ESPAÑOL ES ABAJO
On Thursday evening, SVUSD hosted Digital Wellness for Families at Sonoma Valley Middle School. The presentation was by Kerry Rego, brought by the District and its partner RISK. There was pizza and there were snacks. There was daycare on site. There was interpretation in the room. The District thought this through, and that should be said.
Kerry Rego has been doing this for twenty years. She is a social media consultant and trainer, she has taught at Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State, she built the social media curriculum used across the California Community Colleges, and she has written four books, the most recent one on keeping kids safe online. She is at just under a thousand presentations. Early in the evening she told the room that of every campus she has worked with, Sonoma Valley Middle School is the most dedicated to children’s safety and technology, and that she has been on this campus more than any other. Keep it up, she said.
She also warned us, accurately, that the middle of her talk was going to be frightening. It was. She walked through where children actually reach the internet, which is not just the phone but the tablet, the gaming system, the friend’s laptop, the smart TV. She explained that a quarter of children have their identity stolen before they turn eighteen, usually by someone they know. She explained how deepfake apps are being used in middle schools to turn a yearbook photo into something that is, legally, child sexual abuse material, and how it spreads through an entire grade in an afternoon. She explained that only about forty percent of the parental controls the companies hand you actually work as advertised, and that federal law already sets thirteen as the minimum age for social media, which almost no one enforces.
Then she brought us back out, and this is the part worth carrying home.
Make their accounts private, because that is still not the default.
Turn on the teen account if the platform offers one.
Turn off messaging from strangers.
Turn off their ability to download an app without your approval.
Learn how to report and how to block, so you can teach them.
Limit screen time, and if that feels complicated, change the Wi-Fi password and hand it over when the dishes are done.
Dock the devices at night, in your room if that is what it takes.
And this one, which landed hardest in a room of adults.
The number one complaint children have about their parents, study after study, is that their parents spend too much time on their phones. None of us are exempt from this.
She described a power down hour, and it works on an adult as well as it works on a child.
Dock the device.
Dim the lights.
A warm drink.
A bath or a shower.
Quiet music, meditation or prayer.
A physical book.
She said the antidote to technology is nature, and she mentioned that the leading training center in the world for forest bathing is right here in the Sonoma Valley.
That was a good evening. Now the hard part.
There were about twenty of us in that room. One was a parent, and that parent already serves on a district advisory committee. The rest were grandparents and members of the Lions Club. Good people, every one of them, and not the people this evening was built for.
So the District did everything right in the room and almost nothing reached the families outside it. The flyer was bilingual. The interpretation was there. The childcare was there. The food was there. And the only parent who came was a parent the District already had. That is not a story about parents who don’t care. It is a story about how an event gets in front of a family that has two jobs and a phone full of notifications, and it tells us that whatever the District is doing to promote these nights is not working yet.
None of this is a knock on the people who put the evening together. It is just about how you get a family to show up, and a few small things would help next time.
Put a way to respond on the flyer. An RSVP line, a link, a QR code, a phone number, anything. Then you know who is coming, and you can send a reminder the day before, which is usually the difference between meaning to go and going. It matters even more with childcare, because a parent has to plan for that, and there was no way to tell anyone they needed it.
Say who the night is for. All are welcome is a kind thing to put on a flyer. It is also why the room filled up with people who come to everything. Digital Wellness for Families does not tell a parent this is about their kid. If your child has a phone, this is for you does.
And it is worth the effort. The phones, and the apps that live on them, are not neutral. They are built to hold your child’s attention, to learn everything they can about your child, and to keep your child as a customer for life. That is a full time, well paid job for somebody. The parent is the only one standing in the way. One night in a school is not much against that, but it is a lot better than nothing.
One more thing happened, and it is the most important thing that happened. A question came from the room asking whether Sonoma Valley Unified teaches this to students, whether there is actual curriculum. Rego answered first. In twenty years, she said, she has never come across a school with comprehensive digital-safety education. The budget is not there, and the subject changes faster than teachers can be trained on it. Then she turned to Superintendent Sutter and asked him to answer it for this district. He gave the same answer she had. Not enough money in the budget, not enough time in the school day, and some classes try to address these points.
