Opinion: Seattle Public School’s New Screen Time Limits Fall Short for Families

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On Sept. 21, the Superintendent of Seattle Public Schools Ben Shuldiner announced that the 1:1 device program will be discontinued for kindergarten through second graders, effective January 2027. Kids in these grades will still use iPads and laptops; they just won’t be formally issued one, and there will be screen time limits in place: a max of 30 minutes per day.

I couldn’t be happier that Mr. Shuldiner has taken action to remedy excessive device use in the district. I am relieved he is bringing attention to this critical issue.

However, there are a number of larger, more serious issues with 1:1 device programs school districts fail to grasp. Any one of these is a deal-breaker. Keeping a device program and requiring online curriculum is untenable.

Parents were never invited to provide feedback regarding device use, arguably one of the most consequential overhauls of childhood education since the formal education system was established. School districts have an obligation to listen to us now, and we ask for far more substantial change than this.

The 1:1 device program should be discontinued for all grade levels including an end to laptop and iPad use in the classroom. Instead, a technology class should be created teaching computer skills which can take place in a school’s computer lab. Online curriculum for core subjects should be done away with, substituted with paper-based curriculum.

Children’s health, development and media addiction crises

When we have an alarming spike in nearsightedness due to so much time on screens and not enough outdoors, when kids ages 8-18 average 7 hours on screens outside of school hours, when kindergarteners are showing up to school without basic motor skills because they haven’t held crayons and have instead tapped touch screens, when some haven’t learned to turn the pages of a book, when the U.S. surgeon general has created a parent toolkit to prevent harms to children from excessive screen time, we have what qualifies as a children’s health and development crisis. We have nearly half of teens reporting they are online virtually all day and well into the night.

We are out of our depth in a media addiction crisis so severe many kids find in-person conversations anxiety-provoking, can’t read a book cover to cover, and can’t simply stare out the window for five straight minutes.

Some may think the above problems originate or are reinforced at home, not school. Some may think that schools can’t be responsible for solving every problem society throws at us. Yet this is the environment and context in which we make decisions about children’s technology use at school. That context can’t be ignored.

When scientists told us smoking was harmful, we banned it on school campuses. When the obesity crisis gained national attention, schools reevaluated the health of their lunches. When a piece of playground equipment is unsafe because multiple children are hurt using it, it is removed from school playgrounds.

In light of research proving harms of the most popular tech products and apps, schools can and should take responsibility to ban these things on campus too. We know from recent lawsuits that YouTube designed their platform to be habit-forming, yet YouTube is accessible on student devices.

We know video games are habit-forming. The World Health Organization includes gaming disorder in its international classification of health conditions. Yet, educational programs are modeled after video games with the same pleasant-feeling sounds and graphics. We haven’t even fully banned student smartphone access, despite knowing a smartphone has an addictive effect equivalent to a slot machine. We can extrapolate easily that a laptop isn’t going to be vastly different. Banning the kind of all-day laptop access some elementary and most middle- and high-school students have is the only sane next step.

Computers are necessary, useful and harmful. In adult hands, they lean toward necessary and useful. In kids’ hands, they lean toward being harmful for all the reasons stated above. You can’t put a tool designed for adults — who use computers to work, shop and be entertained — straight over into the hands of children to be used for dramatically different activities, such as learning instruction and education. The only thing made healthy by the student device program is a multitude of stock prices.

This past May, the U.S. surgeon general looked into the harmful effect of screens on our youth, and released a screen time-use toolkit for kids that included device usage recommendations for schools. It suggested that schools:

• Make individually accessible devices available in a computer lab.
• Invest in physical textbooks and prioritize pen-and-paper curricula, hands-on activities and social activities for all grade levels.
• Limit screen use by assigning work in books or on paper whenever possible.

I call upon Mr. Shuldiner to align SPS with the surgeon general’s recommendations immediately.

The student surveillance and data mining scandal is a deal-breaker

I have previously written about this topic in my article “My Child Is Not for Sale, So We Declined the Student Laptop,” so I will keep it short here. We cannot win the data privacy game; there is no winning it. For every new encryption, firewall or filter, a hacker learns to break it. Why do they want to break it? Lots and lots of money. Hackers are highly motivated to work on this.

