Jasper Veer Tuteja

Parents and advocates support Schools Beyond Screens by dressing in white and bringing signs to the Aug. 17 board meeting at the district office. According to Leor Melamedov, educational technology is not functioning as intended. “[Edtech] promised personalized learning, equity, and better outcomes,” Melamedov said. “Instead, it lowered attention spans, reduced real learning, and created a constant source of frustration for parents and teachers without delivering the promised results.”

Parents are petitioning the Palo Alto Unified School District board to regulate classroom screen use, bringing their demands at last week’s board meeting at the district office.

The group behind these efforts, Schools Beyond Screens, brought the petition forward during public forum. The petition calls for eliminating screens through first grade, capping daily device minutes for older students, blocking non-educational sites like YouTube and eliminating required take-home laptops.

Leor Melamedov, co-captain of the nationwide movement’s Palo Alto chapter, said the petition’s goal is to convince the district to implement a policy modeled after Los Angeles Unified School District’s new guidelines, which enforce grade-level device limits and track student screen time.

“[Our] request to the district [is] to start actually keeping track of device usage, edtech [educational technology] usage, screen time and make sure that whatever [screen] time is happening is age-appropriate and actually serves students’ learning,” Melamedov told The Paly Voice.

According to Melamedov, Schools Beyond Screens’ efforts are focused on classroom distractions rather than removing technology instruction altogether.

“Edtech is when you use technology as a means of teaching subject classes, so things like having a Chromebook or iReady to teach English — that’s what we’re trying to curb,” Melamedov said. “But tech-ed [technology education], which is … teaching them actual technology skills, whether it’s typing, coding or cybersecurity in a computer science framework — that’s a positive thing.”

Melamedov said that success requires critical thinking, which can be taught without digital tools.

“It’s not clicking through some stupid edtech app that’s going to make one kid succeed in our Artificial Intelligence first world,” Melamedov said. “It’s who has the capacity to discern truth versus falsity. Who has the capacity to focus? Who has the capacity to reason, to speak, to write well, to make judgment calls? Those are going to be the people who win in the next decades.”

At Palo Alto High School, Early Child Development teacher Jennifer Pierson said she also sees value in moving away from constant screen interactions.

“I love that Los Angeles has actually implemented that [screen time limit] from second grade down,” Pierson said. “In our childhood development classes, we’ve actually gone to more pen and paper as well. I’m a big believer in that [strategy] to develop critical thinking and connections.”

Pierson said writing by hand can also help students retain information better.

“Memory is built differently when you have to put pen to paper when you’re learning materials and writing essays,” Pierson said. “A first draft for sure should be handwritten, and then it could be turned into a typed version, where you can then move things around.”

Senior Willem Madwed said his Paly AP Capstone teacher Lucy Filppu encouraged her students to take advantage of AI’s capabilities, as it would be difficult to avoid in future research environments.

“Mrs. Filppu suggests using AI because she says, ‘It’s like the elephant in the room, so you might as well not ignore it,’” Madwed said.

Rather than relying on academic archives, Madwed said he prefers researching with AI to streamline his process.

“AI is great for research,” Madwed said. “It can find really good sources, and you can give it a really good prompt, and it’ll spend some time and put thought into finding good sources. It takes time to go online and search on Google Scholar and JSTOR. It [AI] just simplifies a lot of research.”

Still, Melamedov said that while students can be taught to use advanced tools properly, they still need boundaries when learning foundational subjects.

“They [don’t] need to have a distracting Chromebook or AI at their fingertips when they’re supposed to be focusing on English literature or social studies,” Melamedov said. “That’s the distinction we’re trying to make: it’s not anti-technology; it’s anti-distraction.”

During the Aug 17. board meeting’s public comment, parents and educators spoke in support of the petition for research guided and evidence based technology use in PAUSD.

District parent Emma van Niekerk said a systematic analysis published in the “Review of Educational Research” comparing children’s reading on paper versus screens further supports the movement’s push for printed materials.

“A 2021 meta-analysis of 39 studies found that when stories are simply digitized, reading on paper leads to significantly higher comprehension than reading on a screen,” Van Niekerk said. “Excessive screen time doesn’t just fail to improve results; it creates digital fatigue.”

Fellow Palo Alto parent Haleh Mousavi said that handwriting forces children to slow down and wrestle with language in a way that keyboards and autocorrect do not allow.

“When a child sits down with a blank piece of paper and a pencil, something remarkable happens,” Mousavi said. “They brainstorm, doodle, they cross things out, draw arrows, reorganize their ideas, and then they slowly discover what they actually think. That messy process isn’t separate from learning; it actually is the learning.”

Beyond academics, Kim Adams, owner and operator of Barron Park Playschool, said that classroom screen time replaces chances for young children to develop social and developmental skills.

“I am here tonight to talk about what screens replace — and that is relationships, movement, and play,” Adams told the board.

To encourage healthier relationships with technology, the petition also aims to prohibit screen time from being used as a reward, incentive or behavioral reinforcement.

Pierson said that elementary classroom management apps, such as digital behavior trackers that display color-coded student conduct charts, do not build needed student autonomy.

“I don’t believe in that type of behavior system to begin with, whether it’s an online red, yellow, green chart or rainbow charts,” Pierson said. “There are other ways to encourage kids to have intrinsic motivation and to create limit setting techniques. I believe that if you build in choice, power, autonomy and control, kids will respond to that.”