Pencils Before Pixels
Children watching live classes

Pro-Learning, Not Anti-Tech

Pencils Before Pixels is a parent-led initiative in the Westside School District in Omaha, Nebraska. Our mission is to give our children the best possible chance of developing the cognitive and social skills they need to thrive by creating a classroom environment that champions focus over distraction and cognitive friction over swiping.

Our Journey

01

The Problem

Instinctively, many parents and teachers know something is wrong. Children struggle to focus and make eye contact. Academic performance continues to decline while mental and physical health issues rise. Teachers are increasingly overwhelmed by distracted students and poor classroom behavior. Over the past fifteen years, classrooms have rapidly transitioned to 1:1 digital devices, meaning every student has an electronic device, yet independent researchers have repeatedly documented the harm screens in classroom cause to children. 

The Problem

02

District 66

We have been working directly with the District since early 2026, meeting with district administration and staff, and speaking in front of the school board. We have shared our concerns and requested data on device usage, academic performance, and the independent research used to guide the selection of the devices and software in our children's classrooms. The District was unable to provide the requested data.

District 66

03

Low Hanging Fruit

The parents involved in Pencils Before Pixels had deliberate conversations to determine how to make a difference without dividing the school into digital and analog classrooms. We identified four low-effort changes for the Fall 2026 semester that would be easy to implement:

1. No more iPads at recess.

2. Eliminate iPad "free time" during school.

3. Discontinue the Epic app, which reads to students.

4. Disable IXL video games.

Low Hanging Fruit

04

Long-Term Solution

The long-term solution our group came up with is:

1. As parents, model the desired behavior at home.

2. Build a coalition representing a majority of the elementary school's student population. This coalition will champion focus over distraction and cognitive friction over swiping, by opting out of the district's 1:1 issued iPad starting January 1, 2027.

Long-Term Solution

8 Quick Facts

Eight facts about the impact digital devices in the classroom have. To view more detailed research navigate to the Research and Nebraska Data pages.

  • Finding 1. Academic Performance

    Math and English Language Arts test scores have fallen across all 50 states. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation's Report Card is a standardized test taken by millions of 4th and 8th graders every two years, shows steady growth before digital devices entered the classroom, followed by an immediate decline the moment each state transitioned to digital classrooms. A decline that continues today in Nebraska and Westside.

  • Finding 2. Classroom Distractions

    iPads are entertainment devices masquerading as educational devices. It is no surprise when a student becomes easily distracted by a device engineered by the most sophisticated behavioral scientists in human history. Sadly, this distraction doesn't stay contained to one student. A nearby classmate glances over and also becomes distracted. The teacher must stop teaching to police the distracted students, and the entire class loses that moment of teaching. Research into peer effect confirms that one distracted student degrades academic outcomes for the entire classroom, not just their own. Multiplied daily, this cycle shifts a teacher's energy from teaching to policing, and degrades the classroom's overall culture and academic performance.

  • Finding 3. Handwriting vs. Typing

    Handwriting activates far more of the brain than typing, specifically the regions and wave patterns linked to memory, attention, and learning. The careful, deliberate act of forming each letter by hand creates a rich network of brain connections that a swipe or key press simply cannot replicate.

  • Finding 4. Imagination & Socialization

    A device constantly in front of children robs them of the unstructured moments that gives rise to their individuality, curiosity, and imagination. With their face hidden behind a glowing screen and headset over their ears, no socialization or negotiation occurs. These are some of the most important skills required in the real world and for a functioning democracy.

  • Finding 5. The District's Own Admission

    Westside's administration has confirmed in writing that it has never conducted independent research on its 1:1 device program, has no data on academic, behavioral, or mental health outcomes after twenty years of use, and has no idea when students operate outside the content filtering environment, meaning students can circumvent the district's web filter to watch unapproved videos or play video games without the District's knowledge during class. Westside has conducted a twenty-year digital experiment with zero district data to justify continuing it.

  • Finding 6. IXL Math & Gender Gap

    The one study the district provided us to justify the 1:1 device program was a five-page paper from IXL, paid for by IXL and conducted by an IXL employee, neither of which the study discloses. Every study that paper cites to support its own conclusions was also funded and conducted by IXL. It is a reaffirming circular reference: Study A says IXL works because Study B says IXL works, and Study B cites Study A. No serious academic researcher would accept a five-page, vendor-funded, vendor-authored paper with undisclosed conflicts of interest and self-referential citations as credible evidence of anything; this is not science, it is marketing dressed up as research. The one truly independent study we found in our research was a 153-page study from an independent researcher analyzing middle schools in New York City, and on page 99, they concluded that there was no statistically significant difference in math scores between students who used IXL and those who did not. Meanwhile, year over year, the gap between male and female math scores continues to grow, with female students increasingly left behind.

  • Finding 7. Do As I Say, Not As I Do

    Engineers and executives from Google, Apple, Facebook, NVIDIA and other Silicon Valley companies enforce strict technology limits on their own kids, and roughly three-quarters of students at the prestigious, but low-tech Waldorf School, minutes from Apple's headquarters, are children of employees from those very tech companies. If the people who built these products won't trust them with their own children, why should we trust them with ours?

  • Finding 8. We Are Pro-Learning, Not Anti-Tech

    We believe technology has its place in school: a dedicated computer lab where its use is intentional and enhances the learning experience. This includes typing lessons, online research, CAD, 3D printing, spreadsheets, coding, digital citizenship, robotics, and video editing, among others. Notably, all of these skills are best taught on a desktop computer, where a full keyboard, mouse, and larger screen are essential tools for the task, not on an iPad, which is poorly suited to this kind of work. What we oppose is replacing teachers, textbooks, and handwritten practice, proven, effective teaching methods, with an ineffective, failed digital experiment.

EPIC

EPIC is an app the district uses for part of its reading curriculum. Epic is a reading app that reads to children. Has there ever been a more oxymoronic concept? When an app reads to a student, it does not require the student to focus or put forth effort, and without focus or effort, no new learning occurs.

Audio review

Reading on Screens

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath was interviewed by Meghna Chakrabarti on NPR show On Point. In the interview he explains the differences between reading on screens versus paper. Listen to the full interview.
0:000:00

What the Experts say

01

“We cannot continue to treat attention as a prerequisite for learning; we must treat it as curriculum itself. Attention isn’t something students either have or lack; it’s a capacity that can be systematically developed or systematically eroded depending on the environments we create. At present, schools leave attention to chance. We assume that students will maintain focus despite carrying devices engineered by the most sophisticated behavioral scientists in human history to prevent exactly that. We complain about distraction while committing to school schedules broken into periods too short for deep work. We lament declining reading stamina while assigning shorter and shorter texts to accommodate shorter and shorter attention spans.”
Andrew Cantarutti

Educator & Writer, The Walled Garden Education

Andrew Cantarutti

02

“Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.”
Leo XIV

Pope

Leo XIV

03

“The trap that many parents fall into is in believing that when their kids are hypnotically looking at a screen, they are demonstrating a profound ability to stay focused.”
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras

Author, Glow Kids

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras

Behavior & Mental Health

This chart tracks four independent measures of adolescent mental health — suicide, self-poisoning, major depressive episodes, and depressive symptoms — from 2001 to 2018. All four held below the historical average for over a decade, then turned sharply upward around 2012, the same period smartphones and social media became a constant presence in teenagers' lives. This synchronized rise across four separate data sources is the kind of pattern rarely seen outside of major societal change, and it points directly at the phone-based, social media-saturated childhood that took hold in the early 2010s and has yet to reverse.

Suicide
Self-poisoning
Major depressive episode
Depressive symptoms
View research page

Resources

Recommended reading and viewing.

