Look Up: Removing the Next Distraction
Protecting Instructional Time: YouTube at PVMS
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Look Up - Removing the Next Distraction
Dear PVMS Families,
In August 2022, we wrote to PVMS families about our decision to have cell phones go "Away for the Day" (https://www.psdnet.org/o/pms/article/801713). That decision, like every decision we make, started with one question: how can we maximize instructional minutes and minimize distractions? Coming out of COVID, that was a major challenge. As a building staff, we saw that cell phones were a major distraction and the source of many of our behavior and bullying problems. We then asked a second question: exactly what academic value did cell phones bring to the school day? We could not think of one.
At the time, it was a drastic step, and honestly, what surprised us most was how many students thanked us for it. Without intending to, we had lifted an enormous amount of social anxiety off our students. Many had worried that if they missed a text, a Snap or a like and did not answer in time, they would lose their place in their social circle. We had not even considered this when we made the decision. With no one able to reach their phone, students had a built-in reason not to answer their friends during the school day, and the attention and energy they had spent on social worries could go back into learning.
2022 TO TODAY: ONE DISTRACTION AT A TIME
Since 2022, PVMS has removed one distraction after another. Each change came from the same core value: protecting instructional time.
- Away for the Day (2022): phones, earbuds and smartwatches off and out of sight all day, including lunch
- E-hallpass (2022): to minimize instructional time lost in the hallways
- GoGuardian, then Deledao: monitoring and filtering on school Chromebooks, including the Penalty Box for students who misuse their devices
- Chromebooks shut down at 10 PM, so school devices do not compete with sleep
- Eagle Period: interventions, make-ups and pull-outs moved out of core instruction
- Device time ended (2026-27)
- Trimesters (2026-27): 12-week electives instead of 9, with less context switching
- The 6th grade wing
This school year, New Jersey began requiring every public school to keep phones away from bell to bell. PVMS students had already been living that way for four years, and today they do not remember our building any other way. But one major distraction remained: YouTube on school-issued Chromebooks. This fall, we asked the same questions about it, and our web-filter data gave us a clear answer.
Beginning Tuesday, November 10, PVMS will move to a restrictive YouTube setting on all student Chromebooks.
This article explains what we found, what is changing, and the cognitive science behind the decision. It also asks something of you: terms like cognitive load and task switching belong in every household's vocabulary, and the final section offers practical steps families can take at home.
SCHOOL SHOULD BE THE PLACE TO ESCAPE THE NOISE
As we are all well aware, our kids are growing up surrounded by screens. Notifications buzz at the dinner table, feeds refresh without end, and some of the biggest companies in the world compete for every minute of their (and our own) attention, and much of that is beyond a school's control.
What happens inside our building is not. For nearly seven hours a day, PVMS decides what fills our students' attention, and we do not want to add to the noise that they already live with. We do not want to be part of the problem of encouraging digital habits that are hard to break.
We want PVMS to be the place where it is normal to be screen-free, to LOOK UP (from devices) and to be human. That means:
- Reading a long chapter without a video playing in another tab
- Working through hard problems without a feed distracting them
- Talking with the classmate across the table instead of scrolling past them
- Sitting with a moment of boredom long enough for a real thought to arrive
This is not a rejection of technology. Chromebooks, educational video and digital tools have a place at PVMS when they serve learning. But technology must earn its place in the school day, and recreational YouTube has not.
School should be one place in a child's day where their attention belongs to them, their teachers and the people in front of them.
FALL 2026: WHAT WE FOUND SO FAR
This year, we moved to a new web-filtering system, Deledao, which gives us a much clearer view of what students access on school Chromebooks. Before we blocked YouTube Shorts, in 13 school days in October, PVMS students logged 1,109 hours of YouTube during class periods on school Chromebooks. Only 0.3% of the videos they opened were educational.
