Olympia Kazi testifies on need for complete screen ban and screen-free days

Final witness on Zoom is Olympia Kazi.

Maybe you can.

You saved the best for last, right, guys?

I want to thank you for this hearing and for all your advocacy.

My name is Olympia Kazi.

I'm the parent of a fourth and a sixth grader, and I am the organizer of the screen break that took place last year at District 6.

Listening today to the testimonies, we see that everybody, including DOE, agrees that we have a problem, that it is worsening.

And yet, they're doing nothing.

Like everybody else said, the emperor is naked.

These screen limits are going to limit nothing.

They're not going to be implementable.

How are they going to be implementable when they have multiple teachers?

What if the previous person saw a little bit of a video?

Are they going to be timing this?

This is ridiculous.

So what I believe we should be doing is we need to have a complete ban from 8 through 5.

And from May to 12, we should take a page from the pilot that is run for the second year in North Carolina at Granville's County and have entire days blocked out as screen-free days, tech-free days, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, etc., depending on the age and the appropriateness.

We need to rethink, obviously, all the testing and all the screeners because they're really meaningless.

Let's be honest.

Talk to the real teachers to understand that.

What's striking most, though, today, guys, is that...

DOE doesn't seem to have, the reps had no sense of what is happening in the actual classrooms.

So during screen break that we engaged 38 schools, over 10,000 students in District 6, we saw exactly what was playing out in the classrooms.

We saw, for example, that some younger teachers didn't know how to go screen free in order to educate.

We saw that expeditionary learning didn't allow to go screen free, right?

And now we even have mandatory IR ready for math in many cases.

I would ask the O.E.

At a minimum to call Superintendent Martinez, who works for them, and ask him what happened in the schools.

Because, or the, I mean, I don't tell them to call me because after what I said today, maybe they don't want to talk to me.

But they should talk with their employee because there is some knowledge they should be using.

Thank you again for everything that you're doing.

Excellent questions.

And, you know, thank you for your focus.

Thank you so much for your testimony.

We appreciate it very much.