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WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

This is On Point. I'm Magna Chakrabardi. In just the past few years, a remarkable revolution has happened in American public schools.

More than 30 states have passed laws either curtailing or fully prohibiting cell phone use in schools. Those are these so-called bell-to-bell rules.

Now, the bans are driven by increasing concerns over kids' mental health, their

ability to focus, and reduced learning. Well, now that backlash is spilling over to all

screens in classrooms, not just phones. It's affecting his social and emotional well-being, I feel

like, and it's affected his habits, his attention span.

He used to love reading and, you know, really spent a lot of time outside.

And I have seen a dramatic, like, cliff he has fallen off of in terms of prioritizing

screens, feeling glued to his laptop. And it's not

even like doing schoolwork. There's like games on the school laptop. That's on point listener Dana,

who has a middle schooler in Lincoln, Nebraska. Here's Natalie. She's a mom of four in Oregon.

We've made little progress in getting the school district to take these concerns seriously. When the school district installed a student facing AI app onto students' iPads and grades as young as third grade, which is eight-year-olds, parents organized to push back. A coalition of concerned parents put together a parent and community sign-on letter to the

school board demanding that the district removed the generative AI app. Other concerns parents

brought up was YouTube videos being increasingly used in classrooms for behavior management,

even in PE, and a new requirement that all elementary age kids bring an iPad to the library for browsing and checking out books.

Well, a teacher in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, also reached out to us and says that the mandatory use of laptops in the classroom is keeping kids from learning even the most basic skills.

Unless I walk around the classroom the whole time, I won't know exactly what they're doing on their computers.

And then when it comes to doing manual work, they don't want to do it.

And sometimes they don't know how to feel a paper out.

Sometimes if it's notebook paper, they don't know which side of the paper to write on.

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