Wood, paper, and puzzles — no screens.
By Mara Quinn | November 14, 2026
Screen-Free Classrooms in Croton: How Parents Rewired a School District
Croton-Harmon, a village school district of about 1,500 students on the Hudson River north of Manhattan, has moved decisively away from the classroom default of one student, one device. As of this school year, kindergarten through second grade has no iPads in classrooms except in rare cases. Teachers in those early grades emphasize games, puzzles, pen-and-paper work. Third and fourth graders now share iPads pulled from classroom carts instead of keeping devices at their desks. Fifth graders cannot take iPads home at the end of the day. Sixth graders cannot take them home on weekends.
The policy reads like a deliberate pushback. Superintendent Stephen Walker framed it that way in a statement about the district's new philosophy: technology must "earn its way into a classroom rather than becoming a default resource within each student's experience." That language marks a shift. For years, screen deployment in K-12 instruction has moved mostly in one direction, more devices, earlier, faster. Croton reversed course.
That reversal did not happen by accident. It took parental organizing, board shifts, and sustained pressure on a superintendent willing to listen.
How Parents Built a Movement
In July 2025, a group of parents formed the Croton Community Collective. Over the past 16 months, the group has grown to more than 400 local members. Their stated goal was straightforward: help their children have screen-free childhoods. They built a network of families committed to the idea. They reshaped the school board. They secured multiple changes to how the district deploys technology in instruction.
The collective's reach extended beyond devices in school. More than 100 families in the group have installed landlines in their homes. The reasoning: children could stay connected, to parents, to each other, without the presence of cell phones.
The approach reflects a philosophy that has begun to bubble up in parts of the education sector and parenting culture. It sits opposite the tech-as-default instinct that dominated school purchasing for a decade. The collective's members clearly believe screens are a problem worth solving by hand, with materials and furniture and old ways of staying in touch.
What Replaced the Screens
When Croton pivoted, the district had to backfill the space devices had occupied. By March of this year, the district reported cutting its educational technology software spending by nearly 33 percent. The district also stopped sending devices home to students in kindergarten through fifth grade.
The money redirected did not vanish. The district allocated around $40,000 toward analog replacements. The purchases landed across a spectrum of old-school learning tools: manipulative math games, new class sets of books, workbooks, dictionaries, and puzzles. These are the materials that filled classrooms decades before tablets arrived. Now they are back, intentional acquisitions in a budget cycle, representing a deliberate teaching choice.
That choice has a pedagogical reasoning attached. Games and manipulatives let young students touch math. Books and pen-and-paper work demand sustained attention. Puzzles require spatial reasoning. These tools are slower than screen-based instruction. They are also, in the framing that parents and the superintendent have endorsed, more aligned with how young minds actually learn.
A Conversation Spreading Beyond Croton
Croton is not alone in questioning the screen-first default. At the state level, a bill has been filed by Sen. Andrew Gounardes that would sharply limit screen use in schools. The bill is positioned as an effort to "create a right to analog learning," a framing that mirrors the language Croton parents used in their organizing.
New York City Public Schools announced a separate policy shift: a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI, coupled with caps on screen time through middle school. That policy came from different concerns than Croton's original parent push, but it points in a similar direction. Screens are not inevitable. Districts can choose.
The Croton policy sits at a moment when that choice, once fringe, has begun to enter mainstream conversation about what schools can do. It is not clear whether the moment will last. But for now, in a village on the Hudson north of Manhattan, screens are no longer the default resource in the earliest years of a child's school life.
