Paul Lukacik teaches ninth-grade English in a small district near West Point, and this fall the list of what his students may keep on their desks has gotten very short. By his account, "all they can have on their desk is a pen, a piece of paper, and the literary source they are using." Nobody in Albany told him to do it. He is one of a growing number of New York teachers who decided on their own that the laptop had stopped earning its place in the room.

The Legislature is now trying to catch up with them. The FOCUS Act, introduced as S10685 by Sen. Andrew Gounardes on August 21 and carried in the Assembly as A11669, would write screen limits into state Education Law for every public school, and the state's largest teachers union has endorsed it. The argument is that teachers should back the bill and then insist on three repairs before it moves. As written, it asks classrooms to go analog without paying for the paper, sets a grade line wider than the one teachers themselves drew, and collides with the state's own testing platform.

What the Bill Would Do

The Senate text is blunt about the youngest grades. From pre-K through fifth grade, schools "shall provide no school-issued devices to pupils," and in grades six through eight devices may be used only through a computer lab or cart model under active supervision. High schools could run one-to-one programs only with caregiver opt-in, and every school would have to let students refuse a device for any assignment or assessment where a reasonable non-digital alternative exists. Exceptions cover individualized education programs, assistive technology, translation and coursework where the technology is the lesson itself, such as computer science. The act would take effect the August 1 after it becomes law, and it currently sits in the Senate Rules Committee.

The sponsors outline the bill as the logical sequel to last year's bell-to-bell cellphone ban. Their justification argues that it makes little sense to limit personal devices "if we are then going to bring them right back in the form of school-issued devices." Gounardes put the case more sharply in September, telling NY Focus, "We've rushed to put these devices in kids' hands, and these platforms in front of their faces without ever asking, 'Is it effective, and cognitively, is it good for kids?'"

Teachers Were Here First

NYSUT's Board of Directors adopted its own screen resolution in May, months before the bill existed. It called for ending individual student screen use from pre-K through second grade, online assessments included. It also sought to keep student-facing AI out of the early grades, bar AI chatbots for students under 16 and preserve paper-and-pencil test options. "Educators are not anti-technology. We are pro-child," NYSUT President Melinda Person said at the time. "Every decision made in the name of innovation must actually serve the students in our classrooms."

The union's members have been describing the problem in plainer terms. Pamela Puttre, a high school English teacher in the Hendrick Hudson district, told NYSUT's own publication this month that "students' reading, writing, comprehension and critical thinking skills have all declined over the last six years, and we struggle with students cheating." Lesli Deninno, who leads the Rockville Centre Teachers Association, described the bind of assigning software she doubts: "I am putting the kids on these programs a certain amount of hours per week, but if you read all the research, it's the exact opposite."

National data released last week points the same direction without settling the argument. A Gallup survey of 2,101 public school teachers, fielded in May, found that 61 percent want students spending less time on devices, 33 percent think current levels are about right and 6 percent want more. Only 42 percent reported having a lot of oversight over what students do on those devices during instruction. The policy teachers most strongly supported, at 58 percent, was more investment in high-quality print and hands-on materials.

The First Repair: Pay for the Paper

That last number is the one Albany should read twice, because the FOCUS Act contains no appropriation. Croton-Harmon, a Westchester district of about 1,500 students, shows what the transition costs when a district does it deliberately. According to NY Focus, the district cut its ed tech software spending by nearly a third and stopped sending devices home with K-5 students. It banned iPads in kindergarten through second grade with few exceptions and set aside around $40,000 for manipulative math games, class sets of books, workbooks, dictionaries and puzzles.

Croton-Harmon could find that money in its own budget. A high-need district upstate that signed a multiyear device contract and let its classroom libraries thin out would face the same mandate with less room to absorb it. The work of rebuilding a print curriculum would land on teachers during their planning periods. Tara Carlucci, a Croton kindergarten teacher, said losing her digital resources felt "like the rug was pulled out underneath us," and she works in a district that planned the change and paid for it. A statewide mandate without a dedicated materials fund would reproduce that feeling in hundreds of buildings at once.

The Second Repair: Draw the Line Where Teachers Drew It

NYSUT's resolution drew its hard line at second grade. The bill draws it at fifth, and the union has endorsed the bill anyway, with Person applauding lawmakers for "moving quickly to begin the crucial work of defining which technologies belong in our classrooms." That gap matters, because the teachers closest to those grades are the ones least convinced that cutting back is the answer. In the Gallup data, elementary teachers were the least likely to want reduced device time, at 55 percent, compared with 67 percent in middle school and 65 percent in high school.

A third-grade teacher who uses a shared cart for a weekly research lesson is not the problem the bill was written to solve. Richard Culatta, who leads the education technology association ISTE, told NY Focus that poor use in many schools "does not mean we should stop using technology in ways that are really helpful." Teachers do not have to accept his whole argument to see that a cart model supervised by an adult, which the bill already permits in middle school, is a reasonable place to meet in grades three through five.

The Third Repair: Reconcile the Bill With the Test

The collision that most needs an answer sits in the testing calendar. NYSED's computer-based testing page states that "in Spring 2026, students in Grades 3-8 will be required to participate in CBT." The FOCUS Act, meanwhile, gives students and caregivers the right to prepare for standardized tests and other mandatory state assessments "via non-digital means as well as to complete such tests or assessments themselves via non-digital means."

Read together, those two sentences describe a fourth grader who spends the year without a school-issued device, sits for a state exam the department requires on a screen, and holds a statutory right to demand paper instead. Teachers would be the ones running both formats on test day, proctoring laptops for some students and paper booklets for others, with no guidance on how the scores compare. The bill's sponsors and NYSED should settle that before a vote, either by restoring a paper option for the elementary grades or by writing a narrow assessment exception into the act.

What Teachers Should Ask For

None of this is a reason to oppose the FOCUS Act. The instinct behind it came from classrooms first, from teachers like Lukacik and from Croton-Harmon's staff. Our own argument this summer that schools should teach AI literacy rather than attempt blanket bans still holds for high school, where the bill preserves room for guided use. The question for educators is whether the law will be written with the people who have to carry it out, or delivered to them in August with a deadline and no budget line.

Teachers have leverage this fall, since the Senate bill has not moved out of Rules and the Assembly version was only referred to the Education Committee on September 2. Locals can put the three repairs in front of their legislators before the session opens in January: a funded materials grant, a cart-model compromise for grades three through five, and an answer on state testing. Lukacik's students already know what a pen and a paperback feel like, and the bill should make sure every district can afford to hand them one.