Dive Brief:
- The Consortium for School Networking released guidance on Monday for district leaders who are navigating growing calls from state legislators and local community members to set screen time policies in schools.
- Several states have passed laws this year limiting screen time and digital instruction in schools, including Alabama, Iowa, Tennessee and Utah. The nation’s second-largest school system, Los Angeles Unified School District, is also preparing to implement a new screen time limit policy for the 2026-27 school year.
- While CoSN said in its guidance that it supports reducing “low-value screen use” in schools, the organization noted that “not all screen time is the same.” CoSN’s goal for school technology policies focuses less on measuring screen time in minutes and more on ensuring that school devices are being used for clear instructional purposes that advance learning.
Dive Insight:
CoSN developed its guidance after receiving requests from the nonprofit’s members — some of whom lead districts in states already requiring screen time limits, said Stacy Hawthorne, board chair for CoSN, a professional association for K-12 district technology leaders.
Most of the policies around screen time use in schools revolve around setting time limits, Hawthorne said.
Momentum for limiting screen time and devices in schools has grown as lawsuits against ed tech and social media companies are increasingly in the spotlight — and as 1:1 device programs have become commonplace in schools, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic. Critics of ed tech have also pointed to the impacts screen time can have on youth mental health and well-being.
“We firmly believe that minutes isn’t a good indicator of quality of screen time,” Hawthorne said. “Thirty minutes watching SpongeBob is 30 minutes too much on the screen, and 30 minutes programming an Arduino to make a temperature gauge for a community garden is probably not enough time.”
In the full guidance — exclusively accessible to CoSN members — the nonprofit advises districts to reduce or eliminate low-value uses of technology, such as passive video watching without instructional support. Other examples ripe for elimination, CoSN said, include repetitive digital worksheets, entertainment or reward-based screen use, unsupervised browsing, the use of unvetted apps or websites, and relying on apps or platforms designed to encourage excessive screen use.
When districts develop these policies, they should protect high-value and legally necessary use cases for technology, according to CoSN. The full guide said, for instance, that assistive technology, individualized education program-required technology, Section 504 accommodations, Americans with Disabilities Act-related services, multilingual learner supports, translation tools, screen readers, speech-to-text and text-to-speech and universal screeners should remain in place.
Broad screen time policies focused on limiting minutes can also have unintentional consequences on students, Hawthorne said. That can be particularly true for students with disabilities who attend school in a district with a screen time limit or ban, she said.
If a student, for example, is the only one allowed to use accessibility technology such as text-to-speech tools to write an assignment in class, then everyone else in the classroom will know that student has a disability, which could be stigmatizing for students with IEPs and 504 plans, Hawthorne said.
School-issued devices also have stronger data privacy protections for students than their personal at-home devices do, she said. And screen time restrictions also make it more difficult for schools to teach students healthy habits around technology use and digital citizenship.
“I think a lot of families, and particularly legislators, don’t understand how much safer students are on using school-issued devices and school-issued accounts,” Hawthorne said.
