On Wednesday, September 2, bells will ring for more than 40,000 students to signal the first day of school at Seattle Public Schools (unless a teacher strike intervenes). But phones will not.
Last spring, superintendent Ben Shuldiner announced no-phone policies for grades K-12; they went into effect May 4, his 100th day in office. Before his hiring he’d promised to address various issues—closing the budget deficit, increasing student enrollment, ensuring student safety in schools—but this addressed a hot (power) button topic: screen time in the classroom.
Since the early days of Saturday morning cartoons, popular and scientific belief has held that screens can have a negative effect on childhood development. Half a decade after remote learning went into hyperdrive during the pandemic, making Zoom classrooms and online coursework a daily reality, parents and educators are trying to find balance.
SPS is hardly ahead of the pack on phones. Twenty-two states already prohibit them in schools outright, and in June, Governor Bob Ferguson introduced a proposal for a statewide ban. He did it at Robert Eagle Staff Middle School in Northgate, which implemented its own ban in 2024.
“Ninety percent of my job, and my counselors’ job, was just playing whack-a-mole and putting out fires from having the tech in the building,” principal Zachary Stowell says. While phones are nominally a way to communicate, he and his team found that they instead silo students.
Two years into the ban, Stowell has already seen the benefits. “We went from fights at lunch in the bathroom…to dancing and connecting, and having a good time at lunch.”
But it’s only one part of a larger conversation surrounding technology use in schools. Parents are questioning not only the tiny distraction machines kids bring from home, but also the ones handed out by teachers.
“We’re a very screen-light family; we’ve just always avoided screens,” says Hilary Patterson, a former Seattle Public Schools teacher and current SPS parent. She was surprised when her kindergartner came home from school with an iPad—standard through second grade in the district. Third through twelfth graders receive laptops. “We don’t have iPads [at home], because we just don’t want to have to deal with regulating it.”
The district’s lofty goal is to create equity among students regardless of their ability to afford their own devices. However, parents like Patterson are concerned about how they’re being used in the classroom. Last November, she attended a PTA meeting at James Baldwin Elementary featuring Emily Cherkin, a Seattle activist who founded what she calls the Tech-Intentional Movement.
“We need Tech Ed, not Ed Tech,” Cherkin says, making a distinction between what she describes as a for-profit industry—Ed Tech—and the more beneficial technical education, “a way of teaching children about things they need to know.” She claims that once curriculums are built around the technology and state testing is administered online, teachers find themselves leaning on screens as their time and resources are limited.
EdTech includes devices like laptops and iPads but also games like Quizlet and Kahoot! and platforms like YouTube or Google Workspace; teacher-led lessons can include them all. Cherkin questions whether they could have negative effects on students, pointing to a landmark Los Angeles case that found Meta and YouTube liable for creating addictive platforms for children.
“In their discovery materials, YouTube admits that their viewership was down during school hours and they say, ‘Well, how do we get kids back on YouTube during the school day?’ And their solution was by pitching it as an educational tool,” Cherkin says.
After hearing Cherkin speak, Patterson teamed up with fellow parent Erica Shutes-
David to create Seattle Families for Intentional Tech. More than 800 parents signed a petition that the group shared with the district in April asking for a number of things, including parental consent for data-collecting products, screentime limits by grade, and allowing and supporting teachers and students to use paper-based alternatives.
Image: Seattle Met Staff
Katie Davis is a co-founder and co-director of the Center for Digital Youth at the University of Washington; she says that her research finds that limiting the negative effects of technology isn’t as simple as reducing the use of those tools. “[Tech] doesn’t usually transform, but maybe it makes something a little bit easier to do,” Davis says. “If you look at the literature, there’s a lot of examples of technologies that don’t have any effect at all on student outcomes.”
Principal Stowell of Robert Eagle Staff Middle School says money is part of the issue. “School funding comes in different buckets, and sometimes there’s not funding here, but there’s funding in tech,” Stowell says. “I think sometimes technology is a little more cost-effective than consumables, but the reality is, what’s best for our kids?” Still, he looked for ways to rein in technology use in the classroom. He hopes to reintroduce laptop carts, meaning students wouldn’t have access to the devices at all times.
“We’re starting to craft and plant seeds around what does it look like to minimize, even at lunch, some of the technology use as a whole?” Stowell says. “We were pioneers in the cell phone thing, why don’t we be pioneers in reinventing what it is to check laptops back out?”
The principal says a clearer direction needs to come from the top down, preferably statewide. As it stands, the SPS directive from May only addresses a single screen—phones. “When it’s not clear, then everyone’s doing [a] rogue thing…we can unintentionally penalize those that are already historically marginalized,” he says. “When policy is clear, then we can implement with fidelity, with joy, with humanity.” And without the dings, rings, or a glowing screen.
