Lowell High School is one of the biggest high schools in Massachusetts, with over 3000 attending for the 2026-27 school year. A couple days before the school year started, students were informed that they will no longer be able to use their personal devices (including laptops and ipads) in the classroom. This new rule has been met with a lot of criticism for many reasons.

One of the biggest reasons that students don’t like this new rule is because of how unnecessary it is. Students have been able to use devices like laptops and ipads at school for years without having many issues. Students often buy personal devices for school so they can further improve their learning and academics. Taking away this opportunity for students to use their personal devices for schoolwork is only going to hinder students from learning.

Along with this, students are now only able to use school Chromebooks in their classes. The school Chromebooks have been plagued with issues for many years, including heavy restriction on websites and features. Students understand that these restrictions exist to prevent students from getting off task in the classroom, but that can easily be managed with simple classroom rules. Chromebooks cannot access websites like Youtube, where many students have to access to watch educational videos for their classes. Along with this, Chromebooks often perform very slowly and are susceptible to software issues.

Lowell High School claims to want to provide every student with a good experience at LHS. If they do want to continue with this goal, this is not an issue they should be focusing on. Students have expressed many concerns with staff about problems they’ve experienced at Lowell High, and I believe that staff should be focusing more on student concerns rather than trying to crack down on an issue that can be managed with basic rules being enforced by teachers.