LAUSD Pushed Ahead With Strict Screen Time Limits. Expect Others To Follow

In 2024, the Los Angeles Unified School District announced a bold plan to integrate technology deeply into the everyday lives of students, parents, and teachers with a plan to develop an artificial intelligence chatbot designed to help track and manage everything from grades and attendance to cafeteria menus.

Two years later, that project has collapsed, and the nation’s second largest school district is leading the way in the other direction, taking a more skeptical view of technology in schools. In 2025, the board approved a school cell phone ban and this summer it set strict limits on student screen time at school.

The AI chatbot kicked off an ongoing controversy that prompted an FBI investigation and led to the resignation of former superintendent Alberto Carvalho

earlier this year when the company building it, AllHere, shut down and its founder faced federal fraud charges.

The school board has since required administrators to review all contracts related to classroom technology for safety and to build a list of the district-approved, student-facing applications or programs that include generative artificial intelligence components. That work is still underway.

LAUSD board member Nick Melvoin said the chatbot scandal did give board members pause. But he argues the district had also reached a post-pandemic moment when it made sense to reconsider its hard push into screens and devices that were intended to help kids keep learning when they couldn’t come to school.

EdWeek Market Brief spoke to Melvoin about how the new screen time policy works, the challenges LAUSD faced crafting it, what the district’s change in approach means for ed-tech companies, and what the implications are for school districts across the country.

How were you persuaded that LAUSD schools needed screen time limits, and can you tell us how that idea coalesced into a political push for the new policy?

During the pandemic, screens and devices were a lifeline for kids throughout the world. It’s how they were learning here at LA Unified as well. When we returned to in-person instruction, we’d closed the digital divide. LA Unified is a district of high poverty; every student now had access to a device that they could take home. But we hadn’t recalibrated on what a student’s interactions with technology and screens should look like.

I’m in schools every week as part of my job and I’d see elementary kids glued to their iPad or Chromebook all day. That was happening alongside the increase in social media addiction for kids and cell phones. A couple years ago, I brought a resolution making LA Unified one of the largest districts, if not the largest, in the world that had a bell-to-bell cell phone restriction.

We’ve seen the ameliorative and positive results of that. But there were still kids spending too much time on screens without a real vision behind it. That’s what led to the resolution a few months ago to severely limit the amount of time kids are on screens.

How does the new policy work and how did it evolve from the initial idea? What were the practical challenges that had to be overcome?

Prior to this policy, there was no set guidance. Teachers had full discretion and were often asking for guidance around what are the limits and best practices. It wasn’t a fault of LA Unified; there was no national guidance.

This policy says no screen time for students under 2nd grade, then second and 3rd graders will have up to 20 minutes per day, including homework. The school is not allowed to require kids during the school day or at home to be on a screen for more than 20 minutes a day. It goes up to 30 minutes in 4th and 5th grade, then up to an hour per course per week in middle school, and 90 minutes per course per week in high school.

In secondary school, you have multiple teachers, so we switch from daily limit to course limit so that teachers have an easier time implementing it. We’ve seen it embraced by parents, students in elementary and middle school, by our educators.

Where we’ve seen some of the challenges is in high school where kids are more used to being on their Chromebooks and doing Google Docs, research, and essays, so we’re calibrating and hearing from educators. There will be some change management. It’s an evolution, but that was expected.

How has implementation gone since school started in early August?

It’s gone well. We have a phased approach particularly at the secondary level, knowing that change takes time. The goal of this is not to be punitive when it comes to teachers. The idea is to win hearts and minds, to convince people about why this is effective, and we’ve been successful there.

We’re hearing, schools are saying, “we’re going to switch to laptop carts as opposed to take-home devices.” Parents are reporting that their kids are more engaged during the school day and spending less time troubleshooting their devices, and we’ve been having iterative feedback with educators in the field. For example, if it’s a computer science class in high school, or you’re going to be on a computer by nature, can there be an exemption for that and those conversations are reasonable and are happening.

How do you answer the counter argument against screen time limits that says kids need to begin learning how to use 21st century technology tools early on?

There are a lot of things that we teach kids how to use without encouraging them to use it in the school day. This came up when I brought the cell phone ban too — cell phones are ubiquitous, kids need to learn how to operate cell phones. They’ll figure that out, and we have a digital citizenship course that kids take about how to be responsible users of devices.

Once they get to 2nd grade, they’re starting to ask — “How do we turn on the device? How do I take tests on it?” — because state tests in California are digital. But given that kids are going home to screen-rich environments, I don’t buy the argument that kids are going to be at such a disservice if during the day they’re not on these devices.

At high school, particularly juniors and seniors, as you’re thinking about training for college and the workforce, that’s where more nuance is welcome when it comes to AI and screen time because we don’t want kids to be at a disservice when they get to college if they’re not familiar with tools that their peers might be using.

