Dear Senator Tuberville,
I am writing to you as a parent and a concerned Alabamian regarding what is happening inside our public school classrooms.
Across our state, teachers report shrinking attention spans, falling reading and math scores, rising anxiety, and increasing behavioral disruptions. At the same time, schools are expanding mental health staffing, intervention programs, and behavioral services at unprecedented levels.
These two trends are not unrelated.
Over the past two decades, classrooms have undergone a structural transformation. Students are now issued Chromebooks as a condition of participation. Assignments are routed through Google platforms. Instructional content is streamed through YouTube. Communication, grading, testing and remediation are increasingly mediated through screens.
Technology is no longer supplemental. It is structural.
In January 2026, cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the U.S. Senate about the impact of screen-based environments on learning and cognitive development. He said that measurable skills such as “literacy, numeracy, attention, and higher-order reasoning have declined” across much of the developed world during the same period that classroom technology use dramatically expanded.
Horvath explained that durable learning requires sustained focus, repetition, retrieval, and cognitive effort. Screen-mediated environments, by contrast, encourage task switching, divided attention, and constant novelty. The brain has not changed, but the environment has.
That scientific concern is now intersecting with legal admissions.
In 2023, Baldwin County Public Schools, along with Montgomery and Tuscaloosa, filed a lawsuit against multiple technology and social media companies, alleging that certain platforms were intentionally engineered to addict children and contribute to psychological harm. The complaint describes excessive screen exposure as harmful to adolescents’ mental health, sleep, and emotional well-being. It acknowledges record levels of anxiety and depression among students.
Yet within Baldwin County Schools, Google systems and YouTube remain required components of classroom instruction and workflow.
This is the contradiction.
If districts are formally asserting that digital platforms harm children, why are elements of that same ecosystem embedded into the mandatory structure of the school day?
Students cannot realistically opt out without sacrificing access to assignments, grading portals, or instructional materials. Continuous digital participation has become a condition of public education.
Meanwhile, mental health infrastructure inside schools continues to expand. Districts contract with outside providers. State funding is tied to behavioral screenings and intervention programs. Federal reimbursement pathways, including Medicaid billing, are activated through documented diagnoses and treatment plans.
As attention and behavioral challenges rise, intervention programs grow. Service contracts multiply. Evaluations lead to formal classifications and ongoing services.
Before we expand treatment systems further, we must examine whether the instructional environment itself is contributing to the problem.
This is not an anti-technology argument. It is a developmental alignment question. If sustained attention is foundational to learning and screen-mediated environments fragment that attention, then mandating those environments warrants serious review.
I am asking you to bring awareness to this issue at the federal level. Congressional oversight hearings on classroom technology, platform use in public schools, and the intersection of digital dependency and youth mental health would provide needed transparency. Parents deserve clarity. Educators deserve support grounded in science. Children deserve classrooms structured around how their brains actually learn.
Alabama families are watching what is happening inside our schools. We need leadership willing to ask difficult questions.
Thank you for your time and for your service to our state.
Rebecca Watson is the founder of Fairhope Faith Collective, a grassroots community dedicated to encouraging transparency, accountability, and family values in our schools and local government, while supporting leaders who honor the trust of Fairhope families. Send her an email at [email protected] if you would like to get involved with causes across our state.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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