As Colorado Academy’s Technology Team has worked hand-in-hand with faculty and staff over the past several years to implement and refine a comprehensive digital citizenship curriculum, they’ve begun to see encouraging signs that their efforts are making a real impact with CA students and families.
Laura Farmer, Director of Educational Technology, observes, “The discussions we’ve been having in classrooms and advisory meetings—from First and Second Grade all the way to Twelfth—have shifted from ‘How do I use technology?’ to ‘How do I manage my technology use responsibly?’ with decision-making, friendships, and digital well-being top of mind.”
Along with the change in focus, Farmer has seen the needle move in actual CA survey data, which seem to show that fewer students are getting smartphones at an early age, and that when they do, fewer students are immediately jumping onto social media apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.
“The more holistic approach has been a game-changer.”
This evolution, which Farmer has steered in collaboration with her colleague, Educational Technology Coach Meghan Campagna, along with CA teachers and counselors in all three divisions and the support of engaged CA parents and guardians, comes in direct response to years’ worth of student survey data, which showed tech-fueled stress, especially that associated with phone and social media use, emerging earlier than ever. That’s most notable among Fifth and Sixth Graders, the cohort where social pressures and the longing for “grown-up” phones and apps rise to a fever pitch.
The CA survey data are far from unique; across the country, the debates around phones, social media, and kids’ safety and well-being have intensified over the past decade, as technology has grown ever more embedded in families’ lives and both adults and children have raised questions about the unintended consequences being so online.
Anecdotally, CA teachers and counselors, like their peers nationwide, have become more aware of the effects of bullying, unkindness, and other behavior in group chats and social media messages among their young students. The survey data that Farmer began collecting and analyzing underscored the trend: Almost half of CA’s Fifth Graders, for example, indicated either “I know someone who has posted something online that they’ve later regretted” or “I have posted or sent something online that I later regretted.” A third reported that they’d been hassled, made fun of, or mistreated online.
In response, Farmer and Campagna started working with colleagues across the school on ways to encourage both students and their families to slow the rush to smartphones and social media, and to regard these seemingly ubiquitous digital tools with greater caution and awareness. Involved parents and guardians joined in the effort by spreading the word about the “Wait Until 8th” movement, which urges families to hold off until eighth grade before allowing their children to have phones. And school counselors, led by Director of Counseling Services Liza Skipwith, made sure that the correlations between students’ emotional well-being, challenges such as anxiety and depression, and digital habits were placed front and center in every discussion.
Over the past couple of years, these coordinated actions seem to have produced real results. In 2023, 30% of Fifth Graders said they had a smartphone; in 2024, that number was 22%. In Seventh Grade, smartphone ownership declined by 20% year over year. Social media app usage in Middle School, too, declined over the same timeframe, even among students with phones. And across the board, fewer students reported the kind of digital behavior that’s most damaging, such as bullying or threats.
“What it looks like to me,” Farmer explains, “is that CA is successfully leaning into these issues as a school community.”
Partnering with families
Farmer loves talking with faculty, staff, and families about another encouraging statistic she’s gleaned from recent student surveys: 92% of CA Upper School students say they want more face-to-face communication and less of the digital kind. That number likely reflects a feeling common among students of every age, says Farmer.
An elementary-age child, she recounts, came to her recently with their phone and an urgent question. “Ms. Farmer, how can I get off the group chat for my grade?” they asked. No matter what they tried, the student kept finding themselves added back into the noisy thread, receiving distracting, rapid-fire notifications from conversations that were only causes of stress.
“The digital and social pressures to be ‘always on’ are so pervasive,” Farmer notes. “It’s our responsibility, along with our families’, to help support these kids with developing brains in making choices away from the phone and the digital world.”
One way that Farmer and her colleagues are accomplishing this is by offering dedicated Q&A sessions and presentations for parents and guardians in parallel with the classroom visits, advisory meetings, workshops, and assemblies that are regular occurrences for students throughout the school year. These adults-only get-togethers often focus on giving parents and guardians helpful data and talking points they can use when their children are struggling with the tremendous pressures around device usage.
