Pencils Before Pixels
Children watching live classes

Focus over distraction and cognitive friction over swiping

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.

01

The Problem

Instinctively, many parents and teachers feel something has changed. Children struggle to focus and make eye contact. Teachers are increasingly overwhelmed. Academic performance continues to decline while mental health issues only rise. Over the past fifteen years, classrooms have rapidly transitioned to 1:1 digital devices, and independent researchers have since documented the harm to our children.

The Problem

02

The Solution

As parents, model the desired behavior at home and create a coalition, representing a majority of the student population at Sunset Hills Elementary, that advocates for a tech intentional school that champions focus and cognitive friction by eliminating 1:1 digital devices starting January 1, 2027.

The Solution

10 Quick Facts

Ten quick 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. NAEP data 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.

  • Finding 2. Social Skills & Imagination

    When children are isolated on iPads with headsets on, zero socialization occurs. Nor are they afforded the opportunity to be bored, daydream, or think creatively, moments long understood to be essential to child development. A device constantly in front of them robs children of the unstructured moments that gives rise to their individuality, curiosity, and imagination.

  • 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 key press simply cannot replicate.

  • Finding 4. Myopia and Physical Health

    A study of over 335,000 children found each additional hour of daily screen time raises myopia risk by 21% — a threshold elementary students routinely exceed from school devices alone.

  • 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 and has no data on academic, behavioral, or mental health outcomes after twenty years of use. Westside has conducted a failed 20 year experiment with ZERO data to justify continuing it. In addition to that it has no idea when students operate outside of the content filtering environment.

  • Finding 6. Do As I Say, Not As I Do

    Steve Jobs did not allow his own children to use iPads and strictly limited technology at home. He wasn't alone. Engineers and executives from Google, Apple, Yahoo, and eBay enforce similar limits on their own kids, and roughly three-quarters of students at the low-tech Waldorf School of the Peninsula, minutes from Apple's headquarters, are children of employees from those very companies. If the people who built these products won't trust them with their own children, why should we trust them with ours?

  • Finding 7. Mental Health

    Four independent indicators of teen mental health — suicide, self-poisoning, depressive episodes, and depressive symptoms — all turned sharply worse in sync around 2012, aligning with the rise of screens and social media in children's lives.

  • Finding 8. IXL Math & Gender Gap

    Every study IXL cites to support its own product was funded, commissioned, or authored by IXL itself, and the one truly independent study found no significant benefit at all. Meanwhile, year over year, the gap between male and female math scores continues to grow, with female students increasingly left behind.

  • Finding 9. Peer Effect

    A single student browsing the internet or watching YouTube on a district-issued iPad doesn't stay contained. A nearby peer glances over, the teacher must stop instruction to intervene, and the entire class loses that moment of teaching. Peer effects research confirms that one disengaged student degrades academic outcomes for the whole classroom, not just their own. Multiplied daily, this cycle shifts a teacher's energy from instruction to surveillance, and gradually resets the classroom's baseline from engagement to low expectation.

  • Finding 10. Digital Testing Penalty

EPIC

EPIC is an app that the district uses for reading. The app reads comic books to students even at the 6th grade level. When an app reads to a student, it does not require the student to focus or put forth effort. 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

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“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.

The Anxious Generation

The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidt

View
The Digital Delusion

The Digital Delusion

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath

View
Stolen Focus

Stolen Focus

Johann Hari

View

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 and laptop 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