Board OK’s screen-time task force
Effort to begin in 26-27 year after choosing members
By Deb and Joe Fitzgerald
Harrisonburg School Superintendent Dr. Michael Richards opened a conversation Tuesday with the city School Board about forming a task force to examine student screen time.
He framed it deliberately as a nuanced, community-driven inquiry rather than a reactive policy shift. He traced the debate all the way back to MIT in the 1980s, where enthusiasm for educational technology (via figures like Nicholas Negroponte, who championed providing laptops to students in sub-Saharan Africa) coexisted with early warnings from scholars like Sherry Turkle about technology’s effects on thinking, identity, and mental health. He walked the board through the evolution of one-to-one device programs, the “Bring Your Own Device” era of the early 2010s, and the pandemic-era push that landed a Chromebook in every HCPS student’s hands.
More recently, Richards referenced Congressional testimony from a neurologist showing a strong correlation between device use in schools and declining National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, known as “The Nation’s Report Card) scores. Richards cautioned the board against over-interpreting that correlation and to resist allowing the national conversation to push HCPS toward an extreme response. He pointed to Baltimore City and LA Unified as examples of divisions making sweeping, potentially hasty changes, and made clear he did not want Harrisonburg to follow that pattern.
The board largely agreed that the goal should be reducing screen time thoughtfully, not eliminating technology wholesale. A repeated theme was the need to distinguish between different kinds of screen use. A student completing a Canvas assignment or emailing a teacher is a fundamentally different activity from passively consuming entertainment or scrolling social media, and the task force would need to grapple with that distinction carefully.
Board members raised the social-emotional learning (SEL) impacts of excessive device use, noting that some research points to screen time, especially social media, as a significant driver of declines in SEL outcomes, even as academic metrics look neutral or positive. There was also interesting discussion about unintended consequences of constant connectivity, in that students have lost tolerance for delayed feedback, struggle with uncertainty around grades, and may be missing opportunities to develop focus, patience, and deeper engagement with material. Board Chair Dr. Tim Howley referenced the book The Anxious Generation as capturing some of these concerns well.
Equity considerations were integral to the conversation. Several members pushed back on the idea of simply keeping Chromebooks at school, noting that secondary students regularly use their devices at home to finish assignments, communicate with teachers, and keep up with coursework during extended absences due to illness or other disruptions. Richards acknowledged these concerns while also noting that keeping devices at school could be a relatively straightforward way to reduce after-hours screen time, and that he and the district’s technology director had already been exploring what that might look like logistically at the middle and high school levels.
The group also affirmed that computer science as a discipline is entirely separate from this conversation. The new task force’s focus is on habitual Chromebook use as a replacement for other forms of learning, not on technology education itself.
On task force composition, the group discussed including teachers at all grade levels, parents and guardians, higher education representatives, students, the special education advisory council, the gifted education advisory council, the equity advisory council, and academic researchers working in this space.
A particularly strong idea that emerged was integrating the Student Advisory Councils from both high schools into the task force’s work, possibly having students engage with the task force’s findings throughout the year as an ongoing project, rather than dropping in sporadically. Richards emphasized that these councils are deliberately diverse, including students with IEPs, students from CTE and STEM programs, and students from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds, making them a meaningful source of authentic student feedback.
The Harrisonburg Education Association (HEA) was also identified as a group that should have a seat at the table. The plan is to build out the infrastructure for the group over the summer and formally launch the task force at the start of the next school year, being careful not to pull teachers into intensive work while they are off contract. Richards and the Board closed by reflecting on HCPS’s broader culture of forming task forces around genuinely hard questions such as SRO policy, school start times, supporting marginalized students, and building HHS2. They framed this effort as consistent with that tradition of inclusive, stakeholder-driven problem solving.