Unfortunately, tech misuse can often impact student learning. Whether it’s a forwarded email or a series of text messages that someone took screenshots of, resolving conflicts and digital drama can often hijack school resources and take time away from learning.

How do you make digital citizenship a priority, given the competing interests or initiatives that school leaders often face, either from their districts or from their own community? Well, you have to have the right people on the bus. My philosophy is that my kids deserve the very best teachers, the very best counselors, the very best custodian, the very best office staff. I only hire the best.

So when I do hire the best, I make sure that they’re going to be able to carry out some of these initiatives that are very, very important and need to be prioritized on school campuses.

Absolutely. So get the right team together and you won’t have that issue, right? You can’t have competing interests because you’re not going to get the support that you need. You have to continue to have conversations with your directors, your assistant superintendents, your superintendents, about some of the things that you want to put into place.

Can you point to some of the resources that you’re using and examples of some of the digital citizenship work you all are doing? Well, I would say Common Sense Education, start there. There is such an amazing amount of information and support that you can just pull directly from to start your own digital citizenship program.

What are ways to support parents in addressing digital citizenship? Definitely work with your parents and your community … They’re the ones that need to have buy-in and understand the “why” behind digital citizenship.

We also have a great relationship with the Riverside Police Department. I give them a call and they go do a welfare check right away on those students to ensure that they are safe online. We then follow up with them the next day with counseling.

How do you get middle school students to get off their phones? With smartphones, kids have access to everything, 24/7. With all the social media, Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat — and there’s many others that are popping up every day that we don’t even know about — those [platforms] are creating havoc on school campuses.

What we’ve done here is to ensure that, one, students have access to cellphones in an emergency. But, two, they don’t have access to cellphones during the school day to disrupt instruction and to utilize social media for some things that might cause cyberbullying or digital drama on campus.

Students have to put their cellphones in their backpack when they enter our gates, and they cannot take them out until they leave. And in the eight weeks we’ve been in school this year, we have not had a single cyberbullying incident.

How have students responded to not having access to their devices? We have increased our student achievement based upon our student grades. At lunch, it is amazing to watch kids talk to each other. They’re not sitting on their phone, taking pictures of each other, doing TikToks and all that stuff.

They’re actually talking to each other, which is really amazing. Inside the classroom, teachers are able to focus on instruction, instead of focusing on telling kids to put their cellphones away.

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Riverside Unified offers an array of resources to help school leaders across the district. For helpful documents to implement at your site, feel free to click on the links below.