Lila Byock’s son had always been good at math. But when he started sixth grade last year, he began to bring home D’s and F’s. It crushed his self-esteem. His teachers told Byock that he clearly understood the material, she said, but he just couldn’t stay on task on his school-issued Apple iPad.

Her son’s school, like many in the Los Angeles Unified School District and across the country, provided an iPad to each student for use throughout the school day, even during band and gym class.

The iPad program, which ramped up during the Covid pandemic, was meant to give kids a technological leg up and help track students who are falling behind. But Byock said her son revealed that he used the iPad during school to watch YouTube and participate in Fortnite video game battles.

“It makes no sense to me,” Byock said. “We’ve banned the cellphones, but it doesn’t matter, because the kids are using the school-issued devices in exactly the same way.”

In February, the district’s ban on use of personal devices, including smartphones and smartwatches, went into effect.

Byock began speaking with other parents of elementary and middle school children, invited a group of them to her house for wine and cookies and heard stories similar to hers from parents who had been trying to raise their kids with as little screen time as possible.

One mother described how her 6-year-old son had repeatedly wet himself in class when he got fixated on activities with his tablet, and another said her teenage son had gotten sucked into communicating with strangers online via popular websites and forums and at one point ran away from home with the school-issued iPad.

Byock created a parent coalition called Schools Beyond Screens, which is organizing in WhatsApp groups, petition drives and actions at school board meetings and demanding meetings with district administrators, pressuring them to pull back on the school-mandated screen time.

The pushback has reached a fever pitch this month after a series of tense meetings with school officials about the topic. Los Angeles Unified is the first district of its size to face an organized — and growing — campaign by parents demanding that schools pull back on mandatory screen time.

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Tagged: Schools BACK TO HOMEPAGE