Issue of the Day: Digital Health and AIAs someone who comes from the tech sector, these topics are especially important to me and I think I have a helpful perspective to contribute here. I have a lot of thoughts but I’ll just hit some highlights here. I’ll break it up into three buckets: Personal devices, NPS devices, and AI Personal Devices: We don’t allow elementary or middle school students to use personal phones at school. At the elementary school level, teachers enforce the rule around the buildings. In middle school, each student is given a Yondr pouch - it’s a little bag that they lock their devices in for the day, then unlock when they leave the building at the end of the day. In high school, students carry devices with them but store them at the front of the room during classes (in most classrooms). Students can use their devices between periods, at lunch and during open periods. My friend, fellow Zervas parent and supporter Dr. Jhilam Biswas is President of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society and director of the psychiatry, law, and society program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She has been a strong advocate for a bell-to-bell ban in schools and I’ve found her compelling. In a Boston Globe Opinion piece, she argued, “Creating smartphone-free school environments is not about punishment or control; it’s about providing a supportive space where students can focus, connect, and recharge. Even if students continue to use smartphones at home, time away from devices during the school day offers young minds the rare room to breathe — space for deeper thinking, social connection, and a daily digital detox in a world where digital input rarely takes a pause.” We face logistical challenges at our open high school campuses, but I’m convinced the benefits are worth the costs and we need to figure out how to get our high schoolers off their phones during the school day. NPS Devices: NPS students do spend time on screens during the day. In elementary school they use iPads and Chromebooks that stay in the buildings; starting in middle school they are issued Chromebooks that they use in school and at home. I am not an absolutist here - I do think these devices serve some useful purposes. For one, they offer the opportunity for differentiated learning. Students use apps that monitor their learning and progress at paces that are appropriate for them. This is good. Students also learn to become digitally literate - how to type, how to email, how to create files and navigate the internet (behind a very strict firewall that disables inappropriate content). In the modern world, these are worthwhile skills to build. But moderation is important. We should have clear district-wide limits on how much time per day and per week a given grade can spend on screens. I would defer to experts on how much is too much, but this screen time should be a relatively small portion of a student’s week. AI: We need to be thoughtful about this new technology. It provides some really interesting opportunities and also some really scary risks. But it is here and I am convinced it is going to be a significant part of our lives in the future. My view is that we need to teach kids to use it as a lever to help them think better and learn more, not a crutch that replaces thinking. I think AI can help with personalized learning - identifying knowledge gaps and presenting our educators with personalized analysis they can use to help teach kids. It can also save teachers time by doing things like slide-building and correcting assignments, so teachers can focus more time on the thoughtful work of connecting with their students. I’m also of the belief that AI will reshape jobs - I think analogies to the impact of the PC on the workforce are relevant - so we need to think about how we’re preparing our graduates to enter a world where they will be expected to engage effectively with AI. But there are also risks. If we expect our educators to use AI successfully, we need to partner with them to select and implement the right tools - we need to make sure we have strong buy-in from the people we’re asking to use the technology. We also have to make sure we have guardrails in place so students don’t use AI to replace critical thinking. We need to protect our students’ privacy by ensuring data is anonymized or sandboxed. We need to avoid technology capture - becoming overly dependent on the companies providing these tools. And we need to be wary of any ideological bias or errors that push viewpoints or try to teach kids what to think instead of how to think. I do think we can mitigate these risks, but only if we’re attuned to them and strategizing from the outset. Part of me longs for the old days before any of this technology existed. But we can’t turn back the clock. What we can do is thoughtfully engage with the opportunities and challenges presented by technology.
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