FARMINGTON — Farmington Public Schools is going to measure how much its students actually use screens in class before deciding how much to cut. Over 90 to 120 days, an outside partner will survey parents, students and teachers, record three weeks of the district's network traffic without saying which three, walk through as many as 200 classrooms, and read the curriculum. Then the numbers go to the Board of Education and the public.
The partner is EdAdvance, the regional educational service center. Matt Mervis, who directs its digital-learning and artificial-intelligence work, presented the plan to the board on Sept. 14. "We're not doing rocket science here," he said. "We're collecting data and analyzing that data and then engaging the community in a conversation around that."
Any one source of data alone, he said, is "not entirely authentic as a snapshot." Surveys show what people believe is happening; parents and their children rarely agree on how much the children use technology. The network audit shows what devices actually did and for how long. The classroom walkthroughs show whether the screen was doing anything paper could not. Where districts usually find their cuts, he said, is the same everywhere: rewards, incentives, the start and end of the day, indoor recess.
Connecticut has no screen-time law. Mervis said the state's framework tells districts to find out what is and is not working in their own schools, and Farmington is one of about ten doing that with EdAdvance.
Some changes are not waiting for the data. Eric Martin, the district's director of curriculum and instruction, said Chromebooks in kindergarten through fourth grade no longer travel home; the practice "kind of started seeping into grades three and four." The district is rewriting its grade-level technology competencies now, so that a use of technology that does not serve one of them becomes a reason to put it away. Farmington High School manages phones with what Martin called phone hotels, not the locked pouches other districts use, and he said the claim that locking phones away is the only thing that works "is not proven true in Farmington."
"Part of the reality going back to COVID is we've conditioned our teachers a lot around the use of technology," Martin said. "And so we have to do some thoughtful deconditioning." The line he said he loved most on the sheet given to principals is the district's job to prepare students to use digital tools "confidently and responsibly, and to know when the best tool available to them is not a screen at all."
Board member Matt Hutvagner asked how long the study would take, because "there's some in the community who think this is a very immediate need." Erika Nowakowski asked that social media and the isolated or anxious child be treated as their own question, not folded into classroom technology. Mervis agreed and went further: what concerns him most, he said, is students forming personal attachments to AI chatbots, turning to them before they turn to a person. He named deepfakes and AI companions as the risks the board should watch this year.
He left the board with a warning about himself. "Don't invite me in to talk about AI, because it'll be a long conversation."
Also from the Sept. 14 meeting: the district is fining its bus contractor $100 a run, and the schools closed the year $248,435 ahead.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. The best tool for keeping a thing safe is still a room with the right air in it. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's Board of Education long enough to know an acronym is coming before it arrives. He is on his second coffee. ☕
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