On March 24, Duluth Public Schools announced $4.2 million in classroom cuts, with teacher displacements beginning in April. At the same time, the district's Chromebook program, software licenses, and Digital Innovation department are continuing as planned. We think the priorities are reversed. And Duluth, home to one of the country's oldest outdoor-education degree programs and one of its richest networks of nature preschools, can do much better.
"No human population has ever spent this much time with screens." A typical American child, by one measure, will spend roughly one-third of their waking life looking at a screen — and most screen-time research points in one direction when it comes to kids.— Paraphrasing Aaron R. Boyson, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Minnesota Duluth. Read the full expert alert →
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In 2002, Maine became the first state to issue laptops to every schoolchild. In the early 2010s, Google began pitching a low-cost alternative — a stripped-down laptop running its free cloud software. By 2017, Chromebooks made up more than half of all digital devices shipped to U.S. schools. By 2026, according to The New York Times, 88 percent of American public schools have adopted some form of 1:1 policy.
Duluth adopted the 1:1 take-home model for middle and high schoolers in that context, alongside nearly every other district in Minnesota, and rolled Chromebook carts into its elementary classrooms at the same time. Teachers and administrators made those choices in good faith with the information they had at the time. But the research on whether the 1:1 model actually helped kids learn came later — and it has not matched the original promise.
Now the reckoning is underway. On March 29, 2026, The New York Times published Natasha Singer's "Chromebook Remorse" investigation, and followed it with a major opinion piece on April 19. At least sixteen states — including Minnesota — have introduced 2026 legislation to restrict school screen time or require efficacy evidence for edtech.
Any parent of a neurodivergent child knows this already: a Chromebook is not a neutral object in the hands of a kid with ADHD, autism, a sensory processing disorder, or an anxiety diagnosis. The constant pull of notifications, the endless tabs, the video autoplay, the games one click away — these are not small frictions for a brain that is already working twice as hard to attend to a teacher in a classroom.
The accessibility argument is often used to defend 1:1 programs: text-to-speech for dyslexic readers, speech-to-text for students with writing difficulties, closed captions for hard-of-hearing students. Those tools matter. They belong in the IEPs and 504 plans of the students who need them. That is different, though, from putting an internet-connected laptop in front of every child in every classroom and counting it as inclusion.
According to CHADD — the national ADHD advocacy organization — roughly seventy percent of people with ADHD go on to develop depression, and researchers have repeatedly documented that neurodivergent children are more susceptible to compulsive screen use than their peers.
Denise Champney has worked with neurodivergent children in Rhode Island public schools for twenty-five years. She watches students "complete" iReady math assignments without reading the problems: "They are just clicking; they want to get through it."
Source: The New York Times, Opinion, April 19, 2026. Champney describes students with ADHD and autism who get very good at guessing which button to press, while the harder work those same students need — sustained reading, writing from scratch, hands-on building — gets pushed off the schedule.
On March 24, 2026, Duluth Public Schools announced $4.2 million in reductions for the 2026–27 school year. Staff "displacement" — the district's term for moving or eliminating positions — begins in April.
At the same time, the 1:1 take-home Chromebook program in middle and high school, the classroom-cart Chromebooks in elementary, the Digital Innovation department, the software licenses, and the device replacement cycles all continue as budgeted. Based on national per-pupil technology-spending benchmarks applied to ISD 709's enrollment, we estimate the district is spending roughly $3–5 million per year on this bundle. The exact figure is the subject of a pending public-records request to the district; we will publish it here when it arrives.
We understand these are hard trade-offs, and that administrators and the School Board have not taken these cuts lightly. But we think the balance between classroom staffing and educational technology deserves a fresh public conversation before the reductions take effect. Even a 25 or 30 percent reduction in edtech spending could close a substantial share of the FY27 shortfall without touching a single classroom teacher.
A 2021 study of 11,875 American children ages nine and ten found that higher screen time was associated with worse mental health, more behavioral problems, lower academic performance, and poorer sleep. A 2024 cross-sectional analysis found the same pattern for sleep quality and academic performance.
In the United States, The New York Times has reported that math and reading scores among 13-year-olds peaked in 2012 — the year before Chromebooks hit the 50-percent mark in American schools — and have been declining since.
The issue isn't only the screens. It's also the software now running on them. Kahoot reports eight million teacher users worldwide. iReady, a gamified math and reading platform, is used by roughly seventeen million American children — about one in three students from pre-K through twelfth grade. These apps are designed to hold children's attention the way social-media platforms hold adults' — through streaks, points, badges, cartoon avatars, and confetti animations. There is a growing body of evidence that what looks like engagement in those interfaces isn't always learning.
Duluth is not starting from zero on outdoor education. Duluth is, quietly, one of the national centers for it. It's worth noticing that while our public school district uses Chromebooks in every elementary classroom, the university across the hillside has been training the country's outdoor educators for half a century.
The University of Minnesota Duluth's Bachelor of Applied Science in Environmental and Outdoor Education is one of the longest-standing programs of its kind in the United States. The university added a Childhood Nature Studies major in 2021, led by Prof. Julie Ernst, expressly designed to train educators in nature-based learning for young children.
Parents of four- and five-year-olds in this city have been choosing this model in increasing numbers, because it works. Across 147 studies, outdoor and nature-based learning produces higher engagement, better academic outcomes, stronger social skills, and fewer symptoms in children with ADHD and other attention challenges. This is exactly the population affected most by heavy Chromebook use.
Duluth is already a national leader in getting young children outside. The opportunity in front of us is to extend that leadership up through elementary and middle school — the years when the mental health challenges facing American kids are peaking, and the years when getting them off screens and into the world around them would help most.
The people who decide whether Duluth keeps issuing Chromebooks to every child are listed below. A paragraph from a real parent or teacher moves them more than any press release ever will. Click a name to open a pre-filled email you can edit and send, or use the two buttons to write to the whole board at once.
Contact info from the public ISD 709 School Board and Superintendent pages. Next regular School Board meeting: check isd709.org/calendar.