Hello from the national desk — it’s Lily.

I got a taste of an old-fashioned recess this month, when I visited a school in northern Michigan. Kids were climbing a massive, frozen mound of snow as if it were a tower. They screeched into the sky. Today’s big story is about this school — and why the district banned screens for its youngest students in the middle of the year.

We also look at how a bad week in court for Meta could be bellwether for school districts suing social media companies, research into the practice of red-shirting kindergartners, and the unlikely comeback of cursive.

I visited Mesick, Michigan last week, a small, rural town in the northern half of the state, to see what it looks like when a school district makes a drastic pivot in the middle of the school year. 

In Mesick’s case, a meeting between the elementary school principal and superintendent led to an all-out ban of devices in the elementary school. Not just phones, but school-issued Chromebooks and tablets.

The backdrop here is a fierce and swift backlash against technology in classrooms, that’s been building for a while now, championed by a pretty wide swath of folks like Jonathan Haidt, some teachers unions, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle who are introducing bills to limit ed-tech in the classroom.

Mesick Superintendent Jack Ledford told me he’s been influenced by Haidt, as well as research he’s seen that makes him worry that screens are doing more harm than good in the fight to teach students to read.

Some students and educators were surprised — and maybe a little panicked — when Ledford and Principal Elizabeth Kastl announced their no-screen rule. But a month into the experiment, teachers and most students said they are doing pretty well without their Chromebooks (which they’ll still use for state testing this spring) and tablets.

“We're going to create people who can think and read and respond and talk to others and have social interactions and not just be glued to a screen,” Kastl said.

Read the full story here.

Red-shirting is not actually on the rise, and it doesn’t help students much. According to a new analysis from the testing organization NWEA, the practice of having students start kindergarten late peaked during the pandemic and now is back to historical levels. Older students who started school during the 2021-22 school year did do better than their younger classmates at first, but the advantage wore off by third grade.

It’s been a losing week in courtrooms across the West for Meta, the company behind Instagram and Facebook. The legal momentum may suggest what’s to come for school districts challenging the social media giants.

In Los Angeles today, a court found Instagram and YouTube liable for a 20-year-old woman’s addiction to social media, harming her mental health. The verdict awards her with $3 million in damages in what many have called a landmark case.

And on Tuesday in New Mexico, Meta was ordered to pay $375 million after a jury in New Mexico found the company violated state law, and failed to protect children from sexual exploitation. Meta has plans to challenge the verdict, said a company spokesperson.

Dozens of school districts have filed similar lawsuits against Meta, claiming its platforms were designed to ensnare children into social media addiction, harming the students districts serve. Arguments for the consolidated suits could begin this summer.

Districts have argued that they are on the hook for societal ills they didn’t create — but that social media companies like Meta did.

“For school districts in particular, they are saying that now they have to redirect resources that could otherwise be used on teaching and the curriculum to manage these mental health issues that are caused by excessive usage of these social media platforms,” Princess Uchekwe, an attorney in New York, told EdSurge earlier this year. 

That’s how many U.S. citizen children saw at least one parent deported in the first seven months of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to a data analysis by ProPublica. The real number might be higher. Mothers were four times as likely to be deported during that time period as they were during Joe Biden’s administration. 

In some cases, parents ended up in deportation proceedings after a school called the police about problems between children that never resulted in any criminal charges.

That’s 11-year-old Antonio Benavides, an initially skeptical member of a cursive club at a Virginia middle school. With more than two dozen states requiring cursive instruction, there’s reason to believe the writing method is making a comeback.

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