What They Were Not Asking For

On Monday, June 9, the Virginia Beach School Board took up a Chromebook policy. The board sat through nearly two hours of public comment and discussion. The vote was 7-4. The version that passed was a substitute, written by board member Matt Cummings, that prohibited Chromebooks in pre-K and kindergarten classrooms, capped first grade at ten shared devices per room, kept one-to-one access in second grade but without take-home privileges, and preserved take-home one-to-one access for grades three through five.¹ The original proposal, from Vice Chair Carolyn Weems, would have barred classroom access through first grade.¹

The vote came at the tail end of a season of parent organizing in Virginia. The week before, on Tuesday, June 2, the Chesterfield County School Board had heard from parents speaking on a petition that, by mid-June, had collected more than 2,500 signatures across Chesterfield, Henrico, and Richmond.² The petition was eight requests long. The requests included screen-time limits, blocking non-educational platforms on school-issued devices, more paper-based learning, and the removal of devices from the youngest classrooms.³

The simplest version of the headline is that parents in Virginia asked for less technology. That headline is slightly wrong. Amber Rhodes, the Chesterfield parent and former teacher who organized the petitions, was careful with her sentence. She said it on the record more than once. We are not trying to take technology away. We're trying to just be more intentional about the way that we use technology.²

The Word Worth Pausing On

Intentional is a small word. It does most of the work that the louder word, ban, fails at. A ban is a sentence. Intentional is a question. The question is the harder one, because the answer is different for a kindergartner and for an eighth grader, different for an art class and for a research paper, different at nine in the morning and at one in the afternoon when nine-year-olds need their hands moving.

The Virginia Beach board's substitute motion was, in its own way, an attempt at that harder question. Not "no devices" but "no devices for the children who cannot yet write their own name." Not "one-to-one everywhere" but "one-to-one for second grade, but the laptop stays at school." Not a binary. A set of small, age-specific decisions about which kind of work belongs on which kind of surface.

That is what a parent organizer asking for intention sounds like, translated into policy. It is also what most schools have not yet figured out how to do at the level of the lesson itself. The substitute motion governs the device. The school day governs the practice. The practice is where the actual decision lives.

What the Petition Was Not

It is worth noticing what the parents in Chesterfield did not ask for. They did not ask their districts to fire the teachers who had been using Chromebooks. They did not ask the boards to remove devices from middle school. They did not ask for a moratorium on AI. They asked for the blocking of non-educational platforms. They asked for more paper. They asked, in essence, for the school to be the entity that chose what was on the desk.

The careful thing in that request is the assumption underneath it. The parents believe the school can choose. They are asking it to do so. That is a more hopeful position than the louder edge of the screen-time debate suggests. It is also more demanding. It implies a school that knows enough about what is happening inside its classrooms to make the choice well.

What Intention Requires

Most schools do not, today, have a way to see whether the practice in the room is intentional. They can count the devices on the desks. They cannot easily count the minutes a child spent typing without thinking, or the moment she set the keyboard aside and went back to her notebook because the keyboard was not helping her. The artifact at the end of the period is a finished document. The story of how it was made is not on it.

That is the harder half of what intention would require, if a school decided to take Amber Rhodes' sentence seriously. Not a rule about which device is in which classroom. A record of what the device, when present, was actually used for, and what the child put down, in pencil or in pause or in conversation, when the device was not the right tool. The substitute motion can govern the first half. The second half has to be built.

A Future That Holds the Practice

The schools that come out of the next few years steadier are the ones that will treat the choice as a real one. Not a tribe, pro-tech or anti-tech, but a practice. Which tool, for which child, for which moment. The parents organizing in Chesterfield and Henrico and Richmond are doing the slow civic version of that question. The Virginia Beach board, in passing a substitute and not a maximalist motion, is doing the policy version. The teachers in those classrooms, working without quite the tools to see what is happening in front of them, are doing the practice version.

This is the piece we keep returning to in our own work. A school cannot be intentional about a practice it cannot see. The pencil mark, the pause, the moment a student closes the laptop because she would rather think on paper for a minute, are not the kind of thing that lands in a learning management system. They are the kind of thing that, if a school cared to keep them, would change what its policies can actually mean. The Virginia Beach policy decides the device. What still has to be decided is the look.

The parents in Chesterfield used the right word. The vote in Virginia Beach was, in its quiet way, a first attempt at it. The harder work, the work that turns intention from a vote into a daily classroom practice, has not yet been done.

If your district were intentional about technology, what would a visitor be able to see in one of your classrooms that they cannot see now?