Safe deposit with a side of cole slaw

Students line up in front of the Kennedy Deli on West 230th Street after school on Monday afternoon to retrieve their cell phones. Photo by Claudio Papapietro

Students’ cell phone solution

By Kate Pastor

Like ticket-holders lining up for a big show, hundreds of students file into the Kennedy Deli on West 230th Street off of Tibbett Avenue each school day, placing their phones, iPods and portable game systems on the counter, along with a dollar apiece, to ensure their safekeeping.

As they approach the store’s entrance, the teens scramble to find small slips of paper, ripping them from notebooks, to jot down their names, school ID numbers and birthdates before entrusting their prized possessions — considered contraband at school — to the deli’s clerks.

All over the city, deli owners like the ones at the Kennedy Deli and students who attend the schools on the John F. Kennedy High School campus are involved in a ritual dance, set in motion by a cell phone ban in New York City schools that is most strictly enforced on campuses — like Kennedy’s — with metal detectors.

Together, school kids and small business owners have found a way to live with the rule, creating a niche business of storing the banned valuables.

“No more kids, no more store,” said Yehia Alsararbi, who helps his brother manage the Kennedy Deli and stood on the sidelines like a crossing guard during a recent morning rush.

The deli used to draw business from people using the adjoining Exxon gas station and the swarms of school kids that came for snacks each day, he said. But now that the gas station no longer pumps gas, he says, the deli would not be able to survive without the 200 to 300 students who use the store’s storage service daily. On the low end, earnings from storage add $1,000 a week to the deli’s take.

Chris Abreu, a sophomore at Bronx Theatre High School, is one of the deli’s faithful costumers. For him, the cost of storage is usually $2 a day because he brings two banned items with him to school.

On a recent morning he brought his PSP because he just couldn’t get enough of Lupe Fiasco’s new song “Put You On Game” and wanted to listen to it while he rode the No. 3 and No. 9 buses to and from school. But he had a more serious reason for carrying his phone, a Sidekick.

“I have a medical condition and sometimes the school gets all crazy and they don’t want us to bring it in so we have to store it here,” he said.

Chris wears a pacemaker, and like most of the teenagers interviewed, he said his family didn’t mind coughing up the extra cash so he could check his phone at the deli.

At the Kennedy Deli, which observers say is only one of the local businesses doubling as a storage facility, there is a simple but airtight system for keeping the goods safe.

Once the phones and other gadgets are plopped down on the counter amid the plastic containers of Blow Pops, Welch’s Fruit Snacks, Sour Power Candy, Airheads and Jolly Rancher Lollipops, each student’s item is rubber banded together with the slip of paper identifying its owner, and placed in one of several empty cardboard candy boxes that sit behind the counter. Mr. Alsararbi would not say where they are stored, but that whatever is left from 7 to 10 a.m., is also available for pickup with ID, between 3 and 6 p.m. unless students make other arrangements.

During the morning hours, police and school safety officers come and go, coffee or breakfast in hand, without a second glance at students standing in line, phone in one hand, slip of paper and a buck in the other.

Nobody seems to begrudge the business owners the profit they get by filling a need in the teens’ lives or the students the solution to an oftdisputed rule. Many parents are grateful to have a safe haven for the phones, which they see as a safety precaution for the time kids spend traveling to and from school.

According to Mr. Alsararbi, he and his brother didn’t come up with the concept on their own. When they took over management of the store from the owner now traveling abroad, he said, they inherited this arm of his business.

And while nobody interviewed could pinpoint exactly when or how the arrangement began, one can imagine an insistent teen offering pocket money in exchange for safe storage and the practice ballooning.

According to Norma Vega, principal of E.L.L.I.S. on the Kennedy campus, this is not the first time she’s seen the arrangement. She said that when she worked at Morris High School, on Boston Road in the Bronx, the nearby deli was “making a killing” the same way. She has arranged for her relatively small coterie of students to leave their phones with a school representative in the lobby without charge, and retrieve them at the end of the school day.

But Debi Effinger, principal of Bronx Theatre High School, said her students are too numerous for the school to manage their valuables and that during her years teaching in the building she has seen all kinds of ways around the phone rule.

Once, she said, a student made a cell phone sandwich by placing it between two slices of bread and wrapping it in tinfoil to avoid discovery. “I’m telling you, kids are clever,” she said.

Now she recommends deli storage to parents who express concern about the school cell phone ban.

This is part of the December 25, 2008 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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