Business Opportunities Weblog

Entrepreneur Keeps Teachers from Taking Away Students Cellphones

By on October 31, 2012 in Ideas

Photo by dooq

When I was a kid, teachers would confiscate all kinds of stuff from unruly students. Knives, radios, yo-yos, you name it. If a kid could buy it, chances are that there was at least one of them in every teachers’ junk drawer.

Today, in the age of cellphones, having your property confiscated by the teacher is a bit more expensive. One enterprising Bronx man has started a business to prevent teachers from taking away students’ cellphones:

School bans on cell phones are dialing dollars for one savvy entrepreneur.

Vernon Alcoser has cornered the mobile market at two Bronx schools, where students pay $1 a day to keep their cell phones in the trucks he parks nearby.

“It’s better than trying to sneak your phone in,” said Tatyana James, a freshman at Herbert H. Lehman High School who pays Alcoser’s company, Pure Loyalty Electronic Device Storage, to baby-sit her BlackBerry during class.

As far as Alcoser knows, his phone storage trucks are the city’s first. Parked across from Lehman on E. Tremont Ave. and DeWitt Clinton High School on Mosholu Parkway, they serve more than 700 students each day.

“It makes the students and parents feel better to know their phones are safe,” said Alcoser, 38, a correction officer who lives on Webb Ave. in the Bronx.

The city Department of Education banned electronic devices in 1998, cracking down on cell phones in 2005, said spokeswoman Marge Feinberg.

Photo by dooq.

cellphones nyc school

Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,203 posts to the site.

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  • http://n.a. cindy hawkins

    We have a truck parked outside of Washington Irving High School on Irving Place, and I am very glad because, as a former teacher I can tell you the phones are a distraction, in an already distracting setting. Students often carry behaviors into the classroom that get in the way of learning. We would allow a cellphone to be carried by a student who had a family situation. For instance, one girl’s mother was very ill with breast cancer; she was given a special permit to carry the phone and indeed, it made her feel better to know she could be in touch in the event of a family emergency. She was, as I recall extremely responsible about it, too. Technology carries challenge as well as responsibility. And to support and encourage kids to view it in that way can only help them in the future! I like the wagon drop off idea, a lot!