The School Year Begins in LA with One Big Change: Limited Screen Time

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AILSA CHANG, HOST:

School begins tomorrow in the country’s second-largest school district, with one big difference from past years- there are sweeping new limits on screen time for students. The new rule in the Los Angeles school district comes just a few years after a major push there to bring technology into the classroom. NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo talked to LA educators about how they’re dealing with the shake-up.

SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: Armaghan Khan is heading back to school for the eighth time as a middle school science teacher.

ARMAGHAN KHAN: The beginning of every year has its own sort of anxiety attached to it, but I’m always excited.

CARRILLO: This year brings a new kind of challenge for him and his colleagues at Cochran Middle School. They’re going old-school – turning off the computers and putting away screens.

KHAN: This is going to be a big impact for me. As a science teacher, technology is kind of the backbone of my curriculum.

CARRILLO: While they were on summer vacation, the Los Angeles Unified School District passed a resolution to limit screen time for all of its students. It’s part of a nationwide discussion in states and school districts about how much time students spend looking at devices. Many districts in some states have passed similar limits this year, but the rapid rollout in LA for its more than 400,000 students is unique. Starting this week, first grade and under will have no screen time, and starting in November, the rest of elementary school will have limits, with middle and high school students following later in the year.

KHAN: I would say about 75% of our work was on some kind of screen-based activity.

CARRILLO: Not only because his students can perform large-scale experiments on their laptops, like a car crash simulator to understand things like Newtonian forces but, also, it’s because it’s his best option. He has a space for in-person experiments, but no budget for them.

KHAN: I don’t feel like I’m being set up for success.

PIA SADAQATMAL: We know that there’s no perfect solution in how to roll out to a school district the size of ours, right?

CARRILLO: That’s the district’s chief academic officer, Pia Sadaqatmal. She’s overseeing the screen time change and says this year is a transition year.

SADAQATMAL: We have one of the first school districts in the nation to adopt a policy at this scale. So we know that we are going to be learning along the way at each phase and incorporating those learnings as we roll out the next group of students.

CARRILLO: Students will have software on their personal tablets or computers that will keep track of the amount of screen time used per week. Certain things are exempt, like virtual textbooks, but teachers are still trying to figure out where everything else fits.

KIRTI BARANWAL: I have more questions than I do, sort of, immediate concerns around it.

CARRILLO: That’s Kirti Baranwal, a longtime librarian at Clinton Middle School.

BARANWAL: I think, generally, screen time limits are good, right? Like, we just don’t want kids on screens all the time.

CARRILLO: Last year, the district banned cellphones, a growing standard for many states around the country. So Baranwal did a lesson on screen addiction and asked her students to report their own screen time. Many came back with eight or 10 hours a day, even with the ban in place.

BARANWAL: Well, I was like, when are you sleeping? Like, what is happening?

CARRILLO: She says for kids who don’t have the resources to play on sports teams or attend arts programs, their time outside of school is occupied often by their phone. She, like Kahn and his science classroom, thinks just cutting things out only ends up leaving holes.

BARANWAL: Like, OK. We don’t want kids on phones. What is it that we want kids doing?

CARRILLO: The Los Angeles school district is trying to figure that out.

Sequoia Carrillo, NPR News, Los Angeles.

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