This is awesome!! Good for your community. I’m sharing this with another person @patm here who is advocating for kids as well.
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Thank you so much for posting this! I do have plans to address the board and superintendent as well.
After watching the video, I am wondering if it is possible to contact or have a statement my Susan Dunaway (not sure of spelling) who can help to formulate letters/statements to school boards. I was trying to take notes but I would prefer to have a copy. Thank you!
Another request for help, I would like to know if there are laws or school guidelines in California, specifically, that says I can’t opt out of tech or 1:1 program. I think that if they schools don’t want to do it school-wide, then I would like to have the legal option to say no and request paper textbooks. The schools have to provide that if I don’t give my permission for laptops, tablets, etc., right?
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Unfortunetly I do not know the answer to this, so apologies for cluttering the thread. Just wanted you to know if you needed any kind of student support/a speaker/testimoney to help you case, I live in California and would be gald to support you in anyway I can.
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@becks Some schools in CA will say they are a “non-opt out” school blah blah blah. These schools just don’t want to deal with people who disagree with them!
You can formulate a letter to the superintendent- copy your principle and tell him/her separately so there won’t be any surprises. Say why you do t want your kid to participate in Edtech activities or use computers at school. Mention there is no education to students about potential harms. List some harms but don’t go into details on all of them. But make your complaint broad enough to cover most students- so they can’t just say these family has a special circumstance we can’t accomodate.
Get what I’m saying? You can ask for CAASP testing to be in paper too…
Let’s stay in touch on this subject. Perhaps we can write a letter together to use as a form for other parents to use.
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I’d like to reply to “Becks” but for some reason I’m not seeing how to do that. You can access info on Susan Dunaway in the below link or email me at brianandgretchen@gmail.com and I can get you her info. We are in both in Kansas City. We just had our first school district “digital learning task force” meeting to address parent concerns of the districts 1:1 digital learning. It is clear those administrators leading the meeting do not want to do a comprehensive review of the last 5 years of 1:1 that we are pushing for. Either they haven’t been doing their job of tracking the performance or they don’t like the results. One of our questions is this – do you have agreements with any company of these digital tools that allows their company to mine data? Our district has allowed over 200+ apps to be downloaded. Some of which we are finding reward students for watching advertising! Apps are misleading and they change their content over time. Schools cannot keep up with this stuff. http://www.facetofacemovement.com/the-experts.html
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I would love to see a parent organize all of the parents to request 504 plans. Just get your child’s health care provider to write a letter with some sort of a diagnosis (at risk for video game addiction, for example) and say that the child requires accommodations in school pursuant to IDEA. If you can get a whole group of parents to do this, the principal might wake up.
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Thank you! That sounds disheartening. SO they SAID they will look into but don’t care? I would be really upset with those apps and advertisers.
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I haven’t heard of non-opt out schools! Ugh. Sometimes it feels a bit hopeless looking forward at my children’s schooling. But it seems so many more parents agree that there is a problem.
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Here is alink to parents rights in California:
(a) It is essential to our democratic form of government that parents and guardians of schoolage children attending public schools and other citizens participate in improving public education institutions. Specifically, involving parents and guardians of pupils in the education process is fundamental to a healthy system of public education.
© All participants in the education process benefit when schools genuinely welcome, encourage, and guide families into establishing equal partnerships with schools to support pupil learning.
(G) Participating, as appropriate, in decisions relating to the education of their own child or the total school program.
(D) Monitoring and regulating the television viewed by their children.
SO it seems like we are meant to FEEL like we have a voice, but do we?
Then there’s California EdTech plan
withe the following: Implementation of Superintendent Torlakson’s “No Child Left Off-line” vision of one-to-one computing for every student and educator.
There is absolutely no discussion or mention of the health or safety of the children. None that I found. How is this possible?
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@becks thanks for the links- Yes I really get this too- that they are just saying we have rights as parents. California is exactly like this with special education law as well…, they ignore you hoping you will wear out in the process and give up move. Sounds crazy but it’s real.
California has the most dysfunctional
Education system in the nation- that’s why there are so many Charter schools.
