As she started her vocabulary lesson this week at Blythe Academy, second-grade teacher Tonya Long asked her students if they had pencils.
A few hands shot up, and the students trotted to the front of class to grab their No. 2 Ticonderogas.
In Long’s classroom, not a Chromebook was in sight.
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“Praise the Lord,” said Long’s coworker Caroline Vaughn as she walked away from the classroom. “They haven’t used (screens) all summer.”
On June 9, Greenville County Schools joined a small but growing list of school districts across the country placing limits on screen time in classrooms.
Starting this summer, no more than half a student’s class time in South Carolina’s largest school district will be spent on a Chromebook, and laptops no longer will be issued to children before second grade. At the same time, the Greenville district has issued a shortlist of 14 allowed education applications and is blocking access to all others — part of a larger plan to control and monitor app usage in schools.
Administrators said they are responding to teacher concerns about declining attention spans, and research suggesting students learn better when technology supplements — not supplants — traditional teaching methods.
‘All over the place’
Susan Stevens, the assistant superintendent for academics in Greenville County, said she first dug into the issue last fall after meeting with a group of high-achieving high school students. She’d asked them about device use in the classroom when one boy described them as “digital worksheets.”
“To hear from our most highly successful students that they were perceiving technology use in that way was just very convicting for us,” Stevens said.
Stevens and her team set out to measure how much time students were spending on devices and what platforms they were using — only to learn there was no consistent way of measuring that.
From now on, she said, teachers are being directed to sign onto apps through a portal called “ClassLink,” which will deliver reliable analytics on screen time by class, by school and by district.
The Post and Courier asked Stevens how much a 50 percent cap would reduce screen time in schools, and she said she didn’t know.
“It's kind of all over the place, to tell you the truth,” she said. “Because everything was not rostered directly through ClassLink, we do not have very clear data.”
The 50 percent cap, she and Superintendent Burke Royster said, assures a balance between traditional and digital teaching tools without eliminating either.
Three years ago, an EdPuzzle representative taught classes during the Upstate Technology Conference at Wade Hampton High School in Greenville. Now that video-quiz app — popular among teachers in the district — is on the banned list. Stevens didn’t specify why but said the district blocked apps that could not guarantee student privacy, were redundant or provided back doors to websites — like YouTube — that the district didn’t want students using.
Fourteen are now on the approved list.
“Teachers are geniuses, so I'm sure they will think of some very creative ways to continue to make learning engaging,” Stevens said.
In Long’s Blythe Academy classroom, technology wasn’t entirely absent. She demonstrated how to fill out a graphic organizer about the word “camouflage” on a smart board as students worked on their own paper-and-pencil version at their desks.
The school district plans to monitor usage under the new rules and return to school board members in six months to report what they find.
The trend — which came to national prominence in April with screen limits imposed in Los Angeles, followed by a widely reported speech late last month by the president of the American Federation of Teachers — is likely to spread across South Carolina. Charleston and Horry counties, whose superintendents have heard similar calls for screen time limits from parents and teachers, are reviewing device policies.
Charleston this summer is auditing its students’ technology use and will announce guidance before classes start in the fall, Charleston’s deputy superintendent, Luke Clamp, wrote in an email to the newspaper.
“The district's current work centers on achieving a balance between foundational, hands-on learning and preparing students for a workforce integrated with technology,” Clamp stated.
Leaping into tech too fast?
Michael Grant, a national expert on educational technology and a professor at the University of South Carolina, said Greenville’s new policy sounded like a good start, adding he’s not aware of another district that has placed a set limit on screen time. He said he trains teachers to use technology as a tool — not as a replacement for teaching. The best approach, he said, is integrating technology with traditional teaching methods.
“One thing that we know is that writing is learning, and that when you are writing, you're processing, and when you're typing, there's a psychomotor, there's a physical part of it that you're not thinking about when you're doing it,” he said.
In 2024, Norwegian researchers found handwriting activated broader networks of the brain than typing.
AFT President Randi Weingarten pointed to the downward trend in K-12 reading and math scores that has coincided with adoption of ed tech and proposed a 10-point plan to scale back both screen time and access to artificial intelligence nationwide.
“Prior to large-scale digital adoption, fourth and eighth graders’ scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress had been rising steadily for years,” Weingarten said in a May 27 speech. “After adoption, the trajectory shifted, often sharply, toward decline.”
Still, ed tech is big business in the United States. A 2021 Harvard READS Lab study counted more than 200,000 educational and reference apps on Apple’s app store and reported that schools spend billions on educational software annually.
The study’s meta-analysis of research on the effectiveness of using technology to teach literacy and math to early learners found mixed results.
It urged caution before schools adopt apps.
Jody Stallings, a veteran middle-school English teacher in Charleston County, applauded the move in Greenville to cut back on allowed screen time, but he said such efforts would have been unnecessary had districts proceeded more slowly.
“There is not a single lesson we have to teach that you need technology in order to do so,” Stallings said. “Is it beneficial? Show me, show me the result. Where has it increased? Where has it helped the students? I'm just not seeing it.”
Of particular concern, Stallings said, is the lack of teacher oversight when kids are on apps. One in particular — NoRedInk — teaches grammar lessons, but Stallings said he’s caught errors in it.
“Teachers have no idea how bad the questions are worded, how inaccurate a lot of the answers are,” he said. “It's like we just sloughed it off to some grad assistant or something, who wasn't very good at his job.”
NoRedInk is one of the apps approved for Greenville County Schools.
‘Upstate Unplugged’
Greenville parent Grace Pouch was astounded and delighted when she heard about Greenville’s new screen time policy.
“I'm actually really surprised that it's as thorough as it is, and that they're biting off this much, because I think it's a lot for them to try to change over the summer,” Pouch said.
Pouch had addressed Greenville school board members last fall urging them to halt classroom use of artificial intelligence until the district better understood how student data might be used and how it might impact learning. After hearing her remarks, other parents concerned about ed tech reached out to her, she said, and they formed a coalition called “Upstate Unplugged.”
Half a dozen members shared their children’s experiences with technology at a May 26 school board meeting.
One parent, Hank Gettys, said kids need to understand how computers work before they are handed such powerful machines. Gettys said he works for an AI company.
“The fundamentals of learning can be taught without a screen in front of the students, especially before they understand how to use it and its impact,” he said.
Another parent, Cinnamon Stetler, urged the board to remove generative artificial intelligence from classrooms. Greenville’s policy allows one AI platform — Magic School AI — for grades six through 12.
“Novices cannot develop skills if the work is offloaded to AI, just as you wouldn't become a chef simply by watching cooking shows or eating at restaurants, and you want to improve your three-point shot by watching a basketball game,” she said.
Pouch said Greenville’s new policy is a “move in the right direction,” but she still objects to Magic School as well as an AI-powered chatbot — Amira — that helps struggling readers. This is a cartoon chatbot that coaches young readers, and GCS is requiring the bottom 25 percent of readers through second grade to use it for 30 minutes a week.
The lowest-achieving students benefit from the Amira tutoring program, according to an analysis undertaken by Greenville County Schools, Stevens said. The South Carolina Department of Education has requested $2.2 million in the coming year’s budget to provide Amira to the state’s public schools.
“Those kids are the ones who should be getting the most human help, hands on, one to one, you know?” Pouch said.
The key to making technology work, Stevens said, is for school districts to monitor it closely all the time.
“Every single application and every single website is continuing to trial new features and push new features, and they push things out, and if we're not on guard for those things, you know, we could very easily miss something if we're not paying attention,” she said.