Worcester parents who spent months building support for a petition to pull individually assigned devices from preschool through second-grade classrooms left Thursday night's School Committee meeting without the answer they wanted. Instead of a vote on their request, the committee sent the matter to a subcommittee for further discussion, leaving the policy question unresolved for now.
The petition asks the district to remove individually assigned, internet-connected devices from the youngest classrooms, according to theworcesterguardian.org. It would not touch assistive technology used by students with disabilities, technology enrichment classes, or teachers' own use of digital tools in instruction. As Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported, parents expressed frustration after the School Committee declined to take up the petition outright, voting instead to continue discussion in subcommittee.
During public comment, several parents criticized the administration's handling of the petition, according to the same Guardian report. Petitioner Noelia Chafoya pressed school officials to weigh families' own experiences with technology at home more heavily in any eventual decision. “Those experiences need to be heard,” she said.
Why the District Isn't Setting a Limit Yet
District administrators have not recommended specific screen-time limits for young students and say they intend to keep gathering input before deciding whether changes are warranted, the Guardian's report states. Worcester Public Schools already prohibits recreational screen use during instructional periods, along with screen-based technology for preschool through sixth-grade students during lunch or recess, per the same outlet.
The administration's own figures, cited in that reporting, show kindergarteners average 28.5 minutes of device use a day, rising to 32 minutes for first-graders and 39 minutes for second-graders. The average climbs further to 52.5 minutes in third grade and reaches 87.5 minutes for high school juniors. A separate internal audit found that, across all grades, Worcester students average just under 65 minutes of instructional screen time per school day, according to a report from Yahoo News.
The same Thursday meeting saw the committee weigh a lease of up to five years to replace 6,000 student Chromebooks and 1,000 staff MacBook Airs, per the Guardian's account of the agenda. The hardware question underscores how central devices have become to daily operations even as some parents push to scale back their use for the youngest learners.
A Petition Drive Months in the Making
The push didn't start Thursday. Back in June, the group Worcester for Safe Student Technology said it would present a petition signed by nearly 500 parents, caregivers, students and educators across 51 district schools, calling for hands-on, teacher-led, screen-limited early elementary learning, according to MassLive.
Worcester isn't alone in wrestling with this. In Cambridge, a district study found kindergartners used Chromebook tablets for an average of 17 minutes a day, with 98.9 percent of that time classified as instructional use, per the Boston Globe. Average Chromebook use there rose steadily by grade, climbing to 71 minutes by high school. Cambridge School Committee members considered a temporary screen-time ban through third grade but deferred action while they waited for more district data, the Globe reported.
National Numbers Show a Shift Toward Devices
The debate playing out in Worcester and Cambridge reflects a broader shift documented nationally. An informal New York Times survey of 350 pre-K through 12th-grade teachers found 99 percent said their school provided devices for students to use in class, and eight in 10 said students at their school had a device assigned to them individually, compared with about a third who said the same back in 2019. Among elementary school teachers surveyed, 81 percent said their school gives students devices for classroom use as early as kindergarten, according to the New York Times. The paper noted its results are not a statistical sample of all U.S. schools.
For now, the Worcester petition sits with the Standing Committee on Teaching, Learning and Student Success, with no timeline given for when or whether the full committee will revisit it. Parents who rallied hundreds of signatures across dozens of schools will have to wait to see whether that subcommittee review leads anywhere closer to the limits they're seeking.
