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Not Class Time

About

What this is, and
what it will not do.

Not Class Time is an independent, sourced argument about one sentence in New Jersey school policy: whether the restriction on personal devices should reach the periods of the day when nobody is teaching.

The guidelines shall, at a minimum … prohibit non-academic use of an internet-enabled device on school grounds during the school day…s.2.b(2)

The Legislature wrote that. The Department decided it reaches lunch, study hall and passing time.Q8 That second decision is the one this site is arguing with, and it can be revisited without a new law.

What the site is

A reference and an argument

Two things at once. It is a reference: what the rules actually say, period by period, with the source for each answer, because most people arrive with a factual question and deserve the answer before any argument. And it is an argument: that NJDOE should revise its guidance to let districts permit device use during lunch, study hall and passing time.

The reference part is written so that someone who disagrees with the argument can still rely on it. If you find a factual error, that is the most serious kind of problem this project can have.

Who runs it

It is maintained anonymously. Students who publicly disagree with their own school’s policy can face consequences for it, and the design of this site assumes that risk is real rather than theoretical. That is also why nothing here asks for a name, an email address or a school.

It is not published by the New Jersey Department of Education, by any school district, or by any of the organisations the statute names. Nothing here should be read as their view.

The rules we hold ourselves to

Five, and they are checkable

  1. We argue a position and say so

    This site is not neutral and does not claim to be. It argues that New Jersey should permit personal device use during non-instructional periods. Credibility here comes from being accurate, not from pretending to have no view.

  2. Every factual claim is cited

    A claim about the statute, the guidance or a district carries a marker linking to the exact source and pinpoint. A citation pointing at a source that is not in the registry stops the site building.

  3. The other side gets its full strength

    The strongest arguments against us have their own page, written the way their best advocate would write them, with our answers and with what we concede. Two of the five are not fully answered, and the page says so.

  4. We never tell students to break the rule

    Arguing to change a policy is ordinary civic participation. Ignoring the policy gets students disciplined, hands opponents the story they want, and ends the argument. The rule in force is the rule.

  5. We say when we do not know

    Where we wanted to make a claim and could not source it, the page carries a visible label saying so rather than quietly stating it anyway. There are several of those, mostly about how enforcement would work in practice.

The registry currently holds 49 sources, each with the date a person last opened it, on the sources page. How the checking works is written up on the methodology page.

What is not built yet

Listed, not hidden

Partial, and labelled so

34 districts, of roughly 600
The tracker covers the districts whose policy we have read and linked. A district that is not listed is one we have not checked, never one we are reporting as unrestricted.
A survey with no results yet
The questions are live and published in full. Results are shown only as aggregates, with the number of responses next to every figure, so a thin sample cannot read as a mandate.
No manual accessibility audit
Automated checks run on every route in both themes. Nobody who relies on a screen reader has reviewed the site. That gap, and the others, are on the accessibility page.