The Lower Merion School Board voted Monday night to repeal the district’s current technology policy in favor of creating a new one.<\/p>\n
The vote was met with heavy criticism and backlash from dozens of parents who attended the meeting to continue pushing for the right to opt out of the district’s 1:1 policy, which provides district-issued Chromebooks or iPads to students.<\/p>\n
For months, parents in Lower Merion have voiced concerns about their children having access to those devices.<\/p>\n
They say they are worried about the impacts of excessive screen time.<\/p>\n
Similar conversations are being had in school districts across the country, including in Los Angeles and Arlington, Virginia.<\/p>\n
One young student said to the school board at Monday’s meeting, “I don’t want to spend the majority of my school day on a computer. I want to be taught by a teacher, and use real books and hand-written notes.”<\/p>\n
Erin Amini, a pediatrician and mother to Lower Merion students, said, “One-to-one devices are not educational. They are a distraction and unsafe in the hands of our underdeveloped kids.”<\/p>\n
Lower Merion’s technology policy had stated that if parents wanted to opt their children out of receiving district-issued digital devices, the district would do its best to make accommodations for those students.<\/p>\n
However, school board member Anna Shurak said that is not how the policy worked and that it is not possible for students to opt out.<\/p>\n
Monday night, the board voted to repeal the current policy, which included the mention of an ‘opt out’ option.<\/p>\n
Abby Lerner Rubin was one of two board members to vote against the repeal.<\/p>\n
“Repealing this, repealing these policies, would go against our best practice when we don’t have another policy to stand up,” said Rubin.<\/p>\n
Shurak said the repeal is necessary to move forward.<\/p>\n
“By not repealing that policy, it does not allow educators or our administrators to do what’s necessary to enact the change the community has been asking for,” she said.<\/p>\n
Shurak said this vote will allow them to discuss and move ahead with a new technology proposal.<\/p>\n
That proposal states technology won’t be used for classroom instruction for students in kindergarten through 2nd grade.<\/p>\n
It also states students won’t be issued an individual device until the 5th grade, and they won’t be required to take it home until 7th grade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Lower Merion School Board voted Monday night to repeal the district’s current technology policy in favor of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":221541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[183,185,184,186,17057,3315,96489],"class_list":["post-221540","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-school-board","tag-students","tag-technology-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221540","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=221540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}