3 in 10 Berkeley High teachers let teens spend free time on screens

A student at Castlemont High School in Oakland uses a cellphone in 2024. Credit: Florence Middleton for The Oaklandside

Editors’ note: ChatGPT and Claude have been blocked across all grade levels in the Berkeley school district since Oct. 9, the district told Berkeleyside after the initial version of this story was published. An email newsletter to families last week included a line stating that “many categories of generative AI websites” were blocked recently but did not provide further details, and parent advocates Berkeleyside spoke to for this story were not aware of the changes. The district did not respond to our request for comment for this story before publication. This story has been updated.

The Berkeley school district unveiled a new survey on students’ use of technology during the school day in what many parents see as an attempt to quell the fury over the role of phones, screens and artificial intelligence in the classroom.

Screen time on district-issued Chromebooks was highest among middle schoolers, averaging approximately 37 minutes a day, according to the survey. About a third of middle school teachers assigned work through Google Classroom or another online learning platform several times a week and about a quarter used Google Classroom daily.

The survey released earlier this month is based on responses from approximately 400 Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) teachers collected at the start of the school year.

One of the metrics the survey looked at was “unstructured computer time,” which was not defined. It was highest for elementary school students, with 34% of third to fifth grade teachers reporting that their students had unstructured computer time for an average of 10 minutes daily spent on screen.

Fifteen percent of elementary teachers said they used Google Classroom and other online tools to complete assignments. Surprisingly, 5% of teachers in lower grades (TK-second) also reported free screen time among students, although more details about how, when and why were not provided.

In high school 27% of teachers said that they gave their students unstructured computer time in class and 31% of teachers reported that they allowed free cellphone time in class, according to the survey. High school students also averaged approximately 20 minutes daily on Chromebooks.

Some parents have greeted the district’s findings with apprehension, saying the numbers are out of sync with what they see when they log into their children’s devices or witness on a daily basis.

“The data doesn’t reflect what we’re seeing,” said Shannon Behrman, a mother of a fifth grader in Berkeley Unified and a trained biologist and biochemist who now works as a science educator. “Are they counting all the Chromebooks in the classroom even if kids didn’t open them? The problem with averages is there are outliers that skew the results and don’t capture the students’ reality. And what parents are seeing is a lot of screen time.”

Berkeley Unplugged is hosting a workshop for parents offering guidance on how to know if a child is ready for a cellphone, smartphone alternatives and making devices safer through parental controls, content filters and family digital habits.

Wednesday, Oct. 21, 5:30-7 p.m. Oxford Elementary School. Learn more and RSVP

The district did not disclose its methodology or explain what was meant by “unstructured screen time.” Berkeley Unplugged, a group formed by parents concerned about the outsize influence of technology in the classroom, has been pushing for a comprehensive audit of screen use the group says would paint a more accurate picture of the situation.

“Any self-reported behavior is going to be less reliable than a technology audit where we look at each child’s computer use,” said Reichi Lee, a founder of Berkeley Unplugged who has launched a write-in campaign for the school board this year. “What teacher is going to say ‘Oh yeah, I give them hours of free computer time?’”

The district has said that technology, when used correctly, can expand learning opportunities, support collaboration and help meet the needs of diverse learners. And some teachers have praised sites like YouTube and Wikipedia as critical for self-driven learning on advanced concepts. Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel has often spoken about tech in terms of educational equity, as a tool that can help even the playing field for students of color.

“We want our classrooms to be a space that cultivates and nurtures strong knowledge and skills, curiosity and exploration, critical thinking and problem solving, practice, application, and reflection, independence through the least restrictive effective support, and student efficacy and agency,” Ford Morthel said at the Oct. 7 school board meeting where the survey results were presented. “For us, equity is foundational, meaning that every student should have access to the experiences, tools, support, and opportunities that are needed to thrive.”

But many parents have pushed back, saying that it’s not enough to assume that just giving students access to computers and websites will automatically improve academic achievement.

