After phone ban, New Hampshire task force to explore screen time in schools

Kim Bleier understands why screens became “a huge piece of the educational narrative” in the darkest depths of the COVID-19 remote learning era. They were essential to education itself. 

But Bleier, a Concord High School social studies teacher, wishes students had left some of that technology behind when they returned to the classroom. 

Instead, the pandemic seems to have only exacerbated screen addiction, creating a string of battles in classrooms and hallways.

“They get in the way of average social interactions. They get in the way of delivering information. They get in the way of productivity,” Bleier said in an interview.

Last summer, lawmakers banned cellphone use in schools from the beginning to the end of the class day. This summer, Bleier and other educators are working to study the next frontier of distraction: laptops, tablets, and other screens.

The New Hampshire Department of Education has launched a “Screen Time Task Force,” a 32-member panel that will spend the next month exploring technology in education. The goal is to craft recommendations to help schools and teachers better manage laptop and other screen use.

“What we want to do is try to make sure that as a task force, we’re providing recommendations that help students stay on task,” said Chris Motika, administrator for the Bureau of Educational Opportunities at the New Hampshire Department of Education, in an interview.

The task force includes seven superintendents, six principals, four educators, a high school student, specialists, and representatives of the Department of Education and Department of Justice. The panel, which had its first meeting last week, will study how screen time affects “student learning, engagement, mental health, physical activity, sleep, and overall well-being,” according to its website.

Back to the basics

Unlike school cellphone bans, which are required in 22 states and have broad support, states have been slower to regulate student screen time. A handful of states, including Iowa and Utah, have passed laws limiting screen time, but most states are so far studying the issue, not taking action.

That caution is understandable, Bleier says; laptop use is more nuanced. Educators must balance the need to eliminate distractions with the need for students to be fluent in computer skills that might be necessary to their future work. Many districts, like Concord, have built arsenals of Chromebooks to allow for one-to-one policies, allowing all students their own laptop or tablet. 

“It’s that never-ending ‘tradition versus modernization’ push-pull that has existed throughout all of time,” she said.

Bleier, who teaches a sociology class and a law class that features a mock trial, says the statewide cellphone ban implemented last school year has helped to earn students’ attention back. But now that it’s back, Bleier has found that basic communications skills need attention. 

“After 30 years as an educator, I’ve had to go back to the very basics of: How do you have a conversation? How do you have a debate? What does healthy discord look like?” she said. 

And she said while the laptops are essential for teaching research skills, she tries to use them as judiciously as possible. By default, the laptops are away unless they are needed. Still, in the limited times they are deployed, some students use the laptops to play games or circumvent the school’s restrictions on social media websites. 

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“After the honeymoon phase was over with the cellphone ban, what a lot of us started to find was that their one-to-one device was the new screen,” Bleier said.

Motika has also seen the screens’ powers of attraction. Last year he returned to the classroom for a one-year stint as a high school English teacher, “to make sure I still have my chops.”

“And I’ll tell you what: Screens impacted the classroom big time,” he said. 

Nuanced reality

The task force will explore the nuanced reality of laptop use, Motika said. That will mean facing difficult realities on the effects of the technology. But it will not necessarily mean a full ban. 

The Los Angeles Unified School District recently passed a strict screen policy that would ban screens in the first grade, allow 20 minutes per day in grades two and three, and add progressively more daily minutes as kids grow, stopping at a 90-minute maximum in grades nine-12. 

Research has shown varied, age-dependent effects of screens on K-12 students. High exposure to screens can reduce literacy and vocabulary achievement among first and second graders, according to the Educational Research Review. Among older students, results are mixed: using the technology for active problem solving can improve cognitive processing, according to an eight-year Finnish study from the University of Jyväskylä, but consuming it passively, such as by scrolling, drives anxiety and isolation among adolescents, the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion has found. 

“Some of the literature that’s coming out in response to things like (Los Angeles Unified School District) is saying ‘be careful,’ because you don’t want to limit students and their ability to access important tools,” Motika said. 

In a video message sent to the committee’s first meeting, Gov. Kelly Ayotte celebrated the rollout of the cellphone ban, but acknowledged the trickiness of approaching screen time.

“Now we really need to look at how else we are using technology in our schools,” Ayotte said. “Are we using it to help enhance children’s learning experiences or are we using it in ways that are counterproductive?”

It is not clear what might emerge from the task force. Motika said the focus this time will be more on recommendations than legislation.

One conclusion appears foregone, educators say: Reducing screen time is probably a good idea for everyone. 

Midway through the first meeting, Motika paused 15 minutes into his presentation to his fellow members and asked a hair-raising question: How many on the task force had snuck a glance at a screen sometime after the presentation began?

Nearly every hand went up.