Restler presses on parent resources for restricting home screen time

So I'm understanding your question.

How are we supporting parents?

Right.

What are the tools and strategies that we're giving them?

We have some wonderful resources available.

We have Randy Asher with us that oversees our digital literacy curriculum.

We've made that public for families as well.

And I know, even as a former superintendent, some of the work that we led at the district level around, you know,

supporting families at home with using technology, screen limits.

We used to have, I'm not sure if they're still doing it, I think they are, a wonderful screening of a movie called Screenagers

and a panel discussion after that that allowed the community to have a conversation around what are the decisions we want to make, what are the impacts of this on our children, what are the decisions we want to make as a family.

And so I saw

I think those are important tools and strategies and information that our families get.

Randy, would you like to talk about any of our public-facing resources available to families as well?

Sure.

Thank you, Council Member Wong, for your question.

My name is Randy Asher.

I'm the Deputy Chief Information Officer for Educational Technology.

We partner on our digital literacy outreach with parent coordinators, with school leaders, and with parents.

We provide a curriculum set of options available.

Two lessons are mandated each year for all students.

Around the use of digital tools.

And we also inform parents through our partnership with different companies like Common Sense Media and several others about how they can help govern and work with their children at home on the use of digital technology and appropriate use

of technology.

So some of this is about helping to educate our parents.

We don't expect parents to reconfigure routers or other technical solutions, but it's about how to have conversations about appropriate use, what are reasonable screen time limitations.

Screen time is not only a laptop or a Chromebook, but we also have students that when they get home are on gaming devices, they're watching television.

There's lots of different types of screens that kids utilize, and it's about finding appropriate tasks and hobbies and interests that will engage the students where not everything is in a digital format.

So we provide a lot of instruction around that and resources to help parents know how to control some of the applications, know how to install parental.

controls on some of these devices because sometimes the device use is not necessarily the only concern, but it's about what they're doing on the device.

So we work with parents to be able to do that and we turn key it through our parent coordinators and other groups to help get that out into the community.