Krishnan questions DOE on student access to YouTube in classrooms

Thank you.

Just a few more questions for me, and I'm going to turn it over to Chair Dinowitz.

First, I want to recognize that we've also been joined by Councilmember Zhuang and also State Senator Andrew Ganardis, who is a

been leading this effort on the state level and been a great partner in the work as well.

A few more questions from my end.

One is going back to the issue of mandates versus recommendations.

You know, I understand there are conversations to be had about these different, you know, issues and how to address them.

But one thing I would hope that we could all agree on and address is

the issue of student-led access to YouTube in the classroom.

There are a lot, children have virtually either unfettered access to YouTube or they're able to figure out ways to get around the filters in the classroom to use YouTube.

Now I want to distinguish the use of YouTube for instructional purpose, right?

When teachers are using it as an educational aid to show videos, that's one thing, that's a separate conversation.

What I'm talking about is when students have such access and dependence on screens, their ability to go on and watch different

programs on YouTube, get around the filters, watch things they shouldn't, and the number of parents that I've heard from around the city hearing their kids talk about

things they've watched on YouTube in the classroom on their own, or talking to their peers about, and parents have overheard it, about things that they've watched, clearly that happened in school in the classroom, or how they got around these different filters, it raises a really serious question.

of putting aside the educational use of YouTube, has the DOE explored and considered the importance of instituting a mandate on student access to YouTube, which is a policy that the LA Unified School District has as well.

And at least maybe that's a starting place where we could institute a mandate, because I fail to see the educational value of allowing students that kind of access to YouTube for their own passive screen time.

We couldn't agree more, actually, and so thank you for raising that.

I'm going to turn it over to Scott Strickland to explain some of the working behind it, but we have, in fact,

turned off the access to the unfederated version of YouTube and kept sacred just a very limited educational purpose, as you just described, but I'm going to ask Scott to jump in.

Thank you.

Scott Strickland, I'm a deputy CIO at New York City Department of Education, Division of Information and Instructional Technology.

Been with the department for eight years in a senior leadership role, so I appreciate the early discussion about the pandemic.

I recall when I joined, it was interesting to me that

No DOE student had a device at home, or a DOE device at home.

All devices that the DOE purchased had to stay in school all the time.

So when the pandemic hit, we had a problem.

There were no devices at home that were DOE-oriented, no internet for a lot of our students.

Went through the whole process of unwinding a no-device policy to a full-device policy, as you both summarized.

In terms of where we are now, the devices are there, the internet is there, the students have learned to use these devices,

and I think we have come to a point where it's time to manage this better than has been done in the past.

So, for YouTube, we heard everyone loud and clear.

As of Wednesday night, 5 p.m., we've filtered YouTube out of all student devices.