Has your child been harmed by their school-issued device?
Most parents assume that the computers provided to their children by their schools are safe for them to use unsupervised. Unfortunately, that is not true.
Even though they are mandatory in most districts, the laptops and tablets that students use for school are not designed for children to safely use at school and at home. Instead, these devices are the same general-purpose devices intended for adult users.
This means that, by default, students’ school-issued devices are portals to the open internet. As such, they pose all manner of dangers to children. Out of the box, school devices are designed to feed students content that is distracting rather than educational; allow access to extreme violence and pornography; enable cyberbullying; and expose children to dangerous adult strangers.
Many children, especially those with conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and certain levels of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), find it difficult to remain on task when using their school computers.
With few exceptions, commercial web browsers, search engines, and social platforms are designed for engagement, not education. “Engagement” is industry terminology for how much time a user spends interacting with an app or website, and is the metric by which Big Tech measures success. Engagement is engineered. Companies use manipulative design techniques to hook users on their products, to keep them scrolling, clicking, and generating more data for the company and at the expense of the user.
The results can be severely disruptive: parents have reported that their children watched over 10,000 YouTube videos on their school computer in a matter of months; others have reported that their children have used their school devices to compulsively game, shop, or use social media instead of doing schoolwork.
Children are frequently served age-inappropriate, harmful content at school, often without seeking it out. A child has no control over the search algorithms that companies use to recommend content, so innocent searches can lead to dangerous content.
In a physical school library, children with questions about their changing bodies, dating and relationships, or world events can find resources, vetted by experts, that give answers in an age-appropriate way and reflect the values of their community. But on their school devices, searches about health, sex, and relationships often lead to pornographic websites; searches about world events return uncensored videos of violence and death.
No parent expects to send their child to school and have them encounter hardcore pornography or videos of beheadings or mass shootings, but parents have reported these things and more.
School devices often provide students with 24/7 access to their peers in in the name of collaboration and group learning.
But this ignores reality : where children used to escape their bullies after school and on the weekend, they are now vulnerable at all times, even in their own homes.
Cyberbullying is extremely dangerous for young people. Parents have reported that their children have been relentlessly harassed while trying to do homework, late into the night, disrupting their sleep and leading to anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide.
Children often come into contact with strangers through their school devices. An investigator with the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force recently estimated that between a quarter and half of cases in his region that resulted in the in-person sexual abuse of a child began on the child’s school computer.
Gangs of violent cybercriminals target children on seemingly harmless online platforms like Roblox, Minecraft, and Discord, grooming them into sharing explicit images of themselves and physically harming themselves or others.
Criminals deceive children into sharing explicit images of themselves, and then blackmail them by threating to share the images with their friends, family, and social media followers. In dozens of cases, the targeted children, often boys and young men, have taken their own lives.
Students use the cameras on their school devices to take images not only of themselves, but also of one another. Further, the rapid deployment of AI deepfake generators had led to a crisis of peer-on-peer image-based sexual abuse. These actual and synthetic images disproportionately target girls and young women.
Parents never imagine that any of this could happen on their child’s school-issued device. And none of this would be possible on devices that were designed only to educate kids and keep them safe.
How do I know what kind of device my child uses?
Most schools use one of three digital products: Google Chromebooks, Apple iPads, and Microsoft Windows computers.
Google Chromebooks may look like any ordinary laptop, but they run a internet-based operating system, ChromeOS, that is designed and maintained by Google.
There are a number of Chromebook hardware manufacturers. Look for the segmented red, yellow, green, and blue ChromeOS logo on the device body or on the home screen.
Chromebooks are typically used by children in grades 3–12, but may be used in younger grades.
Apple iPads are tablets that are designed and built by Apple. They feature an image of an apple on the back of the device. A removable magnetic keyboard and cover may be included.
iPads are typically used by children in grades K–3, but may be used by older grades.
Many hardware manufacturers make laptop computers that are compatible with the Windows operating system. In addition, Microsoft makes its own first-party hardware, including the Surface Laptop and the Surface Pro tablet.
Windows devices will have the Windows logo that consists of four blue squares on the task bar located at the bottom of the screen. Microsoft Surface devices have the four-squares logo embossed on the back of the device in a reflective material.
Windows computers are typically used by children in grades 3–12, but may be used in younger grades.
What the EdTech Law Center is doing about it.
School device providers, including Google, Apple, and Microsoft, know that they are selling hardware and software into K-12 schools to be used by children as young as five years old. These companies have a duty to (1) make those devices safe for K-12 students, and (2) warn the public that their products give children virtually unrestricted access to the open internet.
Big Tech could make products that keep students safe and help them learn. Instead, these companies have forced devices into schools that prioritize their bottom line over student safety and learning, and have shifted the burden of making their devices less dangerous onto administrators, teachers, parents, and even students themselves.
That is unacceptable. Whether at school or at home, students should be as safe with their school-issued computers as they are doing work from a textbook with pen and paper.
Contact us for a free case evaluation.
If your child has been harmed by their school computer, please identify what kind of device it is and complete this intake form. One of our intake specialists will evaluate your claims and contact you if we believe you may have a case.
School Computer Intake Form
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