Gov. Hochul entirely right: Smartphones don’t belong in school.

It’s not just that they’re a needless distraction: They’re toxic to children’s development.

They enable addiction to social media (especially for girls) and online games (mainly for boys).

And parents trying to restrict their own kids’ phone-time find that it can leave children cut off from socializing because “everyone else” hangs out that way.

Any school that expects kids to do classwork on their phones is damaging those students.

Though Hochul, a mother and grandma, won’t push for a smartphone ban until January, in the Legislature’s next session, this follows two other bills she’s pushing now to safeguard children’s privacy and save them from the epidemic of social-media despair, the New York Child Data Protection and the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act .

She’d still allow simple “dumb” phones that can send texts but can’t access the Internet, since parents often want to be readily able to communicate with their children.

If Meta, TikTok and the gaming companies don’t self-regulate and make protecting child users a priority, then it falls to government to create the necessary guardrails.

In taking on the tech giants, Hochul is “fighting to protect kids from the defining problem of our time.”

It’s a cause and a campaign that all New Yorkers should get behind.