Meredith McGlinchey was curious when in fourth grade her son, who isn't allowed to play video games at home, suddenly started begging her for permission to do so.

"He was so screen dependent all of a sudden - wandering around the house, asking, 'What are we doing today? Can I play Minecraft?'" she said.

Logging into his Chromebook issued by the Springfield Township School District, she was shocked to find he had been frequenting a gaming website and streaming YouTube videos - sites he had apparently been visiting in class.

McGlinchey "had a bit of a meltdown," she said, firing off emails to school leaders. But the discovery caused her to question not just what her son was spending his class time doing, but other kids, as well.

Through outreach on social media, McGlinchey found other parents frustrated by how their kids were interacting with technology during the school day: from high school classrooms, where some teachers required students to stow their phones away while others didn't; to the middle school cafeteria, where kids were watching YouTube on their Chromebooks.

At a school board meeting this summer, one parent said she stopped counting after finding 300 YouTube links in her daughter's Chromebook history, just in the last week of school.

"They're young humans," McGlinchey said. "They should learn how to speak to each other's faces, not just congregate around a screen."

While many parent groups and schools are laser-focused on how to regulate cell phones, Springfield parents broadened their pushback to the pervasiveness of screen time in schools. And they have been successful.

The district announced new rules that would go into effect when school starts Sept 3, including no Chromebooks during middle school lunch and tighter filters on YouTube at the elementary and middle school levels, so only links preapproved by teachers will be accessible.

In high school, all students will be required to place their phones in designated holders during class, while elementary schoolers will no longer be allowed to wear smartwatches.

Sue-Im Lee, a parent who has worried about online learning and the amount of time she's witnessed her children "passively observing" screens as part of their coursework, called the changes "wonderful."

"But I just can't believe how long it took," she said, adding that to her, it "feels like common sense."

'A table full of candy'

After meetings with administrators, in the fall of 2023, the Springfield parents - who organised a Facebook group that grew to more than 200 people - issued a series of requests to the district.

Among them: the middle school Chromebook and YouTube restrictions, as well as a standardised cell phone policy at the high school.

"What we're essentially doing is putting a table full of candy out in front of these kids, and then telling them they need to make good choices around it," said Karen Moore Schultz, a parent of rising eighth and fourth graders.

When Schultz's son was taking pre-algebra in sixth grade, she noticed that he was needing significant help with homework, to the point where she and her husband were spending up to 90 minutes a night trying to reteach his lessons.

They discovered the culprit: Rather than paying attention in class, her son would race through his work so he could watch YouTube on his Chromebook, Schultz said.

She then learned that at lunch, her son wasn't necessarily having conversations with other kids, but gathered around screens. One day, she said, he told her another kid was watching Nazi propaganda videos in the lunchroom.

"It feels like lunchtime became more about let's keep them quiet, give them their videos, nobody causes a problem," said Schultz, who told her son he had to tell an adult about the inappropriate content.

While the district had a YouTube filter in place, intended to allow access only to age-appropriate content, parents said students had figured out how to get around it. At a June school board meeting, one parent showed how, using a proxy he found through a quick Google search, he was able to pull up streaming websites and fight videos on TikTok, all while connected to the district's network.

Leaning too heavily on computer-based learning?

The pushback spurred the district to survey parents and students about its integration of technology, said Superintendent Mary Jo Yannacone. The results found that students largely said they weren't distracted by their Chromebooks or cell phones, while parents mostly expressed confidence that teachers were using technology for educational purposes.

Still, when asked whether the district was striking "an appropriate balance between traditional teaching methods and technology-based instruction," feedback was more mixed: 57% of high school parents answered yes, along with 47% of middle school parents.

Proficiency with technology is embedded in Pennsylvania's educational standards, Yannacone said; district students learn to code starting in elementary school.

"I don't personally believe that school systems have an overreliance on technology," Yannacone said, adding that "I feel like we've landed in a really reasonable, appropriate, sound place" with the new rules.

The parents advocates largely agree - though they also expressed concern that schools have leaned too heavily on computer-based learning in the wake of the pandemic.

For Lee - an English professor at Temple University who has a child entering eighth grade, and another who just graduated - the omnipresence of Chromebooks in the classroom means that kids are always tempted by something other than schoolwork. "They have access to much more fun things," she said.

She hopes that when teachers are planning lessons, whether to teach with technology is a "deliberative" question, rather than an automatic one. "That's the kind of stasis that we wanted to shake - and to say that doesn't have to be the way anymore," she said.

McGlinchey also feels as if computer access could be scaled back; at the Philadelphia middle school where she teaches, Chromebooks aren't always in kids' hands, but stay in carts when not being used. She fears that screens are hindering not just learning, but also social development.

"We just want our kids to have a childhood," she said.

 - TNS