make sure they are off. The other problem is hellicopter parents who call their teens in the middle of a school day for non-emergencies.

I think students should be able to have their phones to use in between classes. But teachers need to take a hard line and ask every student with a phone to take it out and place it on the desk where she or he can see it at the beginning of class. Explain this also means taking it out of their hoodie sweatshirt pockets or from under their shirts. Then ask them to turn their phones off. Watch them turn their phones off. Remind them if any phone goes off in the classroom -- even if it vibrates, it will be taken until the end of the school day. If parents need to reach their teen urgently during class, they can still do it the old fashioned way, call the office. I can think of a lot more important stuff to spend money on in NYC public schools than cell phone lockers, can't you?