On the mission
Purpose & scope
Isn't this just anti-technology?
No. Several of us work in technology, and none of us are asking the district to take devices away. Our concern is narrower: how much time students spend on unstructured or entertainment-adjacent screen use during the school day, and how thin the district's current guardrails are around it (content filtering defaults, YouTube access tiers, AI tool defaults).
Well-designed edtech, used deliberately, can help kids learn. What we're pushing back on is default-on, unmonitored access: the difference between technology as a tool a teacher chooses to use and technology as the wallpaper of the school day.
What are you actually asking the board to do?
Two concrete things: block student access to YouTube and gaming sites on school-issued devices with a more restrictive URL block list, and block student access to generative AI tools (e.g. Gemini, ChatGPT) on school-issued devices, in both cases while continuing to allow teacher-directed educational use.
Is this connected to a political agenda or outside organization?
No. We're not affiliated with any political party, advocacy network, or vendor. This started as a handful of SMFCSD parents comparing notes about what our own kids were doing on district devices, and grew from there once we started pulling the achievement data.
On the data
Methodology & caveats
Where does the test-score data come from, and how did you calculate the trends?
The core numbers are CAASPP (California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress) ELA and math results for SMFCSD, published by the California Department of Education, covering 2014-15 through 2024-25. We also cross-reference the California School Dashboard and the district's own July 2026 achievement report.
The year-over-year and per-grade trend lines are a straightforward calculation from those public files, with no modeling or smoothing that would flatter or exaggerate a direction. We've published the underlying data and the interactive dashboard we built from it so anyone can check our arithmetic.
Couldn't the score decline be explained by COVID learning loss, not screen time?
Almost certainly, in part. We don't claim device use is the only or even the primary cause: pandemic disruption, curriculum changes, and staffing shifts are all real, documented confounders, and California districts broadly saw declines after 2020.
What we do point to is that SMFCSD's decline started before 2020 and that the steepest, most consistent drops are concentrated in the grades and cohorts where 1:1 device rollout was heaviest. That's a pattern worth the district investigating, not a proven causal claim, and we say so explicitly in the full analysis.
Is a few points of test-score movement even meaningful?
A single year, on its own, isn't. What we're highlighting is a multi-year pattern: ELA proficiency declining every year since 2018-19, with the decline steepest in the earliest grades, which is a different, more durable signal than one year's noise.
On accessibility & devices
What this doesn't touch
What about students who need devices for accessibility reasons?
Nothing we're proposing touches assistive technology, IEP-mandated devices, or 504 accommodations. Those are individualized, documented, and already outside the kind of general-population default settings we're asking the district to review.
If anything, tighter default settings for the general student population make it easier for teachers and IT staff to keep accommodation-specific device use visible and intentional, rather than lost in blanket, always-on access.
My kid's device use seems fine, so why should I care?
Individual experience varies a lot by teacher, school, and grade, and we believe you if your child's use has been well-managed. Our concern is with the district-wide defaults that apply when a given classroom or family isn't actively working around them. Students without an attentive teacher enforcing limits, or a parent checking screen time at home, are the ones most exposed to whatever the default settings allow.
On who we are
The coalition
Who's actually behind Intentional Tech in Schools?
We're a small but growing group of SMFCSD parents with kids across several district schools. We have backgrounds in all disciplines, which is partly why we started with the data rather than just opinions.
How can I get involved?
The fastest way is to email a trustee or sign up for public comment at an upcoming board meeting. We've put together ready-to-use templates and instructions for both.
Take action