Throughout the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, millions of citizens across Europe and North America were displaced and forced to work in rapidly growing urban centers.
The congested housing, air pollution, inhuman working conditions and lack of infrastructure to manage the disposal of various forms of waste created the perfect conditions for the spread of infectious diseases, especially cholera and typhus. The horrid reality of these conditions prompted officials to address public health concerns through the gradual development of sanitation reforms.
We think a similar “public health approach” is required to address the ongoing health-related harms associated with emerging, 21st-century digital technologies, including but not limited to artificial intelligence.
Given the vulnerability of children to these harms, particularly how excessive screen time and exposure to social media can put them at risk for mental illness (especially depression and anxiety), we believe it is especially important to adopt this approach to reforming the environments in which our children are routinely present.
In response to the ongoing crisis in youth mental illness and how it intersects with educational outcomes, our leadership team and members of the board of education have partnered with our local health department to implement a range of policies and practices to ensure that our students can enjoy the blessings of digital technologies while being protected from the worst of their harms.
5 public health priorities
Our strategies are oriented toward the best of what a public health approach to this topic should consist of, as defined by a few key aspects:
1. Emphasis on environmental reform: For any given health-related issue, there are opportunities to work at either the individual or collective level. While there have been instances in which we have provided access to individual support for students struggling with mental illness, including contracting with school-based behavioral health therapists, our primary emphasis has been on environmental reform.
Since 2023, we have adopted a bell-to-bell policy restriction on access to wireless technology, and in 2024, we implemented a “tech-free Tuesday/Thursday” practice, in which students are restricted from using any digital technology (i.e., Chromebook) for two days of the week.
Balancing individual rights and collective responsibility is not easy, but the addictive nature of many digital technologies and the “negative externalities” of individual access prompted us to pursue environmental change that would positively impact all students.
So far, the results are very encouraging. Student achievement is trending upward, student discipline is improving, and the feedback from educators and families is very positive.
2. Multidisciplinary approach: The first public health boards were formed in response to issues of 19th century sanitary reform and were composed of a wide range of professional entities—elected officials, engineers, medical doctors—who were jointly interested in using the techniques of their separate professions to make environmental changes to improve the public’s health.
As a professor, researcher and public health leader, I (Karl) have sought to strengthen the partnership with our public schools by connecting behavioral health specialists and experts in adolescent development to craft the best mix of policies and practices to engage this issue.
3. Concern for the most vulnerable: While our policies and practices often apply to our entire population of school-aged children, we often have the most vulnerable among our students in mind.
It has been demonstrated, for instance, that school-based phone-restriction policies provide the greatest benefit to low-performing students, and we acknowledge that students who already struggle to engage in the classroom are the most likely to be negatively affected when digital technologies replace peer-to-peer and student-to-teacher personal connections.
Likewise, we have created important exceptions to all our digital technology policies for students with unique learning needs, which require them to maintain access to these technologies.
While some argue that restricting technology access to the most vulnerable raises concerns about inequitable improvements in learning, we have seen the opposite be true. Those students without means are more likely to have unrestricted access to the harms of digital technologies and the detrimental effects of addiction to those technologies.
4. Data-driven decision-making: Through our school district and health department partnership, we have rigorously evaluated each of the major policies and practices we’ve adopted, and we have evolved these practices when we received feedback that they were not working as well as we hoped.
For instance, the district’s bell-to-bell restriction on wireless devices originally only applied to elementary and middle schools. However, results of surveys among teachers and principals suggested that a restriction on “instructional-time only” was insufficient at the high-school level, prompting us to expand the bell-to-bell restriction throughout the entire district the following year.
5. Balanced approach: Throughout the 19th century, those who advanced sanitary reform did not destroy cities—they made them more livable, because they knew of the promise that cities also offered for economic productivity and cultural enrichment.
Likewise, our policies and practices have been critical of the health-related harms of digital technologies, but we have attempted to balance those harms with other competing goods, including the ways in which students can use novel digital technologies to pursue learning objectives.
The school district’s practice of “tech-free Tuesday/Thursday” explicitly aligns with this approach—we desire for students to embrace the benefits of digital technologies, but we want to limit their exposure to a level that balances those benefits with potential health- and education-related harms.
The image above was created by AI.
