The average daily YouTube usage per account is roughly 90 minutes per day. In Santa Barbara classrooms, that number is about to be zero.
The Santa Barbara Unified School District has banned YouTube at junior high and high schools.
Steve Venz, chief operations officer of the district’s Educational Technology Services, announced the ban and a series of other changes at Tuesday night’s school board meeting.
YouTube and other non-instructional Google platforms have been banned on iPads at all junior high and high schools. YouTube is already banned on elementary school iPads.
The changes represent another move in the chess game between the district and concerned parents over the handling of safety and distraction issues on student devices, who’ve pushed for a YouTube ban.
But the Tuesday night announcement wasn’t a victory for all.
Mateo Gallegos, a junior at San Marcos High School, decried the ban.
“I recognize that there are issues that come with unrestricted access to YouTube and other Google services,” Gallegos said during public comment. “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.”
Over the past month, a handful of district parents have been vocal about the various safety and wellbeing concerns associated with what students can access on the district-issued iPads.
At its last meeting, they said that despite students being instructed to use iPads for educational purposes, they have been using it recreationally, too. They can play games and, up until recently, watch videos on YouTube.
Parents denounced this as a failure of the district to not implement the proper content filters, safety features and website restrictions that maintain the iPads’ educational functionality.
Gallegos, however, framed the loss of YouTube as an equity issue. He said that banning access to YouTube would negatively impact socioeconomically disadvantaged students, who make up roughly 60% of the district, and rely on the devices for educational purposes.
For example, he said, some students could use YouTube to study for the SAT and ACT.
The San Marcos junior said he conducted a survey at his school to understand how students would be impacted by new policies. To support his argument, Gallegos said that of the 318 students he surveyed, 85.5% said they use YouTube for help on school purposes when they need additional support.
In addition to the ban, the Educational Technology Services team began collection of seventh graders’ iPads. Over the summer, the district will install a new on-device filter on all the junior high school devices.
Incoming freshmen will keep their iPads home, but the district will make them mostly unusable. Exceptions will be made for certain students, such as those taking classes at Santa Barbara City College over the summer. Parents can also opt-in for their children to maintain use of the iPad.
Tenth through twelfth graders will still take their iPads home over the summer, but parents for the first time will have the option to opt-out.
District Superintendent Hilda Maldonado thanked the district’s Balanced Learning and Technology Task Force for leading the changes on district devices.
