As US Schools Crack Down on Screen Time, Parents Flock to Low-Tech Districts

US schools across the nation are curbing their use of technology amid mounting parental concerns. This is happening as districts look to boost enrollment and cut costs while grappling with a dwindling pool of students.

In the past few weeks, New York City, the nation’s largest school district, restricted screen time and banned generative AI tools for students under grade 8 this academic year. Across the Hudson River, New Jersey’s Lebanon Township School District is limiting tech device use to two hours. On the West Coast, the Los Angeles Unified School District is capping screen time and barring students from using AI tools on district devices — a major reversal for the second-largest school system.

The low-tech policies are providing relief for parents concerned about the dangers of tech to a child’s development. At the same time, the new rules are helping schools stand out as they fight for a shrinking pool of students.

Some schools limiting tech use in classrooms are already seeing a boost in interest from families either through open house turnouts or inquiries. And as institutions face mounting financial strain, many are eyeing potential cost savings from the shift away from technology.

Lebanon Township’s chief school administrator Harold Abraham said 10 new families who moved to the bucolic neighborhood this summer told him that they chose the district partly because they heard the school was discussing the “innovative approach” of minimal screen time a few months before implementing it this academic year.

In Ohio, about a third of Cincinnati Classical Academy’s 1,000 students are “refugees from another educational environment,” according to head of school Michael Rose. Many came from schools where kids got their first Chromebooks in grade 1 or kindergarten, he said. The academy’s strict no-phones, no-laptops policy through grade 9 began four years ago. Today, the charter school has a waiting list of about 340.

Meanwhile, schools following the Montessori curriculum — which prides itself on hands-on learning — are thriving on parents’ increasing concerns about excessive screen-time and the impact such exposure has on their child’s development, according to the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector.

“The schools we work with are almost universally oversubscribed,” said Sara Suchman, the center’s executive director, in a statement.

Since 2010, an average of 17 new Montessori public schools — often established as charters or magnets — have opened annually in the US. There are now almost 600 Montessori schools serving an estimated 200,000 students, per the center. In contrast, the number of US public schools across the nation has been flat or declining over the years, with closures hitting the highest level since 2018.

Parents who want less tech use are also looking to private schools. The roughly 135 Waldorf-affiliated schools across the nation have become synonymous with screen-free education in many areas, and some schools are seeing a surge of interest.

“I’m seeing more and more people being compelled to learn more about our school by just the uptick in overall consciousness around the effects of social media,” said Jon Herzenberg, director of the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, a Silicon Valley school that was featured in Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book, Anxious Generation.

Herzenberg pivoted the school’s marketing materials just last year to showcase its long-standing practice of being “a tech-free oasis in the heart of Silicon Valley.”

There may be more to come. There’s more than 80 similar active campaigns nationwide asking school boards in 24 states to implement new rules around the use of devices and screen time in classrooms, according to an online crowd-sourced national tracker. At least 14 statehouses are considering laws to restrict student screen time this year, according to government relations firm MultiState. So far only Alabama, Iowa, Tennessee and Utah have enacted the laws, according to Ballotpedia.

“The one very unified voice that I’m hearing but I didn’t hear six, eight, or 12 months ago, was this very anti-technology voice,” said Gaby Rowe, CEO of the US and Canada regions for Affinitas Education, a global private school operator. “I’m hearing it in red states and blue states, all across the country.”

There are, however, some who agree with the US Department of Education in advocating for supervised and responsible use of tech in classrooms. In August, the department issued guidance for states on the issue.

“I share concerns about children and technology, the importance of productive struggle, and the need for robust safeguards,” Richard Buery, Jr., Robin Hood Foundation’s chief executive officer, said in a statement following New York public schools’ AI moratorium. “Yet, in an understandable effort to protect students, I fear we’re rejecting uses that could help them.”

Buery said without proper instruction on AI use in schools, “we increase the likelihood that students will use it inappropriately at home, especially those whose caregivers lack experience with generative AI.”

Anticipated Rewards

Many schools are expecting both improved education outcomes and cost savings from their low-tech policies. Granville County’s school district, which serves about 5,600 students, was ahead of its peers when it began prohibiting the use of tech in all classrooms for two days a week last year. After conducting surveys of students and teachers, it expanded the policy this year to ban all devices in grades 1, 2 and kindergarten.

The district about an hour north of Raleigh will also block YouTube for all students on school devices. Granville County is a part of a class action lawsuit against social media companies that allege tech companies, including YouTube-owner Alphabet Inc., specifically designed their platforms’ algorithms to addict users.

The tech ban “seems to correlate with a lot of the results we’re seeing in improvements in discipline and achievement,” said Superintendent Stan Winborne. “I can’t prove one is causing the other, but I’m certainly not seeing a disaster.”

One recent report backs up his conjecture — revealing that students who do not use AI chatbots for schoolwork are outperforming those who do.

Like many school systems across the country, Winborne’s district has been losing students so he hopes the approach will resonate with families and help the district attract and retain students.

Beyond appealing to parents, school leaders anticipate potential cost savings from cutting back on software and hardware use by teachers and students in classrooms. Education technology programs are “a lot of money,” said Winborne. “A lot more than we would spend on photocopies and textbooks.”

Spending on so-called edtech by US public and private schools is expected to reach about $60 billion by 2033, nearly double from 2024, according Verified Market Research. The use of tech in schools surged amid the 2020 Covid lockdowns as remote learning required every child to have a device.

By the 2021-2022 school year, nearly all US public schools were providing a laptop or tablet to students who needed them, compared to just 45% in spring 2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Lebanon Township’s Abraham expects to reap some savings with its decision. “I think there’s going to be opportunity to not renew some of the edtech subscriptions that were redundancies,” he said. “It’s not completely ditching technology, it’s using it with intention.”