A quiet week from the outside, a busy one inside.
Hi everyone,
From the outside this may have looked like an uneventful week. From inside it has been a busy one, and I wanted to bring you up to speed before next week.
Our conversation with the district.
After the April 30 board meeting, we sent a follow-up email to Superintendent Amii Thompson. We restated our ask for transparency on classroom technology and pressed for specificity on the goals she described in her own message as already shared with our community. We asked for that specificity in writing before next week's community meeting, because the conversation will be far more productive with that information in hand. Amii acknowledged the email on Wednesday. She has been out of the office for much of the week and has not yet responded substantively. We hope to hear back before May 14. We will publish this correspondence.
We also heard from three of our five board members this week.
One encouraged us to keep showing up and keep telling our stories. That kind of signal matters, and we are going to.
Another reached out asking for the peer-reviewed research underlying our recent public comment and was appreciative of what we shared. The studies we have been citing are on our website at intentionaltechbi.org/research. We are happy to send specific ones to anyone who asks.
Board President Evan Saint Clair invited me for a one-on-one conversation, and we spoke for an hour. I want to share what I took away, because it shapes how we approach next week. Evan engaged seriously and listened, and I appreciated that. He has not yet been convinced that a board-level resolution is the right vehicle for this work. He prefers to see change come through collaboration with teachers, principals, and the district. He raised concerns about cost, and about what specifically other districts have done and whether their actions have produced outcomes.
These are real concerns and they deserve real responses.
On collaboration: this community has been seeking exactly that, for years. Many of you have raised these questions in classrooms and at the building level for far longer than this campaign has existed. The campaign exists because earlier collaboration did not produce the change families were asking for.
On cost: paper, printing, and physical materials are real budget items. They should also not be barriers to change. Cancelling a single software subscription (like Happy Numbers) would cover the paper needs of at least one of our K-4 schools for a year, in perpetuity. Tools like mini-whiteboards could reduce paper consumption. I will start my own paper mill and cut down every tree in sight, if that is what it takes.
On peer district outcomes: It is fair to ask whether other districts' actions have produced outcomes. It is also worth noting that the rollout of classroom technology in BISD did not pass through that kind of evidence test on the way in. The standard for scaling back should not be higher than the standard for scaling up. That said, we have been and will continue to prepare for these requests. We have compiled a detailed analysis of more than thirty U.S. districts, including the only district to date with published year-over-year outcomes data. We will share that with the board ahead of next week.
One more thing on the week.
Katherine Bouma at the Bainbridge Island Review watched the public comment at the April 30th meeting and is writing a piece on this movement later this month. The community is the source. We are the response. We are grateful that the local press is covering what so many of you have raised.
Looking ahead to Thursday, May 14.
This is the most consequential day of this work so far. Two events back to back in the BISD boardroom. We'll send out more details next week. If you can only make one, I'd prioritize giving public comment at the board meeting. Especially, if we do not get answers from the district in time for the community meeting.
- 4:30 PM, Community meeting hosted by the district
- 5:30 PM, Public comment sign-up
- 5:45 PM, Regular board meeting
Public comment has been the engine of community-led work like this across the country, and it is the engine here.
A note to close on.
We have been studying how peer districts are implementing this work. Granville County Public Schools in North Carolina has been running Tech-Free Tuesdays and Thursdays since the start of this school year. Before launching, the district published a Tech Free Playbook for Educators that gave teachers specific activities, weekly flow suggestions, and clear guidance on intentional planning. The framing throughout is one we share: the goal is intentional use of technology, not removal of it. These are not unsolvable problems. There are dozens of ways for us to take significant steps in the right direction by next school year.
Have a great weekend.
Jordan and The Intentional Tech Team
P.S - In my last email I had a typo. I said something was misinformation, when I very much meant to say it was not. I have thought about this every day. The version of the email linked below has the correction.
Past Emails: