Mill Valley school district builds out its first rules for classroom screen time

What's happening: Mill Valley School District is spending the 2026-27 school year building what Superintendent Elizabeth Kaufman calls an instructional technology use framework. Kaufman told the Briefing the plan is still taking shape, but described envisioning a document that would define how school-issued devices, generally iPads and Chromebooks, get used in MVSD classrooms at each grade level.

She said she pictures a framework that lays out guiding principles like active versus passive use, summarizes current research, and accounts for the fact that most of the district's state-adopted curricula already require digital tools. "We already prohibit the use of personal devices on campus," Kaufman said. The framework's focus is on how digital curricula are used at each grade level, for what purposes, and how often.

Why it matters: Every MVSD family already navigates screen time at home. This framework is the district's effort to define, grade by grade, how much of the school day should involve a screen, and to build that definition together with parents and teachers before it becomes policy.

The context: Kaufman told the board Aug. 13 the push was driven partly by a 2026 U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the harms of screen use and partly by Los Angeles Unified's new screen-time policy, both of which she cited that evening.