Parents in Lower Merion School District, outside Philadelphia, want the right to keep their children off school laptops and tablets. In August, several parents and one student sued the district, its superintendent, and board members, arguing that requiring device use without an opt-out violates the Fourteenth Amendment right to direct a child's education, CNN reported. The suit also raises screen time, inappropriate content, privacy, supervision, and AI-assisted cheating.
The district denies the allegations. Spokeswoman Amy Buckman noted that not all of the plaintiffs have children enrolled in the district, which had 8,533 students in 11 schools in 2024-25, according to federal data.
Lower Merion had let parents opt children out of device-led learning until June, when the board repealed that policy at a meeting that turned into shouting. The new policy limits screen time by grade instead: limited and non-routine use in kindergarten through second grade, under 30 minutes a day in third and fourth grades, under 60 in fifth and sixth, under 90 in seventh and eighth, and under 120 in high school, according to CNN.
Yair Lev, one of the parents suing, said his second-grade daughter seemed to go into a trance while using a math app on a school Chromebook. He and other parents started a group called Pencils Over Pixels.
They are part of a wider push. Schools Beyond Screens, founded in early 2025 by Los Angeles Unified parent Lila Byock, has thousands of members and about 230 chapters in school districts across 40 states, CNN reported. Byock said her son's grades fell to D's and F's after he started middle school, which she tied to all-day iPad use. "He started to think he was just stupid," she said. Los Angeles Unified has since removed devices for transitional kindergarten through first grade and limited screen time for older students, which allk12 covered when Los Angeles schools began limiting screen time.
Smaller districts are moving too. Mesick Consolidated Schools in rural western Michigan took Chromebooks out of its elementary school, Floyd M. Jewett Elementary, after years of low state reading scores, Superintendent Jack Ledford told CNN. At Simons Middle School in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, the principal capped Chromebook use at 60 minutes a week. A North Carolina district made a similar switch this year, as allk12 reported in why one district went back to paper and pencil.
The devices arrived fast. In spring 2020, 45% of public school principals said their school provided students with computers for home use, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). By September 2021, 96% of public schools reported providing digital devices to students who needed them.
Teachers are split on what that has done. In a Gallup survey of 2,101 public school teachers conducted May 6 to 29, 2026, with the Walton Family Foundation, 61% said students should spend less time on devices. Yet 59% agreed that the digital tools or apps they use help students learn more effectively, and 29% said learning devices do more harm than good. Only 34% strongly supported a daily maximum for device use.
Not every parent group wants devices gone. Keri Rodrigues, founding president of the National Parents Union, told CNN that banning technology outright does not protect children. An American Psychological Association report in September found that devices are neither good nor bad on their own. "What young people do on screens matters as much as, or more than, how long they spend on them," said lead author Nicole Barnes. The report recommends software without pop-up ads, no switching between tasks, and little content unrelated to the lesson, CNN reported.
Sources
CNN: Covid launched a new era of technology-led learning. Now, some parents and school districts are ready to toss devices (October 26, 2026)
KRDO (CNN): same story, syndicated copy
Gallup: Screens ubiquitous in classrooms; teachers split on efficacy (September 16, 2026)
National Center for Education Statistics: COVID-19 and elementary and secondary education, technology support
Enrollment from allk12's analysis of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data, 2024-25.
