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Lily Altavena for Chalkbeat

Chromebooks are scattered all around the classrooms of Floyd M. Jewett Elementary School in Mesick, Michigan.

Towers of them are teetering atop bookshelves. They’re piled up in corners of classrooms. They’ve even cropped up in one classroom’s dish rack.

But there’s one place you won’t find them: in students’ hands.

Last month, Mesick Consolidated Schools banned digital devices in its elementary school of about 250 students. The decision wasn’t an agonizing one. The ban came at astonishing speed, almost overnight, after a conversation between Mesick Superintendent Jack Ledford and Jewett Principal Elizabeth Kastl.

Ledford recalled asking Kastl how much teachers read to students in grades K-5. And he recalled her reply: “That has almost vanished.” Kastl’s response helped seal the deal.

Teachers had to have students off devices by the end of the week. School printers went into overdrive. Then the district went cold turkey, Chalkbeat reports.

Mesick’s midyear ban underscores a growing backlash against screen time in school, a battle that parents and educators are taking up nationwide. Fears about digital devices’ impact on learning have fused with ongoing concerns about a multiyear decline in national test scores that predates the pandemic. A stream of government hearings, op-eds, and social media posts has only magnified the sense of urgency.

Ledford and Kastl think the need for drastic action is warranted. About 18% of Jewett’s third graders scored proficient or higher on the state reading test last spring — half the state average and half what it was a decade ago.

In Mesick, a rural town known for its annual mushroom festival, 66% of students are economically disadvantaged. The district has done all the “normal things” to improve persistently low reading scores, Ledford said, like switching to an evidence-based curriculum. But he now views screens as an adversary to learning.

“When we’re competing with screens, we’re going to lose,” he said.

But blanket bans at school won’t affect kids’ screen time at home. And research about how screens affect students is inconclusive, although it does suggest that teachers should exercise caution. Not everyone is convinced that a complete prohibition on screens is the best way to help struggling learners.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California’s education school, said he understands the appeal of an all-or-nothing approach, but it avoids the reality that some technology does have a place in the classroom.

“It’s like taking a hammer when you need a scalpel,” he said. “A lot of the use of technology in schools is not appropriate. But rather than sitting down and thinking about, ‘What are appropriate uses of technology in classrooms serving young children,’ this approach would just obliterate all uses.”

Lawmakers in at least 16 states have proposed bills that would limit education technology in public schools, following a spate of state-approved cellphone bans for schools.

Ledford said he’s been influenced by writers like Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychologist who is a prominent supporter of school cellphone restrictions and has more recently criticized the proliferation of tech in education. At the same time, a mid-March visit to Mesick’s classrooms shows the ed-tech backlash can be somewhat divorced from the reality of a school day.

For some at Jewett, the school day doesn’t feel that different. A few teachers said they hadn’t used screens very much. For others, the routine has changed substantially — and for the better, they believe, with students more engaged and learning less “gamified.”

When asked about her school’s screen ban, a girl wearing a “Lilo & Stitch” shirt in an intervention class for struggling readers just growls. But her intervention instructor, Julie Kearns, said the students are simply adjusting.

The student “definitely seems like she enjoys” reading a book more than wearing headphones and peering at a screen, Kearns said.

As Kearns watched, the girl bounced in her chair while reading a passage about soccer.

Why a school banished screens and bought books

In classrooms, a screen ban for students doesn’t mean all screens are gone.

One Friday in March, third-grade teacher Hanna Brechenser presented images on the Smartboard — the modern-day version of a projector — of Indigenous communities to help foster a classroom conversation. Teachers also still have desktop computers.

This is Brechenser’s fifth year teaching and her second in Mesick. She said she had already tried to limit screentime in the classroom before the ban. Her class mostly used their Chromebooks a few times a week for a math fluency exercise and digital library access.

Both Kastl and Ledford believe teachers may not have been aware of just how much of a crutch screens were in some classes.

Mesick went 1:1 with students and devices around 2015, Ledford said, when schools were under pressure by tech evangelists and politicians to add more technology so students would be prepared for jobs in the digital world. That was the argument at the time, anyway.

“I had started in my walkthroughs just noting, what are the students doing?” Kastl said. “More often than not, I was coming back with a list of students on devices. So the perception of how your day actually looks versus what we were seeing on the data piece are probably disjointed.”

Mesick’s new policy has been helpful for Brechenser because she doesn’t have to police students so much on their devices.

Brechenser’s students have physical books from the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, “Twilight,” and “The Baby-sitter’s Club” stacked on their desks. That’s the other side of Mesick’s new screen ban: The district has set aside $30,000 for physical books to bulk up classroom libraries, along with beanbag chairs so students will have special spaces to read.