What he describes is real. The budget is squeezed and the instructional day has a fixed number of minutes in it. But follow that answer where it leads. If the District cannot teach this to students for lack of money and lack of time, then the parent is the last line of defense, and an evening like this one is the cheapest and fastest tool the District has. It costs a presenter, some pizza, and a room. It uses no instructional minutes at all. It is the one thing the budget answer does not block.
Which is why one of these a year is not a plan. It is the start of one.
So here is what I would ask for, and I have said some of this to Dr. Sutter directly.
Do it again, more than once, and not only at 5:00 on a Thursday. Run one in the daytime and one in the evening so a parent on a shift can get to one of them. Run them at the elementary schools, where the habits are still being set, instead of waiting until middle school. And make at least one of them hands on, in Spanish and in English, led by someone on district staff who sits down with a parent, opens the phone that parent actually owns, and turns the settings on with them. An hour of being frightened changes what a parent knows. Twenty minutes with their own phone in their hand changes what happens in that house tonight.
This District brought a real expert into a school, fed people, and watched their children so they could listen. Now the work is making sure that next time, the room is full of the people it was built for.
Unidos por Nuestras Escuelas, United for Our Schools
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El jueves por la noche, SVUSD presentó Bienestar Digital para las Familias en la escuela Sonoma Valley Middle School. La presentación fue de Kerry Rego, organizada por el Distrito y su socio RISK. Hubo pizza y hubo bocadillos. Hubo cuidado de niños en el lugar. Hubo interpretación en la sala. El Distrito pensó bien en todo esto, y eso hay que decirlo.
Kerry Rego lleva veinte años haciendo este trabajo. Es consultora y capacitadora en redes sociales, ha enseñado en Santa Rosa Junior College y en Sonoma State, creó el plan de estudios de redes sociales que se usa en los Colegios Comunitarios de California, y ha escrito cuatro libros, el más reciente sobre cómo mantener a los niños seguros en internet. Lleva casi mil presentaciones. Al principio de la noche le dijo a la sala que, de todos los campus con los que ha trabajado, Sonoma Valley Middle School es el más dedicado a la seguridad de los niños y la tecnología, y que ha estado en este campus más que en ningún otro. Sigan así, dijo.
También nos advirtió, con razón, que la parte central de su charla nos iba a dar miedo. Así fue. Explicó dónde los niños realmente acceden a internet, que no es solo el teléfono, sino la tableta, la consola de videojuegos, la computadora de un amigo, el televisor inteligente. Explicó que a uno de cada cuatro niños le roban su identidad antes de cumplir dieciocho años, y que normalmente lo hace alguien que conocen. Explicó cómo se están usando aplicaciones de deepfake en las escuelas secundarias para convertir una foto del anuario en algo que es, legalmente, material de abuso sexual infantil, y cómo se difunde por todo un grado en una sola tarde. Explicó que solo alrededor del cuarenta por ciento de los controles parentales que ofrecen las compañías funcionan como prometen, y que la ley federal ya establece los trece años como edad mínima para las redes sociales, algo que casi nadie hace cumplir.
Luego nos trajo de vuelta, y esta es la parte que vale la pena llevar a casa.
Haga que sus cuentas sean privadas, porque todavía no es la configuración predeterminada.
Active la cuenta para adolescentes si la plataforma la ofrece.
Desactive los mensajes de desconocidos.
Quíteles la posibilidad de descargar una aplicación sin su permiso.
Aprenda a reportar y a bloquear, para que pueda enseñarles.
Limite el tiempo de pantalla, y si eso le parece complicado, cambie la contraseña del Wi-Fi y entréguela cuando los platos estén lavados.
Guarde los aparatos de noche, en su propio cuarto si hace falta.
Y esta, que fue la que más pegó en una sala de adultos.
La queja número uno que los niños tienen de sus padres, estudio tras estudio, es que sus padres pasan demasiado tiempo en el teléfono. Ninguno de nosotros está exento.
Ella describió una hora de desconexión, y funciona igual de bien en un adulto que en un niño.
Guarde el aparato.
Baje las luces.
Una bebida caliente.
Un baño o una ducha.
Música tranquila, meditación u oración.
Un libro de papel.