As a 7th grader at Hazel Wolf K-8 in Northeast Seattle, Maxwell Adams didn’t have a laptop or a cellphone at school.
During science class, he sometimes looked at his classmate’s screen if he needed to see a problem in color, because the black-and-white printout his teacher gave him wasn’t sufficient. In history class, when assigned to create a PowerPoint presentation, he made a poster board instead. At lunch, he played football or basketball while some of his peers played computer games.
Maxwell’s parents opted him out of technology at school—including state standardized testing, which is administered on computers. They are OK with him taking an incomplete if his teachers can’t manage to provide an activity in physical form. Grades are less important, they say, than retaining Maxwell’s ability to focus, shielding him from harmful content, and protecting his privacy. His parents also don’t want him unsupervised on a device for hours per day, risking addiction to the internet and games.
And he isn’t the only one. Despite Seattle Public Schools’ district policy to issue devices to each of its nearly 50,000 students, some highly vocal parents are successfully opting their students out of technology altogether.
These parents advocating for what they call “intentional technology” are on one end of a fierce debate happening nationwide: How can schools make sure students are equipped for success in a digital future while also retaining true life skills—like the ability to struggle and think critically in a world of easy AI answers, and to embrace the wonder of friendships, boredom, and the real world beyond the dopamine hit of electronic screens?
Mounting scientific evidence suggests that excessive screen time in a child’s life can contribute to anxiety and depression, delayed social and emotional skills, and decreased ability to focus. It is less clear how much ed tech—the devices, digital curricula, and apps purchased and administered by schools—is responsible for declining test scores nationwide, though a growing consensus among parents, educators, and some lawmakers points toward the wholesale embrace of ed tech as a significant contributing factor.
Washington state is behind many others when it comes to implementing statewide policies regulating technology use in schools. The governor and state superintendent both recently asked lawmakers to ban cellphones altogether during the school day.
Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Ben Shuldiner said he’s seen too much screen time in classrooms and is working to remedy the issue with guidance for how the school day is structured. The district is also considering issuing a cap on minutes per day that students can be on a device.
“There is quite a bit of flexible instructional time and what ends up being the default is, ‘Hey, kid. Here’s a laptop. Go play on the computer with an educational game,’” Shuldiner said. “If we are going to use technology, it needs to be for a good purpose.”
In Seattle, more than 50 ed-tech apps and other products are used on students’ district-issued devices, and much of the curriculum requires a digital component. The district spends about $21 million each year on its digital efforts, out of an annual budget of about $1.3 billion.
SPS issues every student a laptop or tablet “because digital tools are an integrated part of teaching and learning,” and “device access helps ensure students can fully participate in core instruction and learning opportunities,” a district spokesperson wrote in an email. “Device use is expected as part of classroom instruction, completing assessments and assignments, and building digital literacy skills.”
The district’s youngest learners use the least technology as part of instruction, the SPS spokesperson added, but confirmed students are given an iPad starting in kindergarten. There is some flexibility in how each classroom uses technology, and learning at SPS includes both digital and nondigital experiences, but a full opt-out isn’t consistent with district policy, the spokesperson said.
No other options
It’s not that Maxwell never uses technology. Laura Karschney, Maxwell’s mom, allows him to use his family’s desktop computer to access Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—often for homework assignments that involve research or typing. He likes to watch YouTube videos about building bows and arrows, ice age animals, and “Lord of the Rings.” And he brings a cellphone, without an internet browser, when he takes the light rail downtown for dance practice.
When Karschney learned Maxwell would be put on a computer for most of the school day in 2nd grade at Hawthorne Elementary in Seattle’s Mount Baker neighborhood during the pandemic, she decided to teach him herself.
“It’s really a shame that in order for my kid to not become addicted to this stuff I’ve had to home-school him,” Karschney said. “I’m kind of pissed off. It is totally ridiculous, but I saw the writing on the wall—and I’m glad that I did—but it would have been nice to just send him to school.”
He was home-schooled until 4th grade and then went to a Catholic school, where his parents hoped he wouldn’t be on a computer for too much of the day. But then the Catholic school started getting Chromebooks.
“I felt really trapped. What should I do? There are no good options. I cannot continue to home-school this kid. He is super social,” Karschney said. “He should be with kids in our neighborhood. I shouldn’t have to pay $50,000 [to send him to private school].”
She had heard good things about Hazel Wolf K-8, so she decided to take a chance and enroll Maxwell in SPS again for 7th grade. Before school started, she emailed the principal and said she didn’t want her son on a computer.
At first, the administration told her he had to use one. But after voicing concerns about Maxwell’s private information being collected by for-profit ed-tech companies and how SPS consents on behalf of all parents to allow that data collection, school leaders eventually agreed to make an exception for Maxwell.