I suggest you go to school board meetings just to learn how they think so you know they think to play their beaurocratic game. Then you can get a group of angry parents and demand answers about health and wellbeing.
I understand your concern- it’s the biggest institutional mess I’ve seen ever in my adult life- total disgrace.
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Well, sadly, we became so frustrated that we did move. Not out of California, like we wish we could, though tech is everywhere, but somewhere else where we found a private school that doesn’t use computers or 1-1 and very little as they get into junior high. It is a sacrifice financially, (Thankfully we are not in LA and SF with insane tuition), but we were fed up.
In fact, it got worse! They were using iPads for multiple subjects in kindergarten by the end of the year.
I don’t see this changing unless it comes from a state level, which it seems it won’t. I keep watching and hoping on these boards and HT to achieve something : )
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I think the only solution is to have not only tech literate, but digital wellness-ly literate individuals making education policy!!!
I don’t have children and was in school long before this stuff had been invented but it seems from reading these post just as when I was growing up and probably even before that during the stone age at the cave school, all these parents think school is something besides a jail for children. My entire life I have been learning what I could and reading books and experiencing life with animals and the wilderness, the only time my education and growth really had the brakes put on it was in school. The purpose is to groom the 19th century child worker for the mill or prison or war or wherever the factory owners and rulers decided to put the adult from the working class.
We no longer need it.
Look at a photo of a classroom from the turn of the 20th century.
Look at one from today.
Look at a car, tv, radio, restaurant, building, highway, commercial airliner, the telephone, every other aspect of life and society has changed other than the junior prison known as school.
To think it is anything more than a place the corporations can sell mandatory testing supplies to the state that mandates attendance of 100% of children in the country, that’s mafia control brainwashing and education is the last purpose as far as what is in a school what tech the kinds of people the teachers are what is in the textbook.
Why do you think the children are shooting one another? (because life in the school is a worse alternative than the rampage going there sends them on)
I wonder if there wouldn’t be a simpler intervention to at least limit tech usage for your kids. For example, getting your school to agree to turn off the WiFi before giving your child any equipment, the idea being to kill any ad-supported or tracking-supported apps and require all content they view to be pre-downloaded.
You might say, well, what’s the point of making such a minor request if they’re still going to be on iPads all day? But if your school can’t make a concession as simple as turning off the WiFi for you, then they really can’t do anything for you at all.
If you are entrusting a school with your child, you can’t really control what goes on in the school 100%. But I’ve found a wide variety in how accommodating schools can be. Not for digital wellness stuff but for other things like religious exceptions or special ed needs. Even for these topics (which are required by law), some schools won’t budge at all. Some make every effort possible. It all depends on the faculty.
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@becks great to hear your update. You are so wise. A movement will happen and people will run in the direction you created I’m convinced. Many people marvel at my kid’s appreciation for nature, opera, and the beauty of life takes her breath away. We watch TV but not shows that have excessive screen changes. We. Have. No. iPad. Never. Will. Ever!!
My advice to people based on our nearly screen free existence is give kids more person to person awards than they receive on a screen. It’s addicting an such a young vulnerable age. Way of the future? Fooey- not a chance!! Tool to function yes- Take away my brain no.
Anyways… private message me becks and we can chat more.
@Beck - I am very late to this party, but I absolutely feel for your situation.
The only solace I can offer is that technology is not inherently bad per-se, it is our relationship with technology that is the problem.
It is obviously amplified by the addictive nature of technology that aims to exploit us, however I am sure that with your phenomenal parenting, you can build procedures and an environment that supports your child/children to build a healthier relationship & habit formations with & around technology, which will start from educating them from an early age how technology is designed (obviously in very simplistic terms initially).
I am a believer that if we can educate our children about technology, how it is designed, and its inherent biases, that they will become a pivotal generation in redesigning technology to be more inclusive, fairer, and accessible. I mean, just look at the incredible Global Climate Change movement, started by well-informed children.
The danger of removing technology from our children’s lives completely is that it may even have the adverse effect and make them more susceptible to its addictive contents later in life.
Anyway, I really hope this helps in some way.