The discussion follows a recommendation by The Blue Ribbon Task Force, which is a state committee wants Kansas schools to limit screen time for students.
"We came up with four areas we thought were really low-hanging fruit we could go after fairly quickly," IT director Mike Ribble said.
The board didn't vote on the matter but discussed possible plans.
The district already has policies limiting student screen time and making their technology use safer. One step toward this is the use of filtering services and not allowing the younger elementary school students to take iPads home.
"We have in the past, grades K through three, we did not allow any devices to go home," Ribble said. "They've always stayed in the classroom. Four, five, after COVID, we decided to go ahead and allow devices to go home, fourth all the way through 12th."
Going forward, the task force recommended pulling back the take-home option for fourth and fifth grades. This will mean no take-home fee for the iPads for kindergarten through fifth grade.
"A little less revenue, but overall I think it makes sense," Ribble said.
Ribble said one of the main parental concerns was access to the devices at home. One consideration, so students don't stay up playing on the school-issued devices, is to lock them at a certain time. That time has yet to be determined.
"Either 10:30 p.m. until 6 a.m., they will become basically a big clock," Ribble said. "They're not going to get to their device and watch Youtube videos at 2 a.m. Same thing with high school. We would then extend it, probably until 12:30 a.m. to that 6 a.m. sort of time frame."
The devices also have Internet filtering services. The district's current service is ContentKeeper. The IT department will make changes to the filter, to block the entertainment category in its source code.
"The big offender seems to be Youtube," Ribble said. "With the restricted mode, we've also checked the box of Entertainment to block because everything that's coded into Youtube has a name code that it goes with."
Ribble said the downside to this is that good educational videos on Youtube also are filtered out.
"There are good things that are in entertainment," Ribble said. "We did find out in our test, because we are testing this at the middle schools right now, and we found in our STEM classrooms four videos that were in entertainment. We did unblock them, and they are available to those STEM classes."
The last suggested practice is communication with parents. The district started a device check-in system in spring 2024. When the students check in their devices, the school notifies the parents with an email to confirm.
"We're thinking about not just that but also on the check-out process," Ribble said, "Telling them we check these things but also providing links and providing resources like the iPad handbook."
Andrea Tiede, the director of teaching and learning, said they are gathering community feedback with a survey, as a chance for public feedback. Board members expressed willingness to adopt the recommendations but said the issue of technology is complex. No decisions were made at this meeting.
"This whole topic, this whole issue, the answer that's right for kindergarteners, is that the right answer for 12th graders?" board member Karla Hagemeister said. "With so many of our issues and so many of the things that we talk about, if they were easy they'd be done."
The opinions from the community are expected to vary based on the ages of the children in each household.
"It's also a snapshot in a moment of time," Hagemeister said. "Our relationship with technology has changed over the years and, it will continue to change."
©2024 The Manhattan Mercury, Kan. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
