Complaint to school about use of Chrome on students’ computers

I recently sent the following letter to the technology manager at my sons’ high school (names have been changed):

Hi Tyson, As a parent with senior and freshman boys at Roosevelt High School, I am very concerned that they are encouraged or even forced to use the Chrome browser. My main reason for that is that Chrome does not play nice with Apple’s Screen Time feature. In fact, as a parent I have no ability to limit the number of hours spent by my sons with the Chrome browser on their computer, or the websites they visit. As you would yourself know, as what Apple calls a “family organizer” I can set time limits for overall computer use but also for individual apps. While Peyton now being 18 has aged out of Time Machine, I do limit Jeremy’s computer use by setting Downtime to begin in the evening and end in the morning. If late evening cramming is needed, Jeremy can remotely ask me for additional time. Similarly, I can set individual time quotas for all the different apps installed. The TV app gets a quota of zero, while the Calendar app receives 23 h 59 min. I can also adjust quotas for individual websites. My objective is to block gaming sites, which generally are vying for children’s attention. Some of those do make it past the whole-house filter I have set up. None of this is possible with Chrome. Chrome and some other browsers are the perfect way for children to bypass their parents’ imposed digital discipline. I had to block the Opera and Firefox download sites for Jeremy and his younger brother, because they had discovered that those also did not obey Apple’s Screen Time configuration. For Jeremy this workaround is no longer necessary because the school requires his use of Chrome. This is untenable! I am quite certain that Apple’s Safari no longer lags in its compatibility to work with some of the SAAS products Roosevelt uses in teaching the students. If it does, or SAAS providers deliberately require the Chrome browser, Roosevelt should abandon those products, in the interest of digital safety of the students. Safety must not take a back seat to convenience in this case! Yours, D. Cc: Principal, Counselor P.S.: I am planning to remove the Chrome browser from Jeremy’s MacBook Air after I have migrated his bookmarks and saved logins to Safari and the Passwords app. I very much hope that the technology department will support Jeremy in making Roosevelt’s online resources work with Safari.