The plaintiffs, backed by the EdTech Law Center,<\/a> an Austin, Texas-based legal group that has sued tech giants such as Google and education platforms such as PowerSchool and Renaissance Learning, are raising a broad 14th Amendment claim of parental rights to oversee the upbringing and education of their children.<\/p>\n \u201cThe right of parents to make decisions regarding the care, custody and control of their children and to direct their education and upbringing is one of the oldest substantive due process rights that is recognized under the Constitution,\u201d Andrew Liddell, a lawyer with the EdTech Law Center, said in an interview.<\/p>\n Substantive due process refers to unenumerated rights that have been recognized by the courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the 14th Amendment to guarantee a substantive due process right of parents to direct the upbringing, education, and religious training of their children in cases going back to the 1920s.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been recognized for over a century,\u201d Liddell said. \u201cThe world has changed significantly, obviously, in the last century. But the fundamental principle remains, which is that what your children are exposed to at school and what they\u2019re required to do at school\u2014there are limits to what that can do to undermine your life at home.\u201d<\/p>\n Amy Buckman, a spokeswoman for the Lower Merion district, said in a statement that the district was \u201caware of a lawsuit filed by some parents, not all of whom have students enrolled in LMSD schools, alleging the school board\u2019s decision to repeal a school board policy represents a violation of their civil rights. The district denies the allegations and will respond further through the judicial process.\u201d<\/p>\n Computers and other ed tech portrayed as \u2018thieves of precious time\u2019<\/p>\n Some of those parents whose children are not enrolled in the district had sent them to Lower Merion schools but removed them after recent clashes over the former opt-out policy.<\/p>\n James Hausman, the parent of a current 7th grader, removed his son from the district after last school year and enrolled him in private school, the suit says.<\/p>\n Hausman does not permit his child to have a smartphone or use social media or YouTube. But having a school-issued computer led his son to use those services excessively for entertainment and engage in other non-educational uses, such as online poker and horror games, the suit says. His son became agitated and aggressive when Hausman tried to cut off his access to the school computer at the end of the day, the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n Other parents in the suit do have children who continue to attend Lower Merion schools.<\/p>\n Yair Lev, a professor of cardiology and the lead plaintiff in the case, is the parent of a 1st grader and 3rd grader in the district. His younger child started kindergarten last year using a district-issued iPad for a few weeks, but Lev opted the child out of the technology under the district\u2019s former policy.<\/p>\n \u201cTo me, computers, smartphones, tablets, and unnecessary digital technology are thieves of precious time,\u201d Lev said in a court declaration in August. \u201cBeyond my well-founded concerns about health, safety, privacy, and education, these devices rob children of time playing, imagining, reading, talking, being outside, interacting with other people, and simply experiencing the real world.\u201d<\/p>\n After Lev\u2019s son was given alternative assignments under the opt-out policy, he told his parents he felt lucky not to have to use the tech device.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter several months of not having an iPad while his classmates did, [the son] told my wife and me that the time that he was not on the iPad was his favorite part of the day because he was given complicated math problems to do by hand,\u201d Lev said in the declaration.<\/p>\n The son \u201cobserved that his classmates are glued to their individual iPads, that they do not respond to anything around them while they\u2019re using them, and that they tend to become frustrated or upset when the iPad is taken away from them,\u201d Lev added.<\/p>\n By the 2025-26 school year, concern over school technology led some parents in Lower Merion to form a group called Pencils Over Pixels<\/a>, which made recommendations such as banning student cellphones and other devices during the school day and requiring parental opt-in to use school tech.<\/p>\n The suit alleges that as the grassroots group gained momentum, Lower Merion Superintendent Frank Ranelli decided by this past March or April to begin work on repealing the opt-out policy, and that he began denying opt-outs even when the policy was still in place.<\/p>\n The suit cites a comment Ranelli made at an April school board policy committee meeting. \u201cIs there an opportunity for my kids to opt out?\u201d the superintendent said at the session. \u201cWe do not have an opportunity for you to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n At a June meeting where the school board repealed the opt-out policy, one board member said the former policy was never meant to give families a broad option to refuse to use school-issued technology devices. And in August, the board adopted a new policy that some proponents asserted gave the anti-tech parents much of what they wanted, such as new language that all use of school devices be \u201csupervised.\u201d<\/p>\n The suit says the district has never been able to provide adequate supervision of tech devices and the new policy seeks to shift the burden to parents.<\/p>\n Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions defer to parental rights<\/p>\n In raising their parental rights claims, the plaintiffs stress they are challenging a school methodology and not what is taught.<\/p>\n \u201cThis case is not about curriculum,\u201d the suit says. \u201cThe plaintiffs do not seek to usurp the district\u2019s role in adopting and promulgating curriculum, nor do they seek to exercise veto power over the academic content taught to their children. Rather, Plaintiffs seek only to safeguard their children\u2019s health, safety, and privacy, help them learn and develop skills, and ensure that what their children do all day at school does not undermine their family values.\u201d<\/p>\n The curriculum point may be driven by the fact that federal courts have generally been inhospitable to parental challenges to public school teaching materials, at least to the degree such suits sought to remove books or courses such as sex education.<\/p>\n But the U.S. Supreme Court recently has been more receptive to arguments that certain school policies and classroom materials violate parents\u2019 rights. Republican politicians have also accelerated a push for parents\u2019 rights in recent years<\/a>. The U.S. House of Representatives, for example, passed the Parental Bill of Rights Act in 2023, spelling out<\/a> that parents have the right to a list of contents in school library collections and to inspect curriculum materials. (The bill never advanced to the U.S. Senate.) Several Republican candidates for governor this year are including similar pledges in their campaign platforms. <\/p>\n The Supreme Court addressed parental rights last year in Mahmoud v. Taylor<\/a>, when it ruled parents have a First Amendment religious free exercise right to have their children excused from the use of LGBTQ+-themed storybooks in schools.<\/p>\n Writing in dissent in that case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that \u201crequiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent\u2019s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools.\u201d<\/p>\n In March, in a decision on its emergency docket, the court reinstated a federal district court decision that said California parents have federal constitutional rights<\/a> to be informed when their children socially transition or express gender nonconformity at school.<\/p>\n![\"Attendees](\"https:\/\/epe.brightspotcdn.com\/dims4\/default\/9b23c56\/2147483647\/strip\/true\/crop\/7272x4848+0+0\/resize\/335x223!\/quality\/90\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fepe-brightspot.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com%2F75%2F80%2Fcdf05e6f4e6a88565a9bcac9a8f1%2Feducation-technology-pushback-26132496489483.jpg\")
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