School-Issued Devices Aren’t As Safe As You Think

Published: June 27, 2026

School, classroom, technology, child — Getty Images/ SeventyFour

By Movieguide® Staff

Most parents feel a quiet sense of relief when the school hands their child a Chromebook. It carries the school’s seal of approval — surely that counts for something.

“They know how to hook kids. So they are aiming for addiction. They are succeeding,” psychologist and author Dr. Jonathan Haidt warned in a recent conversation with actor Hugh Grant — specifically about ed tech companies supplying school devices. Movieguide® previously reported on Grant and Haidt’s exchange, in which Grant called school ed tech a “drug pusher” being sent home with children and argued that sending kids to school to have their data harvested “should be illegal.”

Schools do put real protections in place: content filters, device management software, acceptable use policies. Those efforts matter. But no IT department can track every conversation among thousands of students, and tech policies vary wildly from district to district.

Here’s what most parents miss: the school’s network-level filters stay at school. Once that Chromebook connects to your home Wi-Fi, those protections often don’t follow. And because the school owns the device, parents generally can’t install any monitoring software on it. The device most parents assume is the safest one is frequently the least protected.

Bark, a child safety company that monitors school-linked accounts, pulled data from Gmail, Google Chat, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and other school platforms and found that nearly four in 10 students (39.83%) encountered violence-related content on school tech in the past year. More than one in five (22.11%) hit drug-related content. Cyberbullying showed up for 12.02%, sexual content for 10.77%, and 7.46% of students encountered suicide-related content — all on school accounts.

Two platforms consistently catch parents off guard. Google Chat and Microsoft Teams both look like business tools from the outside, but kids use them for constant side conversations that have nothing to do with assignments. Google Docs is sneakier still: the comment sidebar functions as a live message thread. Students have been known to share blank documents just to talk in the comments, then delete the text when they’re done.

States are taking note. At least 16 introduced legislation in 2026 to reevaluate screen time or vet educational technology, with four — Kansas, Utah, Minnesota and Tennessee — considering banning devices in portions of elementary school. Los Angeles passed a resolution blocking YouTube on school devices and banning device use at lunch and recess through middle school. The pushback is bipartisan and accelerating.

For parents who want to act: ask your school directly what monitoring tools are on take-home devices, and whether those protections follow the device home. Move the Chromebook to the kitchen table — common space changes the dynamic more than any filter. Tell your kids plainly that school accounts aren’t private; the school can read them. That’s not a threat, it’s just true, and kids who know they’re not invisible tend to make better choices.

Bark offers free monitoring tools for K-12 schools, a Parent Portal for families and a router-based Bark Home that can filter any Wi-Fi-connected device at home — school Chromebooks included. Stewardship of our children’s minds and hearts is one of the most serious obligations Christian parents carry. The school device is a starting point. It was never a finish line.

Questions or comments? Please write to us here.

Add Movieguide® as preferred on Google