Building-wide, October 1-21 (13 school days):
- Students who used YouTube at school: 333
- Students on YouTube on a typical day: about 158
- YouTube videos opened: 38,706 (about 3,000 per day)
- YouTube time during class periods: 1,109 hours (about 85 per day)
- Share of views that were YouTube Shorts: 43%
- Share of views that were educational: 0.3%
The habit grows with each grade. In 6th grade, YouTube is mostly a lunchtime habit. By 8th grade, nearly all of it happens during class time.
- 6th grade: 179 hours of class-time YouTube; 43% of YouTube time at lunch; 0 students with 10+ hours in class
- 7th grade: 292 hours of class-time YouTube; 29% at lunch; 6 students with 10+ hours in class
- 8th grade: 638 hours of class-time YouTube; 13% at lunch; 22 students with 10+ hours in class
What students watch. Music is the largest category, at about 45% of class-time YouTube, much of it lyrical music playing in a background tab while students work. The rest is mostly memes, sports highlights, gaming and sometimes full-length movies.
How they watch. The typical class-time video stayed open about 30 seconds before the next one. This is constant switching, not occasional viewing.
About the data: figures come from PVMS's Deledao web-filter logs for student accounts on school Chromebooks, on campus only. Time measures how long a YouTube tab was open, capped at 60 minutes per video. No individual students are identified.
NOT JUST PVMS: THE NATIONAL PICTURE
What we see on PVMS Chromebooks matches a national pattern: 13-year-olds are reading less and achieving less, and the decline began in the early 2010s.
- Achievement. The 2025 NAEP long-term trend results, released in June 2026, show 13-year-olds down about 4 points in reading and almost 10 points in math since 2020. Average reading performance is now about where it was in 1971.
- Reading habits. The share of 13-year-olds who read for fun almost every day fell from 35% in 1984 to 14% in 2025.
- The smartphone shift. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt dates a "great rewiring" of childhood to roughly 2010-2015, when smartphones and social media became nearly universal among adolescents. The timing lines up with the decline. His thesis is influential and also debated, since much of the evidence is correlational.
As educator Dr. Brad Johnson puts it: "Scrolling is a sprint. Reading is a marathon." Children who spend their days in 15-second bursts are then asked to sit with a complex passage for 30 or 60 minutes. That stamina is built through practice, and every hour spent scrolling is an hour it is not being built.
OCTOBER 26 TO NOVEMBER 10: WHAT WE ARE DOING
We are making this change in two steps, and the first step taught us something.
Step 1 - YouTube Shorts were blocked on Monday, October 26
Shorts made up 43% of student YouTube views, and fewer than 1 in 100 had anything to do with learning.
In the week after the block, Shorts on student Chromebooks fell from about 1,300 a day to almost none. But students did not spend that time differently. They moved to full-length music videos during class. Blocking one feature changed what students watched, not how much.
Step 2 - Restrictive YouTube mode begins Tuesday, November 10
On student Chromebooks:
- Entertainment categories are blocked, including Music, Gaming, Comedy, Entertainment, Sports, Film & Animation and People & Blogs.
- YouTube's Strict Mode is turned on.
- Education, Science & Technology, News and Nonprofit videos remain available.
Videos teachers choose for instruction will still work. Our Deledao filtering system lets teachers approve a specific video for their class when it is needed for a lesson. Our existing expectation has always been that Chromebooks are for school work only. These settings allow us to enforce it more consistently.
FIVE IDEAS EVERY FAMILY SHOULD KNOW
Our job as a school is to create the conditions for deep learning and thinking to happen. Learning new skills and information requires deep concentration, and that concentration is far harder to reach when something else is pulling a student's attention away. These five ideas explain why.
1. Working memory. The mental space we use to hold and work with information in the moment. Research and cognitive science show that we can only hold a few things at one time. There is limited space to work with in real time, so we must do as much as we can to limit brain space invaders.