What better place to get a whole bunch of personal data at once than a school district’s records? The younger the person, the better — that’s more years of data to mine, store and sell. EdTech companies are already doing it while our kids get their education, no hacker required. In fact, there was a ransomware attack at my neighboring school district (Highline) in 2024.

It’s one thing to spy on adults as we surf the web on our phones, but kids? Kids at school? There are already numerous lawsuits filed against EdTech companies for data mining.

Parents deserve transparency, safety and ethics

To even attempt to make online curriculum and 1:1 devices safe, healthy, transparent, private and aligned with parents’ own screen time rules would require a complete and thorough self-audit and subsequent overhaul by school districts, including SPS.

School districts implemented this technology without doing their homework. They simply trusted that EdTech companies were well-versed in child development science, were ethical, and would therefore keep student data private. We have had to learn the hard way that this trust was completely misplaced. It is alarming that the necessary research was not done before implementation, and this wrong must be righted. 

I, for one, am tired of having to research and prove that we shouldn’t have 1:1 devices and internet-based curriculum. It is the school district’s job to prove to parents that this way of learning is safe, healthy and effective. They have not made any serious effort to do so. Now, parents have had to make it their (unpaid) job to determine this instead.

Here are some questions that must be answered for parents:

Transparency questions:

• What websites and apps are kids accessing during school?
• How much time are they spending on each app and what is their total screen time on devices during school?

Online safety questions: 

• How are you guaranteeing that predators cannot message our kids?
• How will you ensure safety from technology addiction and media addiction if all curriculum is screen-based?
• How are you guaranteeing they cannot access violent videos, pornography, and misinformation online, knowing that no filter is 100 percent effective?
• How are you protecting kids’ attention spans when they are given overstimulating video game-like curriculum programs instead of physical textbooks and materials-based learning?

Efficacy and distraction questions:

• Can you provide the non-industry-funded research used in your decision to allow students access to chatbots and AI on their devices
• Can you provide the non-industry-funded research proving the efficacy of screen-based curriculum programs

Privacy questions: 

• In light of the current lawsuits against EdTech companies, as well as independent and credible research stating EdTech companies illegally mine and sell student data, why are we continuing to use these products?
• Why do student laptops have cameras on them and what are they used for?
• When and how will you request information from GoGuardian related to recording and storing videos of students, and surveilling their movements online?
• How will you ensure that GoGuardian has deleted video footage of students and other online movement-tracking information?

School districts have an obligation to provide paper-based education to every child so they can retain their rights to safety and privacy.

After all is said and done: Is there any possible way that an internet-based curriculum requiring thousands of laptops and iPads is remotely worth the work required by school districts to fulfill their obligation to parents and kids that it is fully safe, ethical and healthy?

There are 50,000 students in SPS. I can’t conceive that the cost of even 40,000 laptops and numerous multi-million dollar contracts with curriculum companies (the Amplify curriculum contract alone was $8.9 million for 9 years) could come close to competing with the cost of textbooks and hands-on materials.

The inevitable conclusion is that the 1:1 device program and EdTech — internet-based learning — cannot be made safe for kids or transparent for parents due to its very nature of being connected to the internet. We have countless risks while the benefits list is all but empty. It’s simply not worth it.

My ask for Mr. Shuldiner is simple: Put an end to EdTech, laptops, and iPads and reinstate materials-based curriculum. Then create a technology class to take place in a computer lab. Teach kids coding, graphic design, typing, identifying misinformation online, 3D modeling, and other real computer skills. Last but not least, we need a health class curriculum teaching kids about online safety, technology addiction and prevention, and the importance of face-to-face social interaction for human health.

Until that happens, I’ll retain control over my children’s access to technology in school. And I’ll decide what the future holds for my children: Dirt, mess, sunshine, friends, forts made of cardboard and pillows, thick heavy books, playing in the street, walking to the corner store, and so much more than any shiny, internet-connected rectangle could ever give.