Last fall, a father in my school district made a request that is becoming familiar to educators across the country. He asked us to create a fully screen-free track at our middle school for his daughter.
He had done his homework, reading books and articles and joining other parent groups. He was worried about what screens were doing to kids, and he wanted his child out.
As the chief technology officer for a school district of 4,200 students spread across 720 square miles of the Sierra Nevada, it would have been easy to give him a polite brush-off and a link to our technology policy. But my team and I invited him to come see for himself what was happening inside our classrooms.
He was surprised by what he found on a school tour. He expected to see kids staring at screens in every class but instead saw Socratic discussion and direct instruction. Roughly a quarter of classes used technology that day, and those students were designing projects or writing papers.
Nobody was passively watching anything. They were writing, building, working.
Of course we can’t afford to offer every parent concerned about edtech a walk-through of the school. But the visit surprised me a little too, because I realized I couldn’t give the parent any sort of proof that what he saw on this one particular day was, in fact, reflective of how we use screens every day in our district.
If he had asked me exactly how much time students spent on screens across every class, every school, every day, I couldn’t have told him. Almost no district in America could.
Something closer to pride
As parents across the country push back against excessive classroom tech use, we can address their concerns and build trusting partnerships by quantifying how much time their children spend on screens and on what activities.
We decided to measure. Using a reporting tool built into our digital safety platform, we began collecting district-wide screen time data in November. Seven months later, the numbers told a story I wish every anxious parent could hear.
Our students average 70 to 80 minutes a day on school devices. Out of a roughly seven-hour school day, that’s under 20%. And in elementary school, students spent an average of just 36 minutes per day using devices for targeted, teacher-managed interventions.
From December through May, the district-wide average moved within a band of just seven minutes, showing that usage is driven by consistent, purposeful instruction—not by teachers leaning on tech during a particularly chaotic week or students finding tech-enabled workarounds.
The five most-visited sites across all 11 schools were Google Docs, Google search, Google Classroom, a math platform and a reading platform. Not one entertainment or social media site cracked the list.
YouTube, the site this father worried about most, averaged about five minutes a day at the high school, almost all of it teacher-assigned clips. It’s blocked districtwide in elementary school, as are TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat.
To ensure parents could access the data, we built a bilingual homepage to share the raw files in a public folder for anyone to download. The visibility into how often we allowed students to be in front of screens and what they used them for eased anxiety and equipped parents with a better understanding of our district’s strategic and developmentally appropriate policies.
The process also gave me confidence that our policies were working as intended. Since then, the father who asked for a screen-free track has seen the data and now speaks about our district’s approach with something closer to pride. Parents from neighboring districts have called asking how to replicate it.
Purposeful screen time in schools
Here is what I’d offer other school leaders, and the parents pressing them. The national debate over kids and screens is real, and the concerns behind it deserve better than defensiveness.
Parents are not the enemy of school technology programs, but without data showing that those programs are being implemented carefully and with fidelity, it’s hard to gain their trust. For us, this didn’t require a massive investment—we leaned on the tools we have. But all districts should build the ability to answer these questions confidently.
I think it’s important that parents are asking these questions of our schools today. The father who challenged us made our district better. He forced us to replace assumptions with evidence, and the evidence made everyone calmer.
Schools should be able to show parents, in plain numbers, that a device in their child’s hands is purposeful. If the district can’t, families have a right to ask why.