Digital ‘lifeguards’
Some Seattle teachers are also skeptical of the digital tools they’re encouraged to use each day.
Emilie Mosko, a science teacher at Eckstein Middle School in Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood, has about five out of 170 students per year who opt to not use a laptop.
It used to be difficult when it came to tests, because all tests were administered online through Amplify, the district-selected digital science curriculum. The formatting made it hard to print, so she had to reformat each test into a Microsoft Word document before printing.
But when Mosko realized the students’ laptops had Gemini—Google’s AI chatbot—popping up and allowing students to get test answers, Eckstein’s science department decided to create all their own tests on paper.
When the district first adopted Amplify in 2019, Mosko and fellow teachers tried to teach the online curriculum as designed, but felt it didn’t include enough hands-on experiments for students. It was also hard to monitor students when they were on their laptops.
When students are on the computer, they can “go anywhere on anything,” Mosko said. A teacher has to sit at their own computer, watching an app called GoGuardian to monitor students’ screens and make sure they’re not doing something off-task like watching YouTube or playing Minecraft, Mosko said.
“It’s a real problem because now I’m not teaching anymore. I’m a lifeguard sitting at my station redirecting people when they aren’t doing what they are supposed to,” Mosko said. “It is really just a waste of time.”
Now, most of Mosko’s class is without the laptops. She only has students use them to access the online curriculum about once a month. Students who are tech-free can look at their neighbor’s computer.
iPads for free time
When Zoe Dash, a former K-5 technology teacher herself, dropped her child off for the first day of kindergarten at a South Seattle school, she stuck around to see the start of class.
After the students went around in a circle and said their names, their next activity was watching a video of an animated character who told them to raise their hand every time they heard a bell ring. They sat in the dark for about four minutes, as the teacher sat behind the desk controlling the game.
“It shocked me that that was his first learning activity in formal school,” Dash said. “That is what raised a bit of a yellow flag.”
The kindergartners watched videos almost every day. Sometimes it was a YouTube video of someone reading a book aloud.
“I don’t think it’s a teacher problem,” Dash added, noting that the teacher was new and might have needed more support. Dash helped the teacher find books in the school’s library. The teacher was receptive and now doesn’t use YouTube videos for reading aloud.
Around November, the kindergartners were issued individual iPads. Volunteering in the classroom, Dash noticed the tablets often were used for “choice time” when students could choose what activity they wanted to do.
One day, when choice time came around, 19 of 20 students chose to use their iPads.
“It gave me the shivers,” Dash said. “It was a very dystopian feel.”
“It felt like we had 19 little plugged-in robots and one child still over there playing with dolls by herself,” Dash added. “It made me really sad.”
Whose choice?
Even parents who are deeply invested in the intentional tech movement are struggling with the reality that their students may have little choice but to use technology, especially as they approach high school.
Emily Cherkin, a screen time consultant, former middle school teacher, and SPS parent, is feeling forced to allow her daughter to have her own laptop in high school.
Cherkin’s daughter was almost entirely tech-free for most of middle school, but as last school year came to a close—and with it, a host of projects and presentations had to be submitted online—accessing the loaner laptop, which was kept at school behind a locked door, became a hurdle.
“She had to find someone to unlock the door; she had to run all over the school to try to borrow it and then return it. It was so stressful on top of already the stress of the end of the school year,” Cherkin said.
She met with the guidance counselor at her daughter’s incoming high school this summer to weigh the options. Cherkin valued her daughter not having an SPS laptop, but was grappling with the fact that she couldn’t expect her daughter to be “the guinea pig” for navigating high school tech-free while also acclimating to a new, larger school and student body.
Last week, she wrote an email to a district administrator saying she saw no choice but for her daughter to use the district’s laptop, because declining it would “put additional stress on her in an already stressful and new situation.”
“The experience of learning is so restricted to what is available and accessible only on an internet-connected device that to decline it is to exclude her,” Cherkin wrote.
However, she is requesting that the district disable the generative AI components of the ed-tech products used on the laptops, including curriculum, internet browser, and learning management systems.
A new state-mandated program accessed through an online portal called SchoolLinks has Cherkin worried that her daughter will have no choice but to share her data when she submits mandatory information to qualify for her diploma through the portal.
Maxwell, too, sometimes daydreams about having a laptop in high school so he can arrange his notes with cool fonts and headers and use a digital calendar to stay organized. He also imagines using it when he finishes work early and wants to spend extra time writing short stories. But he knows it would also be tempting to play games on it.
Most of his peers are used to the fact that he doesn’t use a laptop, he said. But other times, he wants his classmates to better understand.
“I want to scream at them ‘Stop, you are ruining your creativity!’” he said. “But it is also their choice. But it is also not their choice.”
