Palo Alto parents are petitioning to strip AI, apps and one-to-one laptops from classrooms. The same month, an SF ed-tech fund closed $265M to build more of it.

In the heart of Silicon Valley, a group of parents is asking their school district to power down. Candice Wei, a Palo Alto Unified parent, started a local chapter of Schools Beyond Screens — the grassroots outfit that helped push Los Angeles Unified into a bell-to-bell phone ban — and handed trustees a petition seeking an all-day phone ban, homework on paper, a parental opt-out from ed-tech, and shared computer carts in place of the laptop-per-student model. It had drawn 228 signatures by mid-July, according to Palo Alto Online (external source, opens in a new tab), with families objecting to being pushed into "emerging technologies with unknown developmental and ethical implications."

Legally, they are pushing on a door that is already ajar. California's Phone-Free School Act (external source, opens in a new tab) — enacted in the fall of 2024 — ordered every district in the state to adopt a smartphone policy by July 1. Some neighbors have moved past phones entirely: the Mountain View-Los Altos board voted to bar smart glasses (external source, opens in a new tab) on Aug. 3, with members calling the AI-equipped eyewear more a cheating-and-recording hazard than a learning tool.

Here is the part the public-comment period leaves out — the money, and it runs the opposite way. In the same stretch of August, the San Francisco ed-tech investor Reach Capital closed a $265 million fifth fund (external source, opens in a new tab) to back AI startups, learning among its targets. And down the peninsula, San Francisco Unified had already committed to an OpenAI ChatGPT EDU contract (external source, opens in a new tab) in January — a deal the district approved administratively, over the head of its own board.

That is the bind for a region that builds the product and buys it. The parents want evidence of benefit before the software reaches their kids; the venture capital that seeds that software, much of it raised within a few miles of these classrooms, is not waiting for the same proof. What is still unsettled is whether a school board in Silicon Valley can say no to a market its own residents keep financing — and whether Palo Alto's trustees, back from summer break, write any of the parents' demands into actual policy. So far, they have not.