LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles Unified School District school board voted unanimously to limit screen time across all grade levels beginning this fall, eliminating it entirely for elementary-age students. The district is the United States' second-largest school system, and since the COVID-19 pandemic it had focused on bringing technology into the classroom.

Since January, Alabama, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia have passed legislation to reevaluate technology's role in education instruction and assessment, and more than 10 other states are considering similar restrictions on screen time in schools. Utah's back-to-basics law takes effect on July 1 and gives the state board of education until the end of the calendar year to draft a new policy for schools.

"We're not going to get this exactly right on the first try, but we're certainly moving in the right direction," Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, said of the Utah measure.

The Missouri state House passed a screen time bill this spring with strong bipartisan support, and it is on its way to the state Senate. The bill, introduced by a Republican lawmaker, initially called for no more than 45 minutes of screen time per day and mandated cursive writing instruction. Changes to the legislation gave school districts more room to set their own policies, and the version that passed requires districts to come up with their own rules on limiting screen time.

Missouri state Rep. Kathy Steinhoff, a Democrat and former teacher, said she could not support the original proposal. "When I saw that bill and I was like, 'Oh, there's no way that I could get behind this,'" she said. "And when you try to make it more of a checklist … it loses its ability to really, I think, have a meaningful education for our kids."

A proposed bill in Vermont, which raises concerns about student data privacy, cited the work of T. Philip Nichols, an associate professor of English education at Baylor University, and would allow parents to opt their children out of screen time.

Tracy Weeks, senior director of education policy and strategy at Instructure, an education technology company that creates digital classroom-management tools like Canvas and Mastery, questioned blanket limits. The tools are used by about 30% of K-12 students nationwide. "It's sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater," Weeks said. "When we talk about things like screen time, [it] gets really hard because not all minutes are equal depending on what you're actually doing."

Schools Beyond Screens, an advocacy group with thousands of parents, was formed in Los Angeles by Lila Byock and eventually expanded around the United States. Byock began to worry about her son's time on his school-issued iPad when he was 11, and her oldest son was penalized for not having the device during a physical education class. She formed the group after talking to fellow parents.