The message from my son’s fifth-grade teacher arrived in February. My 11-year-old wasn’t listening in class. Instead, he was browsing the internet on his Durham Public Schools (DPS)–issued Chromebook, often while his teacher lectured at the front of the room.

“Mom, everyone’s doing it!” he said. I must’ve looked skeptical, because he elaborated. 

“Cooper’s watching Barcelona play Real Madrid. Simon is watching a video of cats playing soccer. Isaac is looking at Useless Websites. Henry’s playing Minecraft. Jayla is watching YouTube Shorts.” In the end, he estimated roughly four-fifths of his classmates at this Durham neighborhood elementary school were tabbing over to websites rather than doing a computer-based math assignment.

That’s when I started paying attention. When my son and his peers finished their classwork, I learned, instead of being asked to talk quietly or read, they were frequently allowed to play educational computer games for the rest of the period—or to scroll YouTube or other favorite, if officially off-limits, sites. If a substitute was covering for an absent teacher, the kids might spend the whole class entertaining themselves on the internet—and reportedly so might the sub. Even during class, the kids were finding ways to get more online time; when I listened closely to my son and his buddies, I heard them sharing strategies for better evading their teachers. 

This, it seems, is public school in the post-COVID era. In 2020, when the schools rapidly shuttered, every student got a Chromebook—what’s known as 1:1 technology. That was a godsend, allowing education to continue. But in the two years since COVID receded, laptops remain and are regularly employed. And it’s not apparent whether DPS administrators have a plan or set of policies governing how they’re used.  

To be clear, I’m not talking about educational software, a highly undervetted field of pedagogy that’s now ubiquitous throughout DPS. Nor is this about learning management systems like Canvas, where students access course materials and submit assignments. And I’m absolutely not blaming teachers, whom I’ve found to be almost universally devoted to students’ growth, even under increasingly dismal conditions; they can’t be expected to monitor 20-plus kids’ screens. 

This is specifically about the ease with which students can visit sites online, despite system-wide filters, because of a half-baked 1:1 policy. Sure, students can’t get to pornography (I think), or to most social media sites, but by and large the internet—with its unlimited number of entertaining, mindless, intriguing, frictionlessly scrollable web pages—is right there, just as hard for kids to resist as us adults and maybe more. Whether they’re supposed to be doing classwork or they’ve brought the computer home, the temptation to waste time online is always there. 

 I’m not the only one taken aback. For this piece, I solicited feedback through neighborhood listservs and local discussion groups on Reddit and Facebook. I heard from dozens of parents about their dissatisfaction with the way DPS handles student technology. Many, like me, were caught off guard.

“My daughter was struggling in sixth grade at Githens [Middle School], so I looked at her search history on her Chromebook and came to discover she was spending ALL DAY on YouTube at school,” wrote one father on Facebook. (Virtually all the parents I heard from asked to be quoted anonymously in order to protect their children’s privacy; kids’ names have been changed.)

A mother whose son attends Rogers-Herr Middle School wrote, “I could go on for days about what my middle schooler has to say about friends gaming on computers or how some kids go through Pinterest to get on social media [sites] like Instagram.”

“We have two rising first graders and we were shocked about the amount of screen time in our kindergartners’ class this year,” wrote a father in response to my listserv message. “The biggest concern we had was the lack of communication and transparency. We didn’t even know that our kids had access to screens until they started talking about what they were doing in class, and we never got a clear answer about how much time they spent on [them].”

 Parents weren’t necessarily worried about the online content their kids were looking at—though, time being the zero-sum thing that it is, an hour spent on a video game in class is an hour not absorbing academic material. The bigger concerns were about the mental and emotional habits internet use fosters: Shorter attention spans. Weaker emotional regulation. Addictive behavior. 

“The computers, and the gaming—it’s so powerful. It’s not a fair fight for the kid,” said a mother whose son attends Riverside High School. “There’s so much money and research that’s gone into hijacking everyone’s brain and eyeballs. It’s not just a discipline issue. The kids need help to limit it, even more so because of their developing brains.”

Parents whose kids have ADHD were particularly upset. Homework these days is usually assigned on a computer, but their kids can’t be left alone to do it because they invariably get distracted and fall into an internet rabbit hole. Several parents tried to get help from DPS but said the effort became Kafkaesque and was never fully successful.

 “School administrators have said they’d love to be more restrictive, but the lead isn’t coming from the district,” said a mother whose son, a 10th grader at Riverside, has severe ADHD. “They can’t take the lead unless it’s a district policy.”

DPS’s focus on technology has grown over several years, following emphasis at the state level. The district’s 2018–23 Strategic Plan stated that all teachers, leaders, and staff would use technology as a tool for “accelerating and personalizing student learning.” One-to-one technology had been part of that strategy; COVID just hastened it. By 2023, the district had met that goal. 

But DPS’s most recent strategic plan barely mentions technology, and it’s not clear what the current policies are guiding teachers’ use of Chromebooks, or even who sets those policies. In response to my questions, DPS administrators sent a statement. 

“Our Board has honored teacher autonomy, working under the direction of school leadership, in determining the precise amount of time any one student might be engaging with curriculum-aligned activities on a computer on any given day,” they wrote. 

That sounds to me like there is no overarching policy.

Durham is far from alone. A quick search of “computers” on Reddit’s Teachers page, for example, illustrates how pervasive the problem is around the country. Some school systems use software like GoGuardian, which can show teachers what sites their students are visiting or lay out a program in which only a few web pages are allowed. Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools uses GoGuardian and also provides each school with an “instructional technology facilitator” who helps guide the use of Chromebooks.  

DPS hopes to get funding from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction for computer monitoring software this year. That would be a big step, though some teachers complain it turns them into computer cops. And it doesn’t work when students take their devices home. 

It would be better to end the 1:1 policy, or at least implement a more surgical approach to computer use. That’s how private schools like Durham Academy (DA) approach student technology, according to DA parents I spoke to. But private schools, of course, are immune to the endless budget struggles that beset public schools.

This past year was tough for DPS. COVID-related learning loss continues to require major attention, and the salary snafu and ensuing public battle that began in January pretty much eclipsed everything. That makes this school year a great time to begin to address students’ Chromebook-abetted internet access, something one parent described as “a social and educational experiment.”’

I’m not excited about being part of this experiment. My son just started sixth grade, which means he’ll bring his computer home every night. I dread the battles. Meanwhile, my four-year-old is heading to kindergarten next year. Buried in DPS’s online registration form is an opt-out page, allowing parents to say no to screens at school for their child. When the time comes, I might just give it a try.

Amanda Abrams is a freelance writer in Durham and a DPS parent. 

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