By Katie Anastas / KPBS / May 28, 2026
On an April morning in downtown San Diego, Elizabeth Johnson and a half-dozen other parents with children in the San Diego Unified School District gathered to protest.
Johnson stuck letters onto a piece of cardstock to spell “teachers over tech.” Other signs read “less screens, more humans” and “ed tech is the biggest grift in education.”
The group is part of the local chapter of Schools Beyond Screens.
They stood in front of the Manchester Grand Hyatt outside of a sold-out conference, where school district leaders, college presidents, tech executives and startup founders were speaking about the latest in artificial intelligence and educational technology.
Johnson and a growing number of other parents are asking the district to reevaluate the role technology plays in its classrooms. They’re concerned about kids’ learning, attention spans, eyesight, privacy and social skills.
A resolution on the issue could go before the school board as soon as next month.
Parents push back
Johnson started worrying about screens even before she became a parent. In 2010, she was studying to become a psychologist and learned about the drawbacks. There were already studies linking high mobile phone use to depression, stress and sleep deprivation.
“I thought that if I ever had kids of my own, I would do everything I could to give them a screen-free childhood,” she said.
When her daughter started kindergarten at Ocean Beach Elementary, she began using a Chromebook at school.
“It was ubiquitous,” Johnson said. “It kind of made me sit up in a different way. I didn’t realize just how much they were going to be on it.”
She remembers the first time she heard her daughter say “smash to subscribe,” something YouTube vloggers tell viewers to do to the subscription button on their profile.
“It really gave me pause, because we are so intentional about the things our kids consume, from the food they eat to the books they read,” she said. “If we watch a documentary or something, we’re pretty particular. The kids are five years old once. I don’t want them to see things they can’t unsee.”
In the four years since her daughter started kindergarten, Johnson said Chromebook use has varied depending on the teacher.
“I think there are some teachers that really believe in the efficacy of digital learning platforms. They believe that this is the gold standard, and they feel grateful to have access to these programs,” she said.
One of her daughter’s teachers didn’t use Chromebooks in class or send them home, she said. They stayed in a bin in the classroom.
During a May 21 school board meeting, a parent told the board that his kids and their classmates have accessed adult content on their Chromebooks while at school, first in fourth grade and now in sixth grade.
“Blocksi is not cutting it,” he told the board, referring to the program that allows teachers to monitor students’ screen use and parents to block certain websites.
In San Diego Unified, kindergarteners and first graders have Chromebooks in their classrooms. In second grade, the district gives students Chromebooks to use at home and at school. They’re replaced when students reach sixth grade and ninth grade.
This made sense in years past, Johnson said. But not anymore.
“There was a point where giving everyone a laptop was the great equalizer. ‘Hey, not just the rich kids have tech at home. Now, this is for people who have been systematically disenfranchised or people who don’t have as much access and as many resources,’” she said.
Now, she said, she’s privileged to know about the drawbacks of screen-based learning and the research that backs it up.
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