We, the students and parents of New Jersey's public schools, are dissatisfied with the decisions of local administrators to enforce the statewide cell phone ban using the "Doorman" app. We respectfully request the New Jersey Department of Education and all local School Boards to reconsider and revise these enforcement policies.

We acknowledge the state's intention to create a better, more focused learning environment for students through the "bell-to-bell" ban (P.L. 2025, c. 195). However, mandating the use of Doorman on personal devices to accomplish this is invasive, dangerous, and unacceptable.

As an NJ parent and an IT professional with a background in network infrastructure, I understand exactly how this software operates. Forcing students to install a local VPN and configuration profile on their personal hardware is a massive overreach that creates an unacceptable privacy risk.

Our concerns with Doorman include:

Closed-Source Software & Unverifiable Privacy: Doorman operates as a local VPN tunnel to block internet traffic, but it is not open-source. Because independent security experts cannot inspect its underlying code, parents have no way to verify Doorman’s claims that they do not log, inspect, or intercept our children's private data, browsing history, or messages.
Venture Capital Tied to Student Surveillance: Doorman Labs Inc. is backed by Reach Capital, the exact same venture capital firm that funded Panorama Education and ClassDojo. These are companies infamous for exploiting legal loopholes to mass-harvest student data and build psychological and behavioral profiles of children without parental consent. We will not hand our children’s data over to this ecosystem.
MDM-Style Control on Personal Property: Requiring students to install what effectively amounts to a Mobile Device Management (MDM) profile on a personally owned device crosses the line. Schools have no right to hijack the operating system of a privately purchased phone under the guise of classroom focus.
Battery Drain & Background Activity: Running a constant, local VPN tunnel throughout the school day drains battery life and forces the device to run continuous background processes, deteriorating the hardware and potentially leaving students with dead batteries in an emergency.
Eroded Safety & Emergency Contact: While the app claims to allow phone calls, forcing a third-party software gatekeeper between a student and their family during a lockdown, medical crisis, or transit emergency introduces unnecessary points of technical failure.

Our Demands We respectfully request that New Jersey School Boards and the Department of Education:

1. Eliminate the requirement to download or use Doorman on personal devices across all NJ school districts.
2. Establish far less intrusive enforcement methods for the state cell phone policy.
3. Publish clear, updated "Electronic Device Policies" that protect student digital privacy.
4. Give students and parents a voice in any future decisions involving third-party surveillance technology.

We believe the best solution is simply to require all students to keep their phones silent and powered off in their bags or lockers at all times, with the obvious exception of an emergency.

This common-sense approach has already been successfully implemented in Spotswood High School due to student backlash, and it fully complies with state law (P.L. 2025, c. 195).

Thank You For Your Time.