“The evidence suggests that classroom technology has, on balance, hurt the learning environment,” said Rainbow Rubin, a mother of two and an environmental health scientist. “Many of these products are designed to keep children engaged, using addictive brain pathways. Our children deserve to be protected from that. The equity issue here is that the most vulnerable children deserve to be protected from addictive products. Children learn well with pencil and paper.”

Research has linked excessive screen time to negative impacts on children’s mental health, cognitive development, attention spans and academic performance — though definitions vary as to how much time is considered excessive. Brain imaging studies show that handwriting engages more brain activity linked to memory and learning than typing, Rubin said. Handwriting engages seven parts of the brain while typing engages only one part of the brain.

Nearly two dozen parents and students, some as young as 6 years old, spoke at the meeting, some asking the district to enforce its mobile device communication policy, which passed in November 2025. The policy banned cellphones and other devices during the entire day in elementary and middle schools but allowed their use during breaks at the high school level. However, compliance has been spotty, with many middle school students reporting that teachers allow cellphones in class and a number of high schoolers saying they use cellphones, their own laptops and other devices in class.

Gemini — Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot — is disabled on school-issued devices and this month the district began blocking YouTube on school-issued computers for elementary and middle school students.

At the Oct. 7 meeting, a number of parents pleaded with the board to pass a moratorium on generative artificial intelligence, something New York City Public Schools and Los Angeles Unified, along with a number of smaller districts have already done.

“I often see my students who use generative AI just to even give them a hint for their homework, but they don’t realize that they’re robbing themselves of the chance to have productive struggle with the material and therefore actually learn the material better,” said Gireeja Ranade, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and a parent of two small children. “Students are becoming too used to materials being presented in video form, and therefore they’re losing their ability to focus.”

A week after the meeting, the district announced in its A+ newsletter that it had recently blocked many categories of generative AI websites. And on Tuesday, after an initial version of this story was published, Superintendent Ford Morthel told Berkeleyside that ChatGPT and Claude have been blocked since Oct. 9, two days after the school board meeting.

Many parents, including members of Berkeley Unplugged, were still not aware of the change when reached by Berkeleyside.

“At no point, did anyone [from the district] say, ‘OK, we fixed this,’” said Scott Hofmeister, a parent of a student at Berkeley High. “They just quietly did it.”

Hofmeister, a member of Berkeley Unplugged, only learned about the change Monday when he asked his child to try to access ChatGPT and Claude on their school computer.

School districts around the country have grappled with how to reign in artificial intelligence, which is evolving and changing faster than schools can keep up.

Ford Morthel said that the survey showed that teachers were both interested in responsible instructional uses and had concerns about academic integrity, student independence and control over artificial intelligence features. Some Berkeley teachers asked for help from the district to disable AI features in Chromebooks, while others wanted more training on responsible use for their students. And some expressed interest in learning how to use artificial intelligence to make their own work more efficient.

The district is currently working on an artificial intelligence policy, which would be the sixth policy around technology use that the district has passed in four years. It also had an AI working group that met last year, but has not reconvened this year.

At the school board meeting earlier this month, the strongest comments came from director Jen Shanoski who asked how long it would take the district to bring the AI policy before the board and suggested that since no teachers reported using AI proactively in the classroom, “the barrier to blocking it is, perhaps, low.”

Director Beatriz Leyva Cutler suggested that the district distribute more information to parents and in different languages to help them control excessive screen time by their children at home. Meanwhile director Mike Chang said that any new policy on artificial intelligence should “not only be legally sound, but also reflect Berkeley values,” adding that the district would “take some time to be careful around that.”

Behrman, the mother of a fifth grader attending a Berkeley school and also a member of Berkeley Unplugged, said that although she was initially optimistic to work with the district to help it pass sensible policies around technology, she now feels demoralized.

“I feel like the district is so far behind in understanding the impact that we’re never going to be able to catch up with the speed that technology is moving at, and our kids are going to be harmed as a result.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that BUSD blocked Gemini on school-issued computers this year. The district has never allowed Gemini on devices that students have access to.

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