Students adjusted quickly, Brechenser said. “At first, they were kind of shocked, but we just have a lot more silent reading time.”

Still, it’s hard to miss signs of the amount of time students spend on screens outside of school: A “K-Pop Demon Hunters” water bottle. A Sonic the Hedgehog T-shirt. The image of a snake Brechenser put on the Smartboard prompted one student, Alaric, to say it reminded him of one in a “Harry Potter” movie he watched before school.

Alaric, who’s 9, said he doesn’t really miss his Chromebook, though he’d been reading something on the online library he can no longer access thanks to the screen ban.

He gets plenty of screen time at home playing Xbox, he said. He hasn’t thought about cutting down on that.

“Because I love Fortnite,” he giggled.

In reading instruction, students get a digital detox

Where Mesick’s screen-free initiative feels most significant is in the 30-minute small group sessions for Jewett’s struggling readers.

Mesick uses Read Naturally, an intervention program designed to build fluency. Before the screen ban, students would read a short passage aloud from a computer, then listen through bulky headphones as the software read the passage back to them. Students would then read the passage to themselves three times before reading it aloud again. Paraprofessionals would go from student to student to assist.

Now, Sharon Brown and other literacy aides sit with their students and work through printed reading passages together. Brown can more easily point out when students stop tracking words with their fingers. She can help sound out words. Though she closely helped students on the computers, she finds herself more thrilled to engage this way, to see progress up close. This is why she is in education.

“It’s our passion to sit and watch these kids go from struggling readers to eventually testing out … and not having to come back and see us,” she said.

With one second grader, she has an engaging conversation about the reading’s topic, mammals, before they begin. He asks if a shark is a mammal and if it evolved from dinosaurs.

Brown can see improvements, particularly with some of her first graders. Students are reading more words per minute, based on data they track every session.

“They are so engaged,” she said. “It’s been amazing to us that we’re going, ‘Wow, this has actually been so fun.’”

The way students use technology is an important consideration when thinking about limiting or banning screens, said Dr. Joanna Parga-Belinkie, a pediatrician and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Educators and parents should focus on using technology in ways that are interactive and in group settings, instead of having students looking at screens on their own.

“When you are focusing on screens and technology and the use of them you might be not focusing on human relationships,” she said.

Samantha Daniels, the mother of three children in the district, said that last school year, some of the software the district used would offer students games if they read enough.

She’d watch her son, a first grader, try to rush through the reading to get to the game. He struggled a lot with reading, becoming easily frustrated like many young readers.

“It would be about getting to that, versus us enjoying what we’re reading and what we’re learning,” she said.

But now, he’s starting to pick up books on his own.

There are some difficult practical adjustments to a midyear change as big as this one. A lot of classroom resources are based online or have some kind of online component. Kastl asked teachers to stop using those components.

Ultimately, every hour of screen time represented “an hour that we’ve lost direct teacher instruction where they’re actually getting that responsive feedback from a human,” Kastl said.

“That’s when you move the needle.”

Will eliminating screens help young readers?

Ledford doesn’t think he’s taking a gamble by eliminating screens at the elementary school, even though students take state assessments on computers. He thinks it’s much easier to teach students technology skills than social skills.

In fact, he already has plans to scale back technology use by older students, too.

Ledford moved rapidly to ban screens, but he expects improvements in reading scores to happen more gradually. Still, he’s laser-focused on the connection between screens and literacy. To him, education should unlock the ability to read for students, because it affects everything else the district is trying to do for kids.

“We’re failing in literacy,” Ledford said. “If we fail in literacy, how can we effectively teach science or social studies or any of the subjects?”

Getting rid of screens will not solve all of Mesick’s problems, like a leaky roof or clapped-out HVAC system. Kastl has also observed a deeper potential issue: a drop-off in parent involvement after schools closed during the pandemic.

In many cases, Kastl said, “Parents don’t know what actually happens inside their kids’ school building.”

But parents know about the screen ban, and they’re excited about it. They’ve said they’ve noticed their children take more interest in reading.

Kids are also socializing more during free periods, a bright spot for the principal’s son, Sam Kastl.

Sam, 11, used to spend indoor recess — a regular occurrence in northern Michigan’s severe winters — playing games on his Chromebook. He thought the screen ban was “going to be annoying.” Classmates who used to ask him if his mom would declare a snow day started asking him to convince her to bring back devices.

But those requests went away pretty quickly. Students now play board games together instead of games on their Chromebooks alone — just like how reading intervention students now study in a group instead of solo. Another student taught Sam how to draw. Everyone’s adjusted pretty well, from his vantage point.

On the day Chalkbeat visited their school, Sam and his fifth-grade classmates built a fort out of blankets during class time. Then they climbed inside to read with flashlights.

This story was produced by Chalkbeat and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.