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Trustees press technology staff on screen time, monitoring and parent access; district outlines GoGuardian and PowerSchool plans
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Summary
Midland ISD technology leaders laid out cybersecurity and PowerSchool parent-portal plans while trustees and public commenters raised concerns about Chromebook overuse, I-Ready dependence, and data privacy; administrators said principals can pull usage reports and parents may use GoGuardian parent portal for district devices.
District technology leadership presented the department’s priorities — cybersecurity, device reliability, and the PowerSchool/MyPowerHub parent portal — and described existing tools the district uses to monitor student device activity, including GoGuardian.
Preston Nguyen of Technology Services said GoGuardian monitoring is active on district-issued devices both on and off campus and that the district provides a GoGuardian parent portal so families can see activity alerts. He said the parent portal offers parents the ability to view their own student’s activity and set home restrictions, while principals and district staff can run more detailed, time-based reports by minute, day, week or month.
A number of trustees and speakers raised concerns that Chromebooks are replacing teacher-led instruction in some classrooms, that programs such as I-Ready can be ‘gamified’ and overused, and that parents should have prompt access to information about their children’s grade-level progress. A trustee urged more transparency and urged the district to run district-level reports to identify outliers; technology staff said they will pull reports and share options for board review.
Technology staff emphasized limitations: a parent portal shows a student’s device activity but does not provide campus- or grade-level aggregates to parents; principals can access campus- and teacher-level details and the district can generate reports limited to school hours to avoid conflating after-hours usage. Staff cautioned that screen-time totals can over-count sessions where a website or tab was left open.
Administration said they will push communication to families about available tools, will provide training (microlearning) about reading reports, and will work with principals on enforcement of instructional expectations.