Brilliant Speech on EdTech, AI, and Child Development

Classroom Habits of Attention in the Age of AI

The Science of Learning: Why EdTech Is Failing Our Kids

Before You Decide, Ask Yourself

  1. Question 1. Will less screen time enhance your child's cognitive development?
  2. Question 2. Will less screen time strengthen your child's social skills?
  3. Question 3. Will less screen time improve your child's physical and mental health?

If you believe the answer to all three is Yes — then less screen time, not more, is the direction worth choosing.

You have the right to make that choice for your child. The form below lets you do it.

1 to 1 Device Opt Out

Pursuant to Nebraska Revised Statute 79-532(c) and Westside Community Schools Regulation 6320R, parents have the right to excuse their children from 1:1 district-issued iPad use. Our system auto-populates the opt-out form and includes the supporting research and documentation needed to make the process fast and straightforward. We have been working directly with the District since early 2026, and provided six months of advance notice that this opt-out will take effect on January 1, 2027 and remain in effect until formally cancelled.

  1. 01

    Fill out the form

  2. 02

    Download the PDF file

  3. 03

    Submit signed form to your school principal

Sample opt-out letter preview

A Family's Experience

Below is a letter a parent wrote to Emily Cherkin, a teacher and strong advocate of tech-intentional education, who publishes the First Fish Chronicles. The parent describes their child's experience being the first opt-out in their district's 1:1 iPad program. If you have concerns that opting out will isolate your kid or make things too difficult for their teacher, this letter is worth a read.

My daughter recently completed 6th grade. For a majority of the school year, she was the only student out of approximately 750 middle schoolers without a school-issued device. (Two other students opted out three quarters through the school year!) My daughter completed in-class assignments on paper and homework in workbooks while her classmates were distracted by the internet and harmed by EdTech. Some of her classmates were jealous when she used poster board and Legos for presentations while they used PowerPoint. The opt out was not perfect. My daughter shared a device with a partner in order to take part in gamified EdTech quiz programs, such as Blooket and Kahoot, as well as in science class because the curriculum, Amplify, is 100% digital. But based on my daughter’s reports of her classes, something interesting happened as the school year progressed. The use of technology decreased around her, not only as instructed by her teachers, but through student choice as well.

First, during the last month or two of the school year, teachers communicated that students would complete presentations on poster board instead of PowerPoint. This included science, history, and math classes - reading and writing classes were already mostly analog throughout the year. In one class, students groaned when they found out they were to use poster board. But when the teacher changed his mind a week later and offered PowerPoint as an option, a majority of students still chose poster board. The teacher had to improvise and find additional supplies because he didn’t have enough poster board for all of the students!

Second, as the year went on, my daughter’s history teacher began to offer paper copies for research rather than only having students review preselected articles online through the school portal. Early in the school year, the teacher provided paper copies mainly for my daughter. When the teacher started to offer students a choice between paper or online, more and more students gravitated toward the paper copies. Sometimes the teacher did not have enough copies and students had to share!

And last but not least, near the end of the school year the school’s administration asked families how they felt about devices through an online survey. The survey was mainly geared toward receiving feedback about family engagement and communication, but a small portion included questions about screentime during class and lunch as well as student use of school-issued devices at home, indicating that school leadership might be listening.

Things are changing!

Emily Cherkin
Emily Cherkin, First Fish Chronicles

How Can I Help

Spread the word

The movement grows one conversation at a time. Share Pencils Before Pixels with a friend, a neighbor, or another parent who feels the same pull to protect their child's development from constant screens. We also have yard signs available.

Xf
Pencils Before Pixels yard sign

Show Up and Speak Out

Pencils Before Pixels has spoken at Westside School Board meetings since early 2026. Join us and share your perspective with the school board. You'll have 2.5 minutes at the podium. We typically write our speeches out beforehand and read them aloud. There is power in numbers, and board members need to hear from you.

View meeting dates

Save the date

Come to a Pencils Before Pixels public presentation. Hear the research, meet other parents, and leave with practical next steps for your family.

  • SEP10
  • OCT1

Make it official

Complete the 1:1 Device Opt-Out form and submit it to your school principal. It is the clearest way to put your decision on the record.