How do I get my kid's school to rethink its technology?

You are not the radical here

Start with the facts: as of mid-2026, at least 39 states and the District of Columbia require school districts to ban or restrict student phone use, and most of that legislation passed inside two years. Legislatures do not move that fast for fringe positions.

So walk in calibrated. A parent asking a school to think harder about its technology in 2026 is not the eccentric at the gate. You are asking your school to catch up with the direction most of the country has already picked, and you are allowed to say so.

Find out who holds the controls

The first practical step is finding out who decided, because it is rarely who you think, and complaints need to be aimed at the right person.

The teacher standing in front of your child usually decided nothing. When Google turned on its AI assistant for students of all ages, it went on by default, controlled only by whoever administers the school’s account, with no teacher-level switch at all. The same pattern holds for most of what arrives on a school device, whether that’s a tablet that turns up with news notifications enabled, a browser with no restrictions, or an AI tool nobody mentioned. Somebody chose each of those, and somebody can unchoose them.

At a private school, the head of school can change policy over a weekend, and parents are the paying customers whose opinion the board exists to hear. At a public school, the road runs through the district: an IT department made the purchasing decision, and the school board is where purchasing decisions get questioned in public. Aim the ask accordingly, and copy the person who can act on it.

Ask for the grantable things first

Whatever your eventual goal, open with requests a school can say yes to without conceding it was wrong. These get granted, and make future conversations easier.

The list writes itself once you look at a school device and ask who chose it and what it’s being used for:

• Notifications off, all of them, because no child needs a news alert mid-lesson
• AI agents off by default, opted into deliberately if a teacher wants them
• The browser limited to what the work needs
• Assigned reading available on paper (this request has the cleanest evidence behind it: across 54 studies, comprehension was reliably better on paper than on screen, and the gap widened as screens improved)

A school that says yes to those things has fixed most of what was wrong without banning devices entirely.

Numbers move schools

The math from the group-chat problem applies here at a larger scale. One parent raising screens can be seen as a personality problem; three families raising the same concern, in writing, within a term, is a pattern the principal has to manage; five is an agenda item at the next board meeting.

Finding those families is easier than it feels, because most of them are waiting for somebody else to go first. The survey evidence gives you a neutral opening – schools have been good at setting rules for AI and far worse at teaching anybody to use it safely, and most kids say no adult has ever walked them through it. That framing asks the school to finish a job, and no parent who hears it thinks you are the zealot.

What to say

If you would rather have the writing done for you, the advocacy builder turns your goals into a printable handout, including your requests, the evidence for each, and the script, plus the questions that show whether anyone at the school is controlling tech access at all.

To the principal or the IT lead, in writing:

“Which AI tools and notifications are enabled on the devices our children use, who reviewed those defaults, and can we opt out? We are asking because we would rather work with the school on this than around it.”

At a school board meeting, where you get two minutes:

“Thirty-nine states now restrict phones in schools. We are not asking this district to lead the country. We are asking it to review what is turned on by default on the devices it hands our children, and to tell parents the reasons.”

To another parent, which is where the whole thing actually starts:

“Have you looked at what the school tablet has turned on? I am going to ask about it. Want to sign the email with me?”

Expect reasons, and give them

Rules need justifications. Ask the school for the reason behind each default setting, in the same breath as the ask. A school that can explain why the browser is open has thought about it, and you have learned something. A school that cannot has answered a different question, and now knows it owes you an explanation. Offer your reasons just as plainly – you want the request to arrive calmly with evidence so you can be read as a partner, rather than a furious parent to be managed.

When this doesn’t apply

A family that chose a deliberately tech-forward school signed up for increased tech use, and in that case, the conversation should happen before enrollment instead of after it.

If a teacher at the school is already pushing this from inside, and one often is, your job changes from critic to reinforcement. Ask them what request from parents would help them most, and make that one.

And a family with no capacity for any of this is not failing. The school-issued device page covers the end of this you control from your own kitchen, and it works whether or not the school ever changes a thing.