Wired - District 91��Ƭistration

Vaping is ‘everywhere’ in schools—sparking a bathroom surveillance boom

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:35:19 +0000

It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez swapped out self-harm for a new vice.

The freshman from Phoenix had long struggled with depression and would cut her arms to feel something. Anything. The first drag from a friend’s vape several years ago offered the shy teenager a new way to escape.

She quit cutting but got hooked on nicotine. Her sadness got harder to carry after her uncle died, and she felt she couldn’t turn to her grieving parents for comfort. Bumming fruity vapes at school became part of her routine.

AI Is changing what high school STEM students study

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 12:58:32 +0000

In the early 2010s, nearly every STEM-savvy college-bound kid heard the same advice: Learn to code. Python was the new Latin. Computer science was the ticket to a stable, well-paid, future-proof life.

But in 2025, the glow has dimmed. “Learn to code” now sounds a little like “learn shorthand.” Teenagers still want jobs in tech, but they no longer see a single path to get there. AI seems poised to snatch up coding jobs, and there aren’t a plethora of AP classes in vibe coding. Their teachers are scrambling to keep up.

“There’s a move from taking as much computer science as you can to now trying to get in as many statistics courses” as possible, says Benjamin Rubenstein, an assistant principal at New York’s Manhattan Village Academy. Rubenstein has spent 20 years in New York City classrooms, long enough to watch the “STEM pipeline” morph into a network of branching paths instead of one straight line. For his students, studying stats feels more practical.

As schools ban phones, more kids are using smartwatches

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 14:44:09 +0000

“The way that parents monitor their kids has changed dramatically in just a generation or two,” says Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “Parents are monitoring their kids far more closely, really wanting to be aware of their location [and] concerned about their safety.”

This heightened surveillance has trade-offs. The trend has seeped into schools, where teachers and leaders have grown frustrated by the introduction of yet another digital distraction to students’ learning, even as more districts enact cell-phone bans.

Yet no one really knows where these gadgets fit into the larger conversation around children and screens. Research on kids and smartwatches is thin. Even data about adoption and use is lacking. This has left digital media and child development experts to extrapolate and hypothesize about the possible pitfalls and benefits.