Picture-perfect weather greeted students in hundreds of Long Island schools Tuesday as they began a new academic year marked with some old traditions and some new.

There were the old friends, familiar faces and the perennial bittersweetness of entering a new grade. Then there were the new experiences and new rules — this year, to the dismay of many, a state ban that requires students to put away their smartphones for the entire school day.

“I think some of the students are in torture right now,” senior Krisangely Torres half-joked about the mental state of her peers during last period Tuesday afternoon at Roosevelt High School.

Torres, 17, said she was upset at first over the state’s so-called "bell-to-bell" cellphone ban. But as Tuesday wound down, she said she had adjusted to the ne

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