THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — Julie Frumin broke the news to her 11-year-old son in the minivan on the way home from school.
His laptop was being taken away.
His face lit up. “Really?” he asked, beaming with excitement.
It wasn’t a punishment. It was a victory Frumin had fought hard for. Her third-grade daughter had already opted out of using school-assigned laptops in favor of pen and paper, and her son wanted to follow suit.
The middle schooler had been begging to opt out, citing headaches from the Chromebook screen and a dislike of the AI chatbot recently integrated into it.
“I’m just so happy that they’re getting an analog education for now,” Frumin said.
Parents across the country are taking steps to stop their children from using school-issued Chromebooks and iPads, citing concerns about distractions and access to inappropriate content that they fear hampers their kids’ education.
The parents have started to organize through email and in group chats with hundreds of members, swapping tips and creating online resources for other families to use when approaching their own district about alternatives to school-issued devices.
In interviews with a dozen parents, each said they were the first in their district to attempt to opt out — often confounding school officials who weren’t sure whether opting out was legally allowed — but that they felt it was crucial to prove a point.
Emily Cherkin, a former teacher who recently testified before Congress about screen time in education, created a tool kit based on material she prepared to stop her daughter from using school-issued devices in her Seattle middle school two years ago. It includes research on the efficacy of digital learning tools, email templates and suggested questions to ask administrators. Cherkin said she knows of four other families in her district who opted their children out since she did, and her tool kit has been downloaded over 3,000 times.
“For me, opting out is not the end goal — it’s the means to the end,” she said. “And the way I see it is, you force a conversation. It gives permission to other parents to even just start asking questions.”
These families reflect a growing backlash to education technology, driven by concerns about excessive screen time and the harm it causes to youth. What started as anger directed at social media companies has translated to pressure on schools. Their requests present a new challenge for administrators and educators who followed national trends toward more digital learning and providing a laptop for every child.
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National organizations representing administrators, school technology officers and teachers have urged caution against lumping in classroom screen time with recreational device use at home, saying they need to prepare students for employers who expect students to be fluent with digital tools and artificial intelligence.
But the parents opting out point to research showing that students who used computers at school performed worse academically and that information is better retained when read on paper. And education experts say there’s a significant difference between educating students about technology and completely relying on educational technology.
“It’s a bit of a mirage,” said Faith Boninger, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder’s National Education Policy Center who has studied flaws in digital platforms used by schools. “Students don’t need to be consumers of this technology in order to be able to use it in 10 or 15 years, when it’s likely going to be something else entirely.”
‘They know best’
The typical conversation around a parent opting a child out of something at school usually involves concerns about content — sex education and coursework involving LGBTQ issues have been the targets of some religious families, who say these lessons infringe on how they want to raise their children.
Frumin didn’t want to come across like somebody who’s trying to dictate the curriculum. Her concern is about how it’s being taught, not what is taught. “You would not find me there saying they shouldn’t read a certain book,” she said.
“I want them to be taught through humans,” Frumin said. “I want the teachers to teach my kids — I think they know best.”
Initially, administrators in the Conejo Valley Unified School District said she was only allowed under state law to opt the children out of standardized testing and sexual health lessons, according to Frumin. But after her children’s teachers agreed, the school relented. Now the teachers print out their assignments. Instead of playing games on their laptops during free time, they read books.
The district did not respond to a request for comment.
Both of her children said they’re happier without the laptops and doing homework by hand. “It’s just a little bit harder,” her son conceded on a recent afternoon in his kitchen, as he put folders in his backpack and went outside to kick a soccer ball.
Covid’s impact
Computers are now ubiquitous in K-12 education. Nearly 9 in 10 public schools provide a device for each middle and high school student, known as 1:1 policies, according to federal statistics updated last year. More than 4 in 5 elementary schools do the same, according to a 2021 survey by the trade publication Education Week. The most common devices are Chromebook laptops, which are powered by a Google operating system that relies on an internet connection, though it’s common for younger students to receive Apple iPads or other tablets instead.
The pandemic supercharged the landscape of 1:1 device policies in schools, thanks in part to a boost from federal stimulus dollars that many districts used to buy more technology, an Associated Press analysis found. But when the remote schooling era of the pandemic ended, the education field should have taken it as an opportune moment to audit digital use in classrooms, said David Stein, president of Montgomery County Education Association, a local teachers’ union in Maryland.
“I don’t think we thought very critically about what should we keep and what shouldn’t we keep,” Stein said.
