Tampa Bay schools rethink screens as Europe restores traditional instruction.
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When Hillsborough County schools reopen Monday, kindergarten classrooms will begin the year with fewer logins. The District is removing i-Ready, Amira and Imagine Learning from daily instruction in kindergarten through second grade. Printed books, handwriting, classroom discussion and work with physical materials will take up more of the school day.
Students in grades three through five will continue using digital programs, generally for 30 to 45 minutes a week per platform. Computers remain available for testing and lessons in which teachers consider them useful. The change affects routine instruction rather than access to technology.
Hillsborough, the nation’s seventh-largest School District, describes the policy as a return to developmentally appropriate teaching. Sarah Garcia, its executive director of elementary education, offered a more candid explanation to WUSF. After the pandemic, schools never fully corrected the habits formed during remote learning. One-to-one devices remained on desks, while the number of programs and the minutes assigned to them kept growing.
Pasco County is making a similar adjustment under Superintendent John Legg, a Republican former state legislator who chaired education Committees in both chambers of the Florida Legislature. Its new guidance, “Learning First: Limited Screens, Maximum Learning,” emphasizes direct instruction, paper-and-pencil work, handwriting, reading and classroom discussion. Kindergarten and first-grade students are expected to spend roughly 30 minutes of the school day on computers.
The policy leaves room for diagnostic testing, research and assistive technology. Pasco presents the limits as guidance for teachers, without creating another compliance system.
These decisions put two large Tampa Bay districts ahead of Florida’s statewide policy. The Department of Education’s latest Digital Classrooms update, published in December, describes schools using one-to-one devices, adaptive platforms, digital workspaces, data dashboards and virtual or augmented reality. It calls for “purposeful integration,” but sets no expectations by age and provides no statewide measure of classroom screen time.
Scandinavian governments have begun asking those questions at the national level.
Sweden moved early toward digital instruction and became one of Europe’s most closely watched school systems. Its government has since committed approximately $221 million between 2023 and 2025 to restore printed textbooks, followed by about $58 million annually from 2026. Since July 2025, Swedish preschools have no longer been required to use digital tools. Instruction for children younger than 2 is supposed to be screen-free, with restricted use for older preschool students. Sweden also retained paper national examinations for third graders and abandoned plans for a new national school digitalization strategy.
The changes followed declines in Swedish reading and mathematics scores in the 2022 Program for International Student Assessment, although the country remained above the OECD average. The results do not prove that screens caused the decline. Performance fell across many countries after the pandemic. A later OECD analysis found that moderate educational use of technology can accompany stronger performance, while intensive use is associated with lower results and greater distraction.
Denmark has followed a similar course. Its 15-year-olds reported using digital devices for schoolwork for an average of 3.8 hours a day, the highest figure among the 81 systems participating in PISA 2022. Nearly three-quarters said they used digital resources in every or almost every lesson.
The Danish government responded with national recommendations encouraging mobile-free schools, blocking irrelevant websites and putting computers away when a lesson does not require them. It allocated about $83 million for books. Digital competence remains part of the curriculum, but devices are no longer supposed to determine the structure of the school day.
Florida has moved more aggressively against students’ personal phones. Elementary and middle school students may not use them during the school day, while high school students are prohibited from using them during instruction. Those rules do not cover the school-issued laptop sitting on the same desk.
The American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend a fixed classroom limit. It asks schools to consider whether a device serves an educational purpose and what its use displaces. An application assisting a child with a disability cannot be assessed in the same way as a room of first graders completing routine exercises while a teacher monitors a dashboard.
Florida’s testing system also requires computers. State progress monitoring is computer-based and computer-adaptive, beginning in the early grades. Hillsborough and Pasco are therefore addressing how much ordinary teaching should be organized around the devices and commercial platforms that grew alongside that testing infrastructure.
Legg can now provide evidence Florida does not collect consistently: device minutes by grade, spending on platforms, changes in teacher workload and student performance before and after the new policy. Florida’s recently appointed Education Commissioner Henry Mack could use the same information when his department prepares its next Digital Classrooms update.
Pasco and Hillsborough should be able to report at the end of the school year how much classroom time returned to books, handwriting and teacher-led lessons, what happened to software costs and whether the change appeared in the work students produced.
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