What effect did the recent FBI investigation into the former superintendent’s relationship with a company to develop an AI chatbot have on the district’s approach to technology?

With big systems, there are sometimes [good] intentions that go awry. Outside of the conduct of the superintendent, the idea of trying to use AI to help students navigate their own learning, which was the impetus behind that chatbot, made sense. But the implementation — the company the district went with, the maybe rushed rollout — was flawed, and that’s giving us pause.

One of the elements of my resolution is asking for an audit of all tech contracts that the board will be getting to look at the return on that investment. We spend a lot of money on ed tech— everything from buying the computers to software that does tutoring or literacy— and there’s going to be a range of value. So we want to have more insight into how much are we spending especially when budgets are getting tighter. And then which types of programs do we want to continue or discontinue.

How should vendor companies that serve LAUSD gauge what this means for them?

The tech vendors are in an interesting time in LAUSD but also [with] districts throughout who are starting to adopt our policy for two reasons.

One, outside of this policy, is tighter budgets. The district and other districts throughout California, when it comes to declining enrollment, labor costs, and economic challenges, have less money to spend and that’s going to hit tech companies and textbook companies.

The second is, how to live within these screen time limits and the more rigorous assessment that districts are going to be doing. There [are] a lot of benefits from computers and the internet to learning software to AI. But it’s about which programs and software are effective or not. If you’re a tech screen-based vendor, that’s going to be hard for you.

If I’m in their shoes, I’m trying to make the case that the 20 minutes a day we should be using on their product, but [I’m] also thinking beyond the school day. I’ve talked to civil rights groups and nonprofits involved in literacy and working with lower income communities. Their fear with this policy was there’s a lot of great literacy software and tutoring work that kids are doing after school.

We were clear in this policy that we are not hindering a parent’s ability to get those services on their own time. If a family requests district devices, we’ll give them one free of charge. My suggestion to vendors is [that] there are other nonprofits, community organizations, [and] parents looking for resources. That’s where I could see them shifting when it comes to more consumer-driven as opposed to a B2B selling to a school district.

How do you respond to ed-tech industry advocates who argue that rather than hard limits on using technology schools should offer guidance to teachers on how to use “good” tools, like those made for learning that have evidence they work, and avoid “bad” tools, like social media or other commercial tools that aren’t built to support learning?

The policy is clear — it doesn’t restrict teachers’ ability to use tech. The things that are now banned for students, like YouTube, aren’t banned for teachers. We wanted to respect the professionalism and discretion of our teachers.

What we’re limiting is the amount of time a student is looking directly at a screen. Yes, there’s been a lot of conversation about screen value now versus screen time, but we were so unchecked in the other direction that sometimes, to end in a better-calibrated position, you must swing the pendulum back. Students have enough access to screens, social media, and devices outside of the school day that this is one where we can lean in.

We know for parents, particularly parents in lower-income communities who are working multiple jobs, that screens are a lifeline when it comes to childcare, tutoring, or turning something on when you’re cooking. If we’re saying a 1st grader’s going to have no screen time during the school, then parents who are either using literacy software or putting on something for the kids to watch because they don’t have childcare — which is a broader systemic issue that we need to solve— at least know, “My kid wasn’t on a screen at all during the school day so I feel better about giving them a little screen time.”

What advice do you have for companies that offer education products and services that depend to some extent on using screens in trying to figure out navigating the new limits?

There are some education companies that have non-tech solutions. We’re going to see a reversion to pen and paper, [and] physical textbooks. Part of that is also accompanied by the fear of cheating and AI. So if you’re a curricular company that has digital tools, but you still have your pen and paper tools, lean into that.

If I’m a math curriculum for high school, I would try to make the case that of all the math curricula out there, mine’s the best product and there’s still a place during the school day or for homework. I would pivot and think about marketing to parents who might find value in your products as a supplement, especially now that they know that kids aren’t getting overwhelmed by screens during the school day.

Because we do know that a lot of affluent kids in this country, after school, are going to tutoring, they’re going to enrichment classes and so tech can still help particularly lower-income families bridge that divide, which is one of the reasons the policy still allows for kids to take devices home when they want to.

What are the implications of this debate over screen time in Los Angeles for the rest of the country? What should other districts facing similar questions about how to manage screen time in schools learn from LAUSD’s experience?

Sometimes it takes a first mover to show that there’s (a) the contours of a policy that could work in a big district and (b) the political will to do this. I’ve spent the last couple years looking for a district or school that had a good screen time limit, and we didn’t find an exemplar, which is why we crafted our own.

But since my resolution was passed a few months ago, I’ve gotten outreach from dozens of school districts asking to look at our template, so we are on the crest of this wave, like we were with cell phones. New York adopted pretty much the same limits that we had so now you’ve got the two largest school districts in the country aligned on our recalibration.

The goal was not necessarily to lead the nation. The goal was to support the kids of LA. But we have the benefit being the second largest district and leaning into some of these more controversial topics to set the tone.