Stein, a math teacher, said he doesn’t think it makes sense to pull students off of computers entirely — state tests are all online now, and teaching statistics requires datasets stored on software — but many teachers agree there is too much screen time in class.
“The default is always just do it on the screen,” he said, “instead of thinking about, ‘Do we need to do that on the screen?’ I think that that’s the issue.”
The Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations is pressing the district to provide a formal process to request “non-screen alternatives” for families that have “made the conscious effort to limit their children’s exposure to screens.”
Lisa Cline, a Montgomery County mom who chaired a parent advisory committee focused on technology, said she opted her son out when he was in third grade and then requested each school year that his teachers keep him off screens as much as possible until he graduated high school last year. She said she hopes to work with the advocacy group Fairplay for Kids to launch a national campaign urging parents to opt out of school-issued devices.
“I think it’s a win, actually, if we get to that point where the default is you opt in,” Cline said.
Different strategies
Parents are typically asked to sign paperwork at enrollment granting consent for the schools to give their kids laptops. Nicki Petrossi said when she initially refused to sign it in 2024, the school district in Fullerton, California, told her that she was legally barred from doing so. According to a letter the district provided her, reviewed by NBC News, administrators argued state rules require children to use computers if that’s how the school is teaching a curriculum.
A spokesperson for the California Department of Education said “how a district implements the state-adopted standards is up to the district.” The district did not respond to a request for comment.
But Petrossi was certain she needed to get her children back on an analog education, in part because she’d already spoken to a dozen teachers from around the country about problems they had with devices in class for her podcast, “Scrolling 2 Death.” She also worried about recent large-scale hacking of education software. So last year, she transferred her children to a charter school that’s low-tech and uses a classical education curriculum.
“Once you know the background of why these devices were even pushed so hard, you know the data exposures that are happening,” she said, “then you know that our kids are the products and that teachers don’t even like it.”
Petrossi also co-founded the Tech-Safe Learning Coalition, which has posted templates that parents can send to their districts to limit their children’s use of school technology, so that “parents have more ammo to go to their schools and have these conversations,” she said.
Other parents who weren’t successful opting their children out of devices entirely still felt like raising the issue was progress.
After Kaitlan Finn failed to get her suburban Chicago school district to let her kids go device-free, she asked her son’s math teacher to print out assignments so he doesn’t have to complete them on a computer. She said some of his classmates began asking for the same once they saw him get paper packets. She also started a parent group with 75 members that’s asking the district to allow students to keep Chromebooks at school rather than take them home.
“Screen use feels like tobacco use used to be,” Finn said. “You know, kids used to have rooms they could smoke in at school before they realized how bad it was years ago. I feel like my kids are being forced to smoke cigarettes during the school day, but then they’re also sending a pack of cigarettes home with them too.”
Marcos Boyington, a father of four in Boulder, Colorado, took a different approach.
He opted three of his kids out of school-issued Chromebooks, and they instead use laptops that he purchased. This way, he said, he’s able to control filters for what his children can access while at school. He came up with the idea after the high school said it couldn’t block eBay on his son’s school-issued laptop. A district spokesperson said administrators and parents can request that websites be blocked “if they are posing a safety risk or distracting students from school work.”
When Boyington shared what he’d done in an internal forum for parents at Google, where he works, he said several others said they planned to do that with their child.
“We understand the value of tech. It can really help,” he said. “But also, it’s really easy to screw it up.”
‘Ten Tech Commandments’
Frumin has also been finding support among other parents and teachers in the Conejo Valley Unified School District.
At the Feb. 4 school board meeting, six parents and one teacher spoke during the public comment portion, pleading for the district to dial back the amount of class time students spend on devices. They emphasized how much they admire their children’s teachers, but noted issues they’ve seen involving the school-issued devices, ranging from difficult-to-read text to elementary-aged children playing videos with racial slurs.
Then it was Frumin’s turn at the microphone.
She pulled out her phone and played the backing track for “Ten Duel Commandments,” from the “Hamilton” musical, and announced that she was going to rap a petition she and other parents had written. “It’s the Ten Tech Commandments,” she sang at the start, as the board and the audience chuckled. “Oh yeah, this is happening,” she said with a smirk.
“These decisions are being made without giving parents a voice. With all the lack of regulation and complexity, we really should have a choice,” she sang toward the end of the song, noting 260 people had signed the petition so far. The audience cheered.
