In a full room, the Park Hill school board heard concerns from local parents affiliated with the group Schools Beyond Screens about how technology is used in learning spaces.
During the board’s Sept. 10 meeting, parents discussed screen overuse, the effects on educational outcomes and social skills, a lack of transparency and the financial burdens of constantly replacing technology.
Schools Beyond Screens is a national coalition that advocates for transparent, student-centered technology policies and use in classrooms.
Multiple parents pointed to studies that have shown that increased technology use is associated with negative academic outcomes, reduced social skills and attention issues.
They urged the board to consider whether the district’s school-supplied device policy is actually beneficial and argued the district’s technology task force’s decisions should be rooted in reviewed research.
“If the data shows that fourth graders, eighth graders and 15-year-olds should have very limited digital learning time, why is it our default to give our youngest learners a one-to-one device?” said Taylor Rees, a Park Hill mom.
Andrew Potter, father to a Park Hill kindergartner, said he would like to see more transparency regarding how much time a child is spending on a screen and what apps they have access to.
He’s not the only one. Potter also pointed to a survey that the Park Hill chapter of Schools Beyond Screens conducted. Of the 255 responses it received, 91% said they would like a daily report showing how much time their child spent on a school device.
Others spoke about how the district’s technology use made some parents question which school to send their children to.
Tori Winter, a mom to twins set to start kindergarten next year, said it should have been an easy decision to send her kids to Southeast Elementary School. But the school’s use of iPad time as a reward for completing work, causing some students to rush, was a concern for her.
In the survey, some respondents said they were considering changing districts or sending their children to private school instead because of similar concerns.
Another parent, Brennan Coulter, rounded out the public comment period by speaking on some of the financial liabilities the school incurs each year through education technology, and requested that the board review those costs.
“One-to-one devices were not a one-time purchase,” Coulter said. “They created a permanent, recurring obligation, such as device replacement, software licensing, insurance, breakage, filtering, help desk support and the staff required to manage it all. Those costs return every year, and they can grow over time.”
The Park Hill School District is projected to spend more than $2.6 million on technology hardware and software as part of its capital plan expenditures during the 2026-2027 school year, according to budget reports. That is nearly a 63% increase from the previous year, when the district spent roughly $1.6 million on technology expenses.
It’s not clear how much of that spending is related to student devices.
During the meeting, the board also heard from its instructional technology task force, which was convened to develop district recommendations for digital learning practices.
Administrators said the task force was created in part because bills that aimed to limit screen time were introduced in the Missouri legislature this year. They ultimately did not pass.
Keelie Stucker, the executive director of secondary education at Park Hill and a member of the task force, said their goal was to ensure technology in the district was being used in a way that was developmentally appropriate, healthy and educationally sound.
To achieve that, the task force presented two strategies it intended to pursue. The first was to review and integrate technology in a way that supports core instruction and to not treat it as something separate, Park Hill’s Executive Director of Elementary Education Melissa Hensley said. The second was removing barriers to access so that the technology can help support different learning needs for all students.
As the task force develops its recommendations, Hensley laid out how it plans to incorporate research, conduct feedback surveys and review technology use data.
She stressed the importance of gathering stakeholder input and feedback for the process.
“We know that our stakeholders, as we see tonight, are passionate about this topic,” Hensley said. “We know that we cannot do this alone. This is not isolation work. This is together work, and we have to hear from people and know the experiences that happen every day with technology for our students, for our staff and for our families.”
Board members expressed that they were looking forward to the task force’s work and that the additional parameters were necessary steps after the boom of online learning brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Some of this is just kind of unbuilding, unwinding the COVID technology that we had to have because that was the only way to learn,” board Vice President Daryl Terwilleger said.
But after the presentation, Rees said she still has concerns about the research the task force is utilizing to make its decisions.
She said none of the materials she saw was from peer-reviewed articles and a portion of the material came from the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a nonprofit professional association that promotes education technology leadership and innovation. CoSN also works with various education technology companies.
“A task force is only as strong as the research it considers, and that research must challenge our current practices,” Rees said during her public comment. “CoSN focuses largely on how to implement technology effectively. I don’t want to risk my child’s brain health on information provided by companies that will profit from putting the technology in her hands.”
The task force is still in its early stages and won’t present recommendations until January 2027. Its next meeting will be held on Sept. 22, and the school board will meet on Sept. 24.
