Following outcry from parents, the Santa Barbara Unified School District has officially banned YouTube at junior highs and high schools.
It is an outcome that a group of district parents have long been fighting for, citing that YouTube is addictive, distractive, and reductive when it comes to their children’s education. One parent told the Independent that her 13-year-old daughter had been sneaking her school-issued iPad into her room at night to watch YouTube shorts, scrolling through short-form videos for hours instead of sleeping, and it was having noticeable effects on her behavior.
That’s just one example of what these parents wanted to prevent: Students using their iPads for recreation, like watching videos or playing games, rather than education. They argued at previous meetings that the district did not have adequate security measures — content filters, website restrictions — in place to prevent students from getting side-tracked by non-educational media.
The district announced the new ban during this Tuesday’s school board meeting, as part of the district’s work with its Balanced Learning and Technology task force. YouTube and other non-educational Google platforms are now blocked on school-issued devices at the junior and senior highs. YouTube was already banned at the elementary level. Teachers will maintain access to YouTube and instructional videos, and they can be made available on Canvas.
But while parents may celebrate the ban, a junior from San Marcos High School, Mateo Gallegos, said he and his peers are not on board. He said that students, particularly low-income students, rely on their devices for educational purposes and translation, and use YouTube to watch educational videos and study for the SAT and ACT. He cited a study he conducted of 318 of his peers, saying that 85.5 percent of them use YouTube for additional support in school.
“I recognize that there are issues that come with unrestricted access to YouTube and other Google services,” Gallegos told the board on Tuesday. “But I encourage you all to think further about the unintended consequences of limiting these services and academic tools for students and how you plan to address the loss of millions of hours of educational videos and other tools to students who relied on them most.”
New content filters and restrictions will prevent junior high and high school students from accessing YouTube on their iPads.
Additionally, summer plans for students’ iPads were laid out. All students in TK through 6th grade leave their devices at school.
The Educational Technology Services team is collecting all 7th graders’ iPads to install new on-device content filters over the summer.
Incoming 9th graders will keep their iPads at home, but the iPads will be “bricked,” so students cannot use them. Exceptions will be made for students taking classes at Santa Barbara City College over the summer. Parents can also opt in for their children to continue to use their iPads normally.
Tenth through 12th graders will still take their iPads home over the summer, unless their parents opt out and elect a “summer shutdown,” which is now an option for the first time.
“I want to thank the Balanced Learning Tech Committee; all the parents who have been partnering with us to do this work, this could not have been done without some of the ways they have sent us resources, research, information … some of our teachers have done the same,” said Superintendent Hilda Maldonado. “This is the perfect time for us to be doing this because this will also not interrupt some of the instructional things we were concerned about in May when many of these devices are used for testing.”