“We’ve all heard kids say, ‘But everyone has a phone’ or ‘All my friends have TikTok,’ but we can show families data proving that at CA, it’s not really everyone, especially in Fifth and Sixth Grades,” Farmer notes. And with that knowledge, CA parents and guardians can become allies—presenting a unified front and a shared message—when those pleas for new tech and apps inevitably crop up.
Another favorite talking point: Everything you do online, such as via text messaging or social media apps such as Instagram, is permanent. That includes Snapchat, Farmer tells families, even though many young users believe that the app’s promise of “vanishing” messages is literally true. On the contrary, she reminds parents and students alike, companies such as Snapchat and Meta preserve digital copies of all that happens on their platforms. And besides, it’s easy enough for an “invisible audience” member, whether acquaintance or stranger, to take screenshots and share almost anything they see on their phones. Your mistakes, in other words, can come back to haunt you at school, during the college admission process, and even later in life.
Encouraging face-to-face time
In her conversations with students just as with parents and guardians, Farmer often circles back to two simple questions: “What truly makes us feel happy? And what makes us feel stressed out?”
As she tells anyone who cares to listen, the answer in many cases is face-to-face, not digital, interaction. “And if that’s true, then what are we doing in our classrooms and across our school community to give more time and space for that kind of communication? Kids are telling us, ‘Phones and apps make life hard for me sometimes, but I don’t know how to give them up.’ How are we taking care of them?”
In CA’s Upper School, where students have already had years to negotiate their relationships with their phones—while building digital citizenship awareness in sessions with Farmer, Campagna, the counseling team, and others—the willingness to disconnect, if even for a few hours, is readily apparent. Ninth Graders coming to the Upper School for the first time keep their phones in their lockers during the school day in order to facilitate building new connections with peers. Older students are allowed to carry their phones, but they must be placed in storage caddies installed in every classroom while teaching and learning are happening.
In the Lower School and Middle School is where much of the most important work happens to set students up for success later on, Farmer notes. An integrated curriculum that extends from First Grade to Eighth Grade uses age-appropriate concepts and language to draw future and current phone users’ attention to the ways that our digital technologies affect our thoughts, feelings, and real-world behavior.
For elementary-age students, education is focused on the ways that their most heavily used apps—YouTube, games, and text-messaging, according to the data—compete for time and attention, sucking focus away from family activities, outdoor time, or other pursuits. “Even with our youngest students, we talk about psychology, about how apps like YouTube use design features like auto-playing videos to keep us glued to our devices,” Farmer explains.
Once students reach Middle School, teachers and counselors pay increasing attention to the impact of technology on friendships in what is already a socially and emotionally volatile time. “Our data show there’s a pivot point around Seventh Grade from YouTube, games, and texting to apps such as Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram,” notes Farmer. “There’s a corresponding increase in the percentage of our students who have done something they regretted or experienced something harmful online.”
By this time, Farmer finds that students are savvy enough to understand the ways that apps can influence behavior, and the curriculum begins to address more directly the problematic business model that drives most social media companies. “Students start to get the idea that Snapchat and TikTok can gain a powerful hold on their emotions; they realize that the ‘infinite scroll’ may not be a source of joy but a source of stress.”
Conversations emphasize the importance of student agency in choosing to be another of the hundreds of millions of customers of the social media and tech giants. “The argument that the biggest companies don’t necessarily have their best interests at heart, but more often want to profit from their time and attention, definitely holds water with this age,” Farmer observes. “They see that in many ways, the digital world they trust can actually be a trap set by marketers.”
These kinds of discussions, continues Farmer, are the key to helping young people develop healthy relationships with technology—and each other. She encourages parents to ask the same questions of their children that Farmer and her colleagues have begun posing at school: Would you like to feel more “in the driver’s seat” with your phone and social media? Are there ways you could limit the amount of time and mental energy these things demand, such as turning off certain notifications?
“Teachers, staff members, and parents especially—we all want to do the right thing for our students,” Farmer acknowledges. “We all recognize that there are wonderful benefits that come with smartphones and apps”—the ability for parents to stay in touch with their kids when they’re on their own, for example—“but at the same time, we want to encourage a balance, where families together agree on limits that are healthier for everyone.”