In a digital landscape of finetuned social media algorithms, content generated by artificial intelligence and global news inducing fear or rage, it’s no wonder that endless scrolling can consume our hours and days without us realizing it.
Not all screentime is inherently harmful, but in recent years, the use of technology in classrooms has steadily risen. At Riverside School District 96, younger students are given school-issued tablets to assist with learning while older students are issued Chromebooks. While these devices have educational applications, some parents in the district say they worry their children are overexposed to screens in the course of their learning.
Sheila Schrems is one such parent. Schrems is a kindergarten teacher at Oak Park Elementary School District 97 and her two children, a fourth grader and a second grader, attend Central Elementary School in Riverside. She also started a Facebook group, called Riverside Unplugged Connections, for parents in Riverside and the surrounding area who wish to delay their children’s access to smartphones until high school.
“I’d assume that graduating fifth grade is a very popular time to get your kid a smartphone, but if you see, ‘Wow, there are six or 10 kids at Central, and there’s six or 10 kids at Ames, and they’re not getting a phone for middle school, I can hold off,’” she said.
Schrems said she has concerns about the lack of transparency from administrators on how much time students spend on their devices in the classroom following a Central PTO meeting in March.
“It’s hard to tell. I’m not sure what the screentime is like,” she said. “When [Principal Peter] Gatz said, ‘Oh, it’s about this percentage of the day,’ to me as a teacher, it sounded like, ‘Ideally, it’s this much,’ but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s more than that. My son accidentally ratted himself out; he was like, ‘I watched part of the NCAA tournament game today.’ I was like, ‘When were you doing that, and why didn’t your teacher notice?’”
Molly Marquardt, the director of technology at D96, said the district leaves it up to each teacher to decide how and how often screens should be used in their classroom.
“Our leadership that we have here work really closely together as a whole team to make sure we are addressing student use and the things that are going on, but there are different curriculum components that are integrated with technology,” Marquardt said. “It could vary by grade. It could vary by what’s being taught at that time. We have a lot of trust in our teachers in their classrooms with their kids and the device use that they might have going on.”
Marquardt said she could not break down how much screentime students receive by grade or classroom.
D96’s parent handbook has a section on the acceptable usage of technology at school, Marquardt said, though it mostly outlines what behavior from students is above board or not, like engaging in illegal or prohibited conduct. The policy does not touch on the amount or kinds of screentime students get.
Marquardt said the potential negative impacts of excess technology use is “part of the continuous and evolving conversations around screentime, technology, kids, curriculum, all of the things that are incorporated.”
“We know that it’s important to our parents, our community and the entire Riverside area. It comes up at parent-teacher nights and community nights,” she said. “Our top priority is making sure that students are receiving a good education, that they’re getting the knowledge that they need, that they’re growing and they’re learning.”
Schrems said she worries students may be learning less optimally due to the proclivity for screens.
“My son’s handwriting is horrible, and maybe it was always going to be horrible, but I think there’s a lot less writing. I think there’s more and more evidence out there saying the more you write it down physically with a pen or a pencil, the more it gets locked into your brain,” she said.
Studies from recent years have shown that students who took notes by hand had higher brain activity in the region responsible for memory than those who typed them, according to Scientific American.
Michael Hull is another parent in Riverside who has similar concerns about the effects of screentime on his children in D96.
“I would prefer that the use of devices were minimized,” said Hull, who used to teach at a high school and collegiate level. “The literature in the space of teaching and learning is pretty clear at this point that the way our brains encode learning is different between analog and digital and generally superior when we do it in an analog way.”
Hull said he understands the district may want to teach students how to use technology responsibly, “but that doesn’t mean they need to be the primary teaching mechanism.”
Lindsey Stolley’s son initially attended two years of school at D96 before she began homeschooling her children due to a myriad of reasons, she said, “but the technology stuff was what actually pushed us over the edge in the end.”
“School started on a Wednesday. It was Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. By Friday afternoon when he came home, they’d watched one and a half episodes of ‘The Magic School Bus’ and most of ‘Chicken Run,’ a movie with zero educational value,” Stolley said. “I asked about this, and they said, ‘Oh, they needed a reward at the end of the day’ … It was August. They could have been outside playing.”
She said she worried about the use of screens to both teach students and as their reward while they purportedly take a break.
“Watching a screen like that is stimulating to the brain. It’s not a break for your brain at all,” Stolley said. “The worst thing, though, is that we know these aren’t the best ways to do things, and they keep doing them.”
Schrems said the ubiquity of smartphones in our society, both in and out of the classroom, is impacting young minds.
“I’ve been seeing it in my classroom. I hear it from my colleagues throughout Oak Park. I’m seeing it on social media,” she said. “They don’t know how to wait. Even as adults, if we have a few minutes, and we’re just waiting, we look at our phones. Kids see their parents doing that, and I see kids at restaurants with iPads, and they don’t know how to wait for the food to come without a screen in front of them.”
Schrems, Stolley and Hull told the Landmark they restrict their children’s access to screens at home during the week and allow them limited access on weekends, sometimes to watch a movie as a family. Stolley said she sometimes lets her kids watch an educational video to supplement her at-home curriculum.
“If I want my children to have a healthy digital life, the first person for modeling that is me, not the school. The school is a context, but if I model bad digital life habits at home, that’s way worse, right? I try not to be on my phone when my kids are around,” Hull said.
