For a few years, the fight in schools was over phones. Now some North Carolina districts are going after a device they handed students themselves: the laptop.
Granville County Schools, a rural district of about 6,400 students north of Durham, is the clearest example. It is in its second year of going technology-free two days a week, and this year it went further. The two days are now consecutive, Mondays and Tuesdays, so teachers can sequence full lessons without screens. Devices are out of kindergarten through second-grade classrooms. Students in grades three through eight no longer take laptops home at all, and instead use carts kept at school. Only high schoolers still get a take-home device. And across the district, students cannot reach YouTube.
"Everyone agrees that there is a problem, and that our young people are spending too much time on devices," said Stan Winborne, the Granville superintendent. His administration's view is that the value of technology is in how it is used, not whether it is used, and that when every student carries a device, they overuse it in ways that hurt their own learning.
What the laptop data showed
Before cutting back, the district looked at what students were actually doing. Using its web-monitoring tools, it pulled 30 days of app activity at two schools. At J.F. Webb High School, YouTube was the third most-used app, with nearly 40,000 uses in a month. It beat the tools students use to do school: ClassLink, Google Docs, Gmail, and Canvas. At Granville Central Middle School, YouTube ranked fourth. Some students, the district found, were on their laptops dozens of hours a week.
"I would love to assume that that is all educational, but we knew it wasn't," said Michael Spradlin, Granville's technology director. Spradlin, a former teacher who used technology heavily in his own classes, is not against devices. He now requires teachers to get his approval before installing an app, partly to check security and partly because, he said, many products are marketed as educational tools but work as little more than games. He has banned some that were popular.
A year in, not a clean win
Granville has been surveying students and staff, and the picture is mixed. Teachers reported not having enough paper to print worksheets. Students complained that some teachers just printed the same online material instead of changing how they teach. Kids liked talking to classmates more, but said it also made rooms louder, and that their hands cramp now from handwriting. Most students did not think tech-free days had improved their focus, lowered their stress, or made them feel calmer.
The teachers see it differently, and the surveys suggest the change is landing harder than students realize. Staff report that students are more mentally tired at the end of a tech-free day, which they read as a sign of more thinking. Wendy Wilkins, a third-grade teacher at Mount Energy Elementary, said her students have formed closer bonds than she usually sees. "A laptop cannot have empathy and understanding and connection," she said. A district instructional coach, Mary Warehime, said students now write first drafts of essays by hand, partly so teachers can watch the work happen and be sure a student, not generative AI, is doing it.
An outside researcher working with the district, University of North Carolina public-health professor Karl Johnson, framed the experiment as a mirror. It revealed, he said, that the county had become "a little too dependent upon ed tech," with some teachers using it well and others less so, and some students using their devices to cheat. Granville's leaders lean on a body of research finding stronger comprehension from print than from screens, and on health concerns about heavy screen time, though Winborne is candid that reduced device use will not transform students overnight.
A wider North Carolina pullback
Granville is not alone. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction issued guidance this summer urging schools toward purposeful screen use, discouraging screens as a reward or a time-filler and encouraging creative, adult-guided work. Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools approved a three-year digital learning plan this spring that adds YouTube restrictions and phases out devices for kindergarten and first grade, though some parents and board members wanted it to go further. One board member compared students' device use to an opioid addiction. Burke County went as far as declaring last year that paper and pencil would be students' primary tools.
In Wake County, the state's largest district, a parent group called Community Advocates for Responsible EdTech has formed to push for limits and to keep generative AI out of schools until there is a clear policy. It was started by a Wendell mother, Kaitlyn Sanderson, whose daughter is still in pre-kindergarten and who worries about the device her child will be handed next year. Wake board members and Superintendent Robert Taylor have floated dropping devices for the youngest students to save money, but officials recently said the savings would be small, because so many devices are still needed for state-required testing and progress monitoring.
That last point is the real obstacle. Schools have rebuilt everyday work around easy device access: required progress monitoring for young students must be done online, practice exams are online to mirror the real ones, textbooks have gone digital, and assignments are handed out and turned in through apps. Granville has kept physical textbooks in English, math, and science, made sure students have dictionaries, calculators, and novels, and bought more paper, a cost Winborne calls nominal against what the district saves. It still has to make exceptions, like letting career and technical students use required software on tech-free days.
"I'll admit that it's been risky to try this," Winborne said. "It's disrupted our business as usual ... but I'm proud of the work that we've done, and I believe that it's the right thing to do." The move fits a national mood that has already produced hard limits elsewhere, from phone bans to the screen-time caps that Los Angeles imposed on more than 400,000 students. For the debate that started it all, see our look at whether phones should be banned in schools.
Sources
WRAL: Why one NC school district is taking the laptops away and turning to old tech
School and district figures from allk12's analysis of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data, 2024-25.
