“I started getting really good grades,” she says. “It made me feel like … I’m not stupid, I have so much to say and it just made me think, ‘I can do this, I can do school and I can be good at it.’
Her mother, Heather Martin, says that’s the kind of promise screens hold for students like her daughter — students she worries are being forgotten in the national backlash against screens in schools. Screens are increasingly accused of interfering with student learning: More than 30 states have banned cell phones in school. Some states have gone further with proposals or policies to completely remove screens such as laptops and tablets from classrooms. In late May, the US Department of Health and Human Services issued surgeon general consultation warning about the “harms of screen use”, citing its effects on children’s health and educational outcomes.
Much of the move away from screens in schools comes from parents who worry that screen use is interfering with their children’s learning, an argument Heather Martin hears in her own community of Concord, 30 miles northeast of San Francisco. She shares some of those concerns, but says, “There was never a discussion about children with disabilities in the conversation, other than me bringing it up with the other parents.”
Advocates worry that these students are also being left out of the national conversation.
Screen time policy proposals are often a ‘dull tool’
Students with disabilities make up a rapidly growing share of students in this country—there are more than 8 million of them. Many rely on assistive technology to get through the school day, including for note-taking, reading and writing. For example, blind and visually impaired students can use screen reading or magnifying software to read. Others, like Soraya, use speech-to-text and audiobooks.
Countries included Alabama, Tennessee and Utah already have laws restricting screens which come into force already in July.
“My concern is that this is a really short window of time for this to happen,” said Lindsey Jones, CEO of the Center for Applied Special Technologies (CAST), a nonprofit education research organization that focuses on making the learning environment accessible.
Jones points out that some of these laws do make exceptions to the restrictions on screens for students with disabilities — often a line in the text mentions assistive technology. But she says that should be the minimum and worries that many policy proposals are “a very blunt instrument”.
“They’ve moved so quickly that we’ve really left it up to our educators and our disability communities this summer to figure it out,” she says. Perhaps with more time and input from people with disabilities, policies would better protect their rights, Jones adds.
Beyond concerns about state- and school-level bans on cell phones and screens, disability advocates point out that the collapsed US Department of Education is much less prepared to enforce civil rights. These rights include access to assistive technology for students with disabilities. So does the Trump administration recently delayed the long-awaited digital accessibility rule for public institutions, including schools.
“For some children, the screen is their accessibility tool”
At Soraya’s high school in Northern California, this past school year was the first in which students’ phones were locked in bags for the entire school day — as are many schools across the country. Heather Martin worries the phone ban could open the door to a wider ban on screens at her daughter’s school.
“A screen-free environment feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” she says. “It’s not looking at ‘no screen’ versus ‘no accessibility.’ And for some kids, the screen is their accessibility tool.”
As she talks about the change in her school, Soraya tenses up. “I hate them,” she says of ziplock bags. She says her phone isn’t just a distraction, it’s a safety net to call her parents if she has a panic attack, for example. And she feels picked on when she has to ask to take her phone out of her locked bag to take notes.
of Soraya individualized education program (IEP)a legal document outlining the accommodations and modifications she must receive at school says she can use her phone to take notes, along with other assistive technology. But since the cell phone ban is new, her teachers are still adjusting. Because she has several different classes and teachers throughout the day, she says it’s easy for some teachers to be unfamiliar with her accommodations.
That’s the kind of “unintended consequence” Jones worries about as she contemplates a near future in which more schools move away from the technology she says has changed the rules for people with disabilities. When technology is used intentionally, she says, it can “actually allow us to create much more flexible environments, and those are really necessary for people with disabilities.”
Jones’ organization, CAST, invented an educational framework called Universal design for learning which encourages educators to design their classrooms to account for the different ways students learn. For example, a teacher can teach a math lesson using blocks, a diagram, and a video to help impress the same lesson on different learners. Or perhaps the reading in class is provided as an e-book so that students with poor vision can enlarge the text while those with dyslexia can listen.
As screen restrictions ripple through the nation’s schools, Jones hopes people with disabilities aren’t forgotten. “We need educators, we need people with disabilities, we need assistive technology providers” to assess how these policies are implemented in the classroom, Jones says. “This will be the best way forward for everyone to achieve their goals without trampling on people’s rights.”
For Soraya, using these kinds of tools has made her embrace her learning differences. In fact, she has just finished researching and writing a series of essays exploring how people with dyslexia learn. For the first time in her life, she’s straight like, but more importantly, she says she can express herself in a deeper, more meaningful way.
“I have so much more to say… It made me feel more confident about myself.”
