This sucks. My school district used a bunch of money to buy every student chromebooks. I remember just a few years ago, back when I was in middle school, I helped unbox all the chromebooks that were shipped to the school - about 2500 of them. Just for one middle school. Every student having access to these laptops made some thing a lot easier, like using Canvas to submit work done on Google Docs.

However, this is in fact a real problem. Our district forced very obtrusive monitoring and blocking software, as well as literal bloat to be installed on the chromebooks - there's like 20 browser extensions that cannot even be turned off, making the already low performing chromebooks so laggy that it's hard to use. Obvious "bad sites" like pirate bay, porn, and etc are understandably blocked, but they also block access to "social media" like reddit and discord.

This doesn't sound that bad yet. The problem comes when students use their own devices instead of the school provided ones. Some sites and services are still blocked at the internet level, but can by bypassed easily. This means that, students with own laptops could communicate with each other using services that chromebook students cannot access. This means that students from families with lower income or with more siblings literally get blocked out of friend groups, with access only to heavily monitored google chat. During distance learning, this problem has only been made worse.

Additionally, district chromebooks are absolutely no less distracting with the various censorship and monitoring and bloat - kids would still much rather browse the limited internet than pay much attention in class. I think there was some study that showed laptops drastically reduced student's academic performance on average. (Though I think access to computer is really powerful for learning how to access internet resources and developing actual knowledge.)

TLDR my opinion and experience on technology + kids