The San Diego Unified School District board approved a resolution Tuesday that kicks off a review of classroom technology use.
This fall, students will no longer have access to YouTube or gaming platforms on their school laptops. Students in transitional kindergarten won’t have Chromebooks in their classrooms.
The district also plans to create grade-level guidelines and review all of its instructional software.
“Technology should be a tool that supports teachers’ work, not a substitute for the relationships, human interaction, professional judgment and critical thinking at the heart of a great education,” board member Shana Hazan said.
The move comes after months of advocacy by local parents with Schools Beyond Screens. The resolution includes some of the requests from the group, like blocking YouTube on district devices. By the end of the year, the district will require applications to be ad-free and allow families to opt out of taking devices home over the summer.
“It is a great first step toward future, measured reform,” spokesperson Erin Payne told the board.
Payne said the group will continue pushing the district to disable generative AI tools on student devices and share how much it spends on educational technology.
“This is a public, taxpayer-funded institution after all,” Payne told the board.
Elizabeth Johnson, another leader of the group, wanted parents to be able to opt out of Chromebook use in class.
“We've got hundreds of parents who are absolutely planning, on day one of the 2026-2027 school year, very respectfully, addressing their teacher and saying, ‘You know, respectfully, we would like our child to opt out of Chromebook use,” she said after the meeting. “This is absolutely happening. So I think it was a missed opportunity to not talk about this in this resolution.”
The group points to changes just approved in Los Angeles. On Tuesday, LA Unified’s board approved a final version of a screen time policy it’s been working on since April.
It prohibits screen use until second grade and sets daily and weekly limits for other grades. Families of students in all grades will have to opt-in to taking devices home.
“It's not often that we get from resolution to policy in such a quick period of time,” LA Unified board member Kelly Gonez said at Tuesday’s meeting. “Certainly, there's a lot of urgency, so I appreciate that we're meeting the moment.”
In San Diego Unified, district leaders plan to set time limits for Chromebooks by winter break.
Part of next year’s work will be to train families about parental control tools, they said. Just 1,400 families have made parent accounts on Blocksi, the district’s online safety software.
“Many families don’t know that they’re able to use it to lock down certain websites, certain platforms, on their students’ computers at home,” Hazan said in an interview. “We have work to do to educate families.”
The district’s technology teams say they’ll give an update to the board in January.
