Lock Up the Phones, Wire Up the Classrooms: What the AI-in-Schools Push Means Down Here

VOORHEES — There are two ideas colliding in New Jersey’s schools this fall, and at first glance they look like they’re pointed in opposite directions. Take the phones away from kids. Give the kids more technology. Somehow, both are supposed to make school better. Let me try to untangle that, because for a lot of South Jersey families it’s going to land squarely in their kid’s classroom this year.

The part that’s already law

Start with the part that’s already law. Back in January, then-Gov. Phil Murphy signed bipartisan legislation requiring every public district in the state to adopt a policy restricting phones and internet-enabled devices during the school day, effective for this 2026–2027 school year. If your kid came home this month grumbling about a pouch, a locker, or a bin by the door, that’s why. The reasoning came out of a state commission on adolescent social media use and youth mental health, and whatever you think of it, the research it leaned on is pretty blunt: the phone in a 14-year-old’s pocket is engineered to win the fight for their attention, and it usually does.

Now the second idea. Congressman Josh Gottheimer rolled out a back-to-school agenda in early September that pairs the phone lockup with something more ambitious — using federal grants to build dedicated AI labs in schools, so the space the phone used to occupy gets filled with instruction instead of just silence. The pitch, roughly: don’t only subtract the distraction, add something worth the kids’ attention. In Newark, a program run by the data-center company EdgeConneX has already gotten district approval to launch AI and digital-infrastructure curriculum in two specialized schools.

Where the map gets in the way

Here’s where I start caring less about the press releases and more about the map. Because an “AI lab” is only as real as the internet feeding it, and that’s where South Jersey has a problem the glossy announcements tend to skate past.

Because an “AI lab” is only as real as the internet feeding it, and that’s where South Jersey has a problem the glossy announcements tend to skate past.Ethan Brooks

Gottheimer, to his credit, named it. Alongside the labs, he’s pressing the FCC and the federal broadband agency to prioritize getting fast internet to rural and underserved districts — his office’s stated worry being that the benefits of AI end up “concentrated in the wealthiest, most connected communities.” Read that sentence again from a kitchen table in Salem County or a corner of Cumberland where the nearest reliable fiber connection is a rumor. A district in Moorestown or Voorhees can stand up an AI lab tomorrow. A district where a third of the students do homework on a phone in a fast-food parking lot because that’s where the signal is? That’s a different conversation, and no cellphone ban fixes it.

That’s the real story under the story, and it’s the one I keep writing in this column in different clothes: technology doesn’t arrive evenly. It pools where the money and the bandwidth already are. New Jersey has poured real dollars into closing that gap — Gottheimer points to more than $260 million from the federal infrastructure bill going toward broadband here — but “funded” and “connected” are not the same word, and the miles between them run right through South Jersey’s poorest counties.

Two questions for your district

So here’s what I’d watch this year, if you’ve got a kid in a South Jersey district. Ask two questions at back-to-school night. One: what’s actually happening with the phones — is there a real policy or just a memo? Two, and more important: does the school have the bandwidth to teach the thing they keep saying is the future? Because a locked-up phone is a fine start. But a dark classroom with a fast-internet sign on the door and no signal behind it isn’t preparing anybody for anything.

The kids are going to grow up in an AI world whether we’re ready or not. The only question we get to answer is which kids we bother to bring along.

Based on reporting from Gottheimer’s congressional office, Hoodline, WHYY, Securly and EdgeConneX.