PHILADELPHIA – Unhappy parents are suing a Pennsylvania school district for pushing the internet on their children, alleging a new policy that forces children to endure hours of screen time harms their well-being.
A 122-page complaint filed Aug. 26 in Philadelphia federal court cites research on the evils of excessive screen time for youths and says Lower Merion School District is exacerbating those problems. The plaintiffs are members of a community movement called Pencils Over Pixels that advocates for reforms to the district’s technology policies.
They were outraged this summer when the school board repealed an existing policy that allowed parents to decline internet-connected devices for their children and are hoping a federal judge sees the change as unconstitutional.
“A parent’s right to make decisions regarding their children’s care includes the right to make decisions to safeguard their health, safety, and privacy,” the lawsuit says.
“A parent’s right to direct their children’s education and upbringing includes the right to transmit his or her morals, values, beliefs, and culture to their children. In contravention of their proper role as public educators and leaders of the District, Defendants are violating Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights by requiring Plaintiffs’ children to use computers that are persistently connected to the internet and that expose them to all manner of online harms and risks to their health, safety, and privacy.”
The Lower Merion school board voted 7-2 in August to pass its new Technology Use Policy, and of the seven families listed as plaintiffs, three have chosen to send their children to private school. The policy says technology “at its best, can extend what human practice makes possible.”
While it touts the use of technology in education, the parents say otherwise. Children’s attention in class turns to devices that feature social media and AI chatbots who “not only help them cheat on their assignments and diminish what they have already learned, but have also sent grown adults into delusional spirals and have coached other young people to take their own lives.”
Students bully each other online, the lawsuit says, while actual handwriting suffers and headaches from staring at screens increase. The educational applications used by the district are “infantile” and inferior to reading books and completing assignments by hand, it adds.
And the parents are worried about the safety and privacy of their children now forced online for even more hours.
“Despite growing expert and public consensus about the many harms of excessive screen use and time spent online, Defendants insist on exposing students to those harms daily,” the lawsuit says. “And they insist there is nothing parents can do about it. But the Constitution says otherwise.”
The suit makes a due process claim, arguing parents’ right to direct their children’s education and upbringing has been violated. The plaintiffs say they value free play, boredom and creativity but have seen their children’s imaginations stunted since tablets and computers became more commonplace in education during the COVID pandemic.
One seventh-grader has been “compulsively” playing online poker on his school device – even while getting off his school bus and walking down the street. The child “prefers to interact with his school friends through screens rather than in person.”
And when his father sets limits on their personal devices, the child “defies him and uses his school device instead,” claiming “he is doing homework when in fact he is playing games.”
Patrick Huyett of Anapol Weiss and lawyers from the EdTech Law Center represent the plaintiffs.
