Krishnan questions DOE on recommendations vs. mandates rationale

Thank you so much, First Deputy Chancellor, for your testimony, for DOE's engagement on this issue.

I've had conversations with the Chancellor about it as well, and so we appreciate your commitment to addressing it with us and working together.

I've got a few questions to jump on a few different topics, and I'll turn it over to Chair Dinowitz and then open it up to our members to ask questions as well and then come back to myself.

Just to start with some, you know, jumping around to some different topics.

So just at the outset.

One of the things that concerned us when I saw the policy was recognizing how ubiquitous the problem is now and how it's getting worse.

What was DOE's rationale to issue a series of recommendations as opposed to mandates?

And what are you hearing so far about how that's playing out?

Because my concern is different school districts, different schools will implement these recommendations in different ways.

They're not all on a level playing field.

And so why did DOE approach this from an advisory standpoint as opposed to a standpoint of issuing mandates?

Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity to clarify as well.

So we arrived at this policy based on a year's worth of feedback, listening towards CEC meetings, PEP meetings.

And so we appreciate the acknowledgement of the council and our community of how we evolved this based on feedback and research.

As we got to the word recommended, I want to assure everybody.

in this room, everybody watching, and has been shared with our superintendents.

Under the division of the first deputy chancellor, which is I, we have our supervising superintendents, our superintendents, principals, teachers, all of our school personnel, and we have made one thing clear.

So this policy, while we don't want it to be punitive,

while we're implementing, and we know that there will be an implementation, like, kind of gross period, that it is clear that these policies, these recommended, the 30, the 45, the no use, they are required.

They are non-negotiable.

Earlier in your testimony, we talked, somebody mentioned, I'm sorry, I don't remember who, around the percentage of time our kids are spending on devices in schools.

And we looked very closely at these time limits to make sure that this is not exceeding 10 to 15% of the school day.

And what we're really talking about as well is like this unfettered, unstructured use of technology.

We don't want any of our students participating in that.

That is crystal clear.

And we also know that our schools are built very differently.

The number of staff, the number of class, the number of students, the way schools are programmed, the curriculum they're using, the instructional tools that they have chosen to use.

So we need to leave space for our schools to be able to make those decisions around how it's going to work in their schools.

Similarly to our cell phone policy, we set up a very clear, we are not using cell phones in our schools.

schools and then schools found pathways into how that was going to work in their given facility and based on the staff that they have.

And we know that our schools, you know, I trust our schools, but more than just trusting our schools is like these critical feedback loops that we have between myself, the supervising superintendents,

their principles about how it's going, how implementation is going, and making sure everyone knows that our stance on the zero for 2K to 2, 30 for 3 to 5, and 45 for 6 to 8 really is a non-negotiable.

But we don't want schools to, you know, this is the fourth day of school.

We want schools to feel comfortable to figure this out, to have time to collaborate and make really

very intentional decisions on if we're going to use technology in our classrooms, when will that be and for how long, and have a landscape across the student's day of how that lands for the student.