(Daily Caller News Foundation) \u2013 Parents are pushing back after their school district refused to let them opt their children out of technology in the classroom.<\/p>\n
Students at the Lower Merion School District near Philadelphia use tablets in Kindergarten and Chromebooks in second grade, AP News\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0May 14. The school district said they cannot allow students to opt out of the technology after parents voiced concerns.<\/p>\n At least one parent raised concerns about competing against the devices for their children\u2019s attention, and at least one student raised concerns about struggling to get into the right \u201cmindset\u201d for school, according to AP.<\/p>\n However, the wealthy<\/a> school district was reportedly considering policy changes to address some of the concerns raised. This may include tightening cellphone restrictions, or banning younger students from bringing devices home, according to AP.<\/p>\n A parent campaign called Pencils Over Pixels circulated petitions to change the school board\u2019s mind before the next meeting scheduled for June, KYW Newsradio reported<\/a> May 19.<\/p>\n Pencils Over Pencils and the Lower Merion School District did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n The campaign aims promote \u201cstudent health\u201d and \u201chuman connection\u201d by advocating for the enforcement of an \u201copt out\u201d policy for school technology and a \u201cbell-to-bell\u201d cellphone ban<\/a>, according to petition on its website<\/a>.<\/p>\n Data privacy is another aim of the campaign. The petition also cited 2022 Internet Safety Labs study<\/a> that suggested up to three quarters of EdTech apps profit off of selling students\u2019 data, and advocates for the establishment of a \u201cTechnology Advisory Committee\u201d independent of any tech-industry<\/a> vendor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Daily Caller News Foundation) \u2013 Parents are pushing back after their school district refused to let them opt…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203072,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[183,185,184,186,23794,28,69,13842,89680,503],"class_list":["post-203071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lower-merion","tag-lower-merion","tag-lower-merion-headlines","tag-lower-merion-news","tag-lower-merion-township","tag-parents","tag-pennsylvania","tag-philadelphia","tag-public-schools","tag-screentime","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}