Petition to Delay the Personal Laptop Provision

We support the school administration's commitment to focused classrooms and support the phone caddy policy. However, the new laptop provision being carried forward on that success shouldn't be. It is a different policy solving a potentially different problem. We're asking the administration to delay this aspect for the year.

1. The phone policy moved a device. This one takes it away.

Phones were never allowed during instruction — that rule predates the caddy and has always been the expectation at Minnetonka High School. As the principal put it, "the expectation for the storage of phones during class has changed." Storage is the key word. This provision doesn't change where a laptop is being kept — it determines whether students may use one at all.

Personal laptops are different. They weren't just tolerated; they were permitted, and used openly with teacher knowledge every single day. This new provision doesn't relocate them; it revokes permission to use them. That may still be the right decision, but it deserves its own evidence and its own timeline, not the borrowed success of a policy that solved a different problem.

2. A laptop is not equivalent to a phone.

For most students in most classes, a phone has no academic use. It's built for communication and entertainment, and taking it away removes a distraction while enforcing a rule everyone already understood.

A laptop is a different thing entirely. Many students – particularly upperclassmen, and especially in AP and IB courses – use one daily to do the actual work: drafting essays and lab reports, running software that only exists on a laptop, and keeping a source and a draft open side by side. We can't tell you precisely how many students, in which courses, or how often, because that question has never been asked.

The comparison to college makes the even clearer. The expectation there is the same: phones stay away during lecture. Laptops are the opposite: they are ubiquitous in the college classroom, standard equipment rather than a privilege. One of the things Minnetonka does best is prepare students for what comes next, and technological fluency is part of that preparation. This change removes students' choice to teach themselves that fluency. 

3. The announcement came after families had already bought the laptops.

This was announced about a week before school started. This is near the end of summer, when families buy computers for the year ahead.

Many families made that purchase this summer – often a significant expense – because personal laptops had been standard at MHS for as long as anyone can remember and nothing suggested that was changing. They spent that money in good faith, based on the district's own practice. This provision doesn't just inconvenience them; it cancels the reason they spent it.

What We're Asking

• Delay the laptop provision to 2027-28. Everything else in the August letter — the caddy, the smart watch rule — can proceed unchanged.
• Survey students, families, and teachers this year on how personal laptops are actually used at MHS.
• Treat laptops separately from phones, and consider course-level approaches before a school-wide ban.

We want focused classrooms too. We're grateful for the administration's commitment to that goal.