2. Cognitive load. Everything competing for that limited cognitive space. Some of that load is the learning itself while the rest is extra (Sweller, van Merrienboer & Paas, 2019). Notifications, texts and music in another tab all add extra load without adding any learning. A student reading a hard text with lyrical music in the background while answering texts is splitting the space the reading needs. When the load grows large enough, cognitive overload happens and learning becomes difficult.
3. Task switching and attention residue. Every switch between tasks costs time, and part of the mind stays on the last thing (Leroy, 2009). A student who stops writing to "just check" a video, a text or their phone has to rebuild their train of thought when they return. The interruption costs more than the seconds spent watching. Students need deep and focused attention in order to retain knowledge.
4. Variable reward. When rewards are unpredictable, we keep checking for the next one. Short-form video feeds are built on this principle. The next Short might be hilarious or boring, and not knowing is what keeps a thumb swiping long past bedtime. The big tech companies know this, and their profit margin depends on how much attention we keep on our phones.
5. Lyrical interference. Words in music compete with the language processing that reading and writing require. A review of 36 studies found music with lyrics reduced reading comprehension, while instrumental music showed essentially no effect (Vasilev, Kirkby & Angele, 2018). A student at home doing homework with a favorite song playing may feel focused, but comprehension drops when the music has words.
Distraction also spreads. In classroom experiments, students who could simply see a classmate's screen scored 17 points lower on a comprehension test (Sana, Weston & Cepeda, 2013).
In fairness to the evidence: not every interruption costs the same, short-video feeds are not identical to gambling, and instrumental music is not automatically harmful. The case for action rests on what is well established - distraction during learning costs learning.
WHAT FAMILIES CAN DO AT HOME
PVMS is only part of the day for our students, and the same science applies at home. The most effective steps are simple.
1. One screen during homework. Put phones in another room and close video tabs. Check messages during natural breaks, not in the middle of a task.
2. Quiet for reading and writing. Try silence. If music helps your child settle, choose instrumental music without lyrics.
3. Devices out of bedrooms at night. Charge phones and tablets outside the bedroom. School Chromebooks already shut down at 10 PM; phones do not.
4. Set limits on short-video feeds. Shorts, Reels and TikTok are designed to be hard to stop. Most phones and YouTube accounts include settings to limit or turn off short-form video.
5. Read together. Ten minutes of reading at home, with no screens nearby, builds the attention and stamina students need in class.
6. Use the vocabulary. Talk about cognitive load, working memory and task switching at home. Children who understand why focus matters are more likely to protect it themselves.
LOOKING UP, TOGETHER
Our theme this year is Look Up. Stay Human. Lift Others. We want PVMS to be the place in a child's day where it is normal to look up - to read deeply, think hard and talk with the people in front of them. Removing recreational YouTube during the school day is one more step toward that goal.
We heard concerns in 2022 that there would be backlash about our cell phone policy. Today, it is just something that we do, and we have all seen how students benefit. We expect the same here, and we hope this change sparks conversations in your home about how technology fits into your family's day.
If you have questions, please feel free to contact us at (856) 540-6200. Thank you for taking the time to read this. We hope you all have an awesome long weekend!!
Respectfully,
Dr. Adam J. Slusher
Principal, Pennsville Middle School
Mr. Kevin Mulhern
Assistant Principal, Pennsville Middle School
REFERENCES
Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation. Penguin Press.
Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002
National Assessment Governing Board (2026). NAEP long-term trend assessments show different trends for 9- and 13-year-olds. https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2026/naep-long-term-trend-assessments-show-different-trends-for-9-and-13-year-olds.html
Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education, 62, 24-31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.10.003
Sweller, J., van Merrienboer, J. J. G., & Paas, F. (2019). Cognitive architecture and instructional design: 20 years later. Educational Psychology Review, 31. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09465-5
Vasilev, M. R., Kirkby, J. A., & Angele, B. (2018). Auditory distraction during reading: A Bayesian meta-analysis of a continuing controversy. Perspectives on Psychological Science.