Croton-Harmon school district announces new restrictions on technology use inside and outside of the classroom.
https://thecrotonchronicle.substack.com/p/croton-harmon-school-district-announces
Publish Date: 2026-06-15 06:02:00
Source Domain: thecrotonchronicle.substack.com
Last week, the day before Thursday’s Board of Education meeting, Croton-Harmon school superintendent Stephen Walker and two other administrators sent out a detailed list of changes to the district’s technology policies to parents and the larger district community.
In the June 10 letter (see full text below) Walker, along with Croton-Harmon High School principal Laura Dubak and Ellen Moskowitz, Director of Technology and Innovation, described the most recent discussions that led to the changes, which included the convening of a committee of educators from all three district schools, followed by meetings with the entire faculty.
Left to right: Stephen Walker, Laura Dubak, Ellen Moskowitz.
The new policies are quite sweeping. Classroom teachers will no longer begin or end instructional blocks with the use of devices, do online read-alouds, use video based lessons for initial teaching content, or use technology as a reward, among other provisions. In addition, devices will no longer be sent home with students either on a daily basis, on weekends, or during school breaks.
At Thursday’s BoE meeting, district officials also presented more specific policies for limits on cell phone and other internet-enabled devices at the high school, laying out detailed disciplinary consequences for violations of district policy and New York state law.
The changes come just as two leading teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the New York State United Teachers, have called for limits on screen time and AI use in the schools. And the new policies are, at least in part, the consequence of strong advocacy by the Croton Community Collective (CCC), an organization of more than 300 local parents which has lobbied for similar restrictions.
In a “Formal Request for a Districtwide Technology Reset” issued last December and again in January (see bottom of this post), the CCC outlined its own recommendations, many of which have been incorporated into the new policies.
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