Schools need to listen to teachers’ expertise more and rely on technology less, warns recently retired special education teacher Jane Roth, who spent 26 years teaching at New Haven Public Schools (NHPS). Her takeaway: Technology use in schools is becoming less supplemental and more over-relied upon, which she believes is not in students’ best interest. Roth retired from NHPS on June 30, after most recently teaching special education at John C. Daniels School (JCD) for more than 11 years. Before that she taught at now-closed alternative high school Hyde, Roberto Clemente, and she tutored for decades in Guilford, Madison, and Branford. While at JCD, Roth was a building steward who has advocated for students’ safety before the school board and mayor in the past. Roth was also an executive board member for the teachers union, holding a representative role for special education educators. She taught in several districts over a total of 32 years. Roth had plans to work for five more years after her husband’s passing but decided to first advocate with fellow educators across the country for the repeal of Government Pension Offset (GPO) law, which limited public employees’ ability to receive social security benefits on behalf of a spouse. After successful advocacy work and the law’s 2025 repeal, Roth worked for a final school year. In a recent conversation with the Independent, she looked back on her decades of experience in New Haven and beyond that helped shape her teaching and taught her lifelong lessons. She recalled several of her personal classroom experiences that she believed proved time and time again that students can learn not only how to read but also to develop a love for reading and learning, when taught foundational skills on paper rather than on a screen. “I am not against technology use in schools. I like Lexia; it’s very good, but I used it as a supplement,” she said. The literacy computer curriculum shouldn’t be the program, she argued. “There’s absolutely nothing like a book in a child’s hand,” she added. Roth said it was especially important for her, as a special education teacher who must often personalize her teaching to her students’ needs, to teach the student the skills and strategies before giving them a computer to practice them. For example, Roth explained, a person typically scans written text on a computer rather than reading it closely. “Scanning on a computer is not learning or teaching them how to actually read,” she said. So she continued over the years teaching her students to use pencil and paper to get their reading skills up. She often would instruct her students to read on paper but to use another sheet of paper to cover the rest of the text and read line by line. This would help her students avoid scanning the entire text and instead focus on comprehending sentence by sentence. Scanning, while helpful, is a skill Roth said should be learned after core reading concepts. In recent years, Roth said, that disconnect between the paper and the screen grew as school districts around the country, like New Haven’s, brought in more EdTech (educational technology) for student learning. The growing divide made Roth feel less supported as an educator, she said. During the 2025-26 school year, Roth said, the growing “reliance” of technology caused her to struggle to enjoy teaching and feel respected, particularly when assessing students’ skills in reading. Roth emphasized that there is supplemental value of digital learning programing, especially when an educator is teaching a full classroom. But as a special education teacher offering one-on-one support, she recalled asking her students “to be working with me, not computers.” A time when Roth felt particularly unsupported was when she gave a third-grade student a reading assessment on paper to gauge their comprehension skill through context clues. The assessment required the student to read a page-long passage with multiple blank spaces throughout it, and then to use a word bank to fill in the incomplete sentences. Typically Roth has her students do this assessment on paper, which allowed for them to use the extra paper method of covering the majority of the text while going sentence by sentence to fill in the blank. The test gives the student three minutes to complete it. When Roth tested the third grader, they did well, she said, and the student scored on grade level. Roth later learned that the same student was tested again, six weeks after she had assessed their skill on paper, but the test was given on a computer and the student struggled significantly and tested below grade level. “On a screen you can’t use a pencil and paper to guide yourself,” Roth said. “We have to reinforce those basic skills first before just jumping into reading on a computer, otherwise it’s all a blur.” She continued, “If we teach them to confidently read, eventually it will translate into what they can do on a computer.” Roth said that this third grader wasn’t the only student she learned had tested on grade level on paper but struggled when using a computer. When discussing with other educators, she learned that the “paper and pencil assessment was more in line with what the classroom teacher saw with the child everyday.” “At some level, we have to honor what a teacher sees in their work,” she said. Roth said she over time began feeling like her teaching knowledge was not respected or supported by the district. As a special education teacher equipped with intervention skills, Roth said, “When it’s not working, teachers need to have the autonomy to step back and do what they know is best for the student to learn what they need. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it works.” While many teachers follow a pacing guide, Roth worked with students’ Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), which set goals for the students to meet by the end of the year. That allowed her to take her time to not just introduce students to concepts but to dive deep into helping them become proficient in a skill. She gave another example of a student she worked with who struggled with reading until she helped him learn the skills he needed to actually comprehend a reading. “Once he learned to read, it was like a buffet in my classroom of books,” she said. The student developed a newfound love for reading now that he learned the necessary skills on paper with Roth rather than a computer. Roth then allowed the student to borrow books to read at home almost daily. “Unless they’ve developed a love for reading, why would they do it?” Roth said examples like this went unnoticed by the district. To retain teachers, Roth said, a district must show them respect by listening to their expertise, which she said is “free to retain us.” Roth also prioritized educational games — from multiplication and division dominos to vowel and rhyming bingo — where students could win prizes and reinforce their skills. “Those educational games “were better than Takis,” she recalled. She only occasionally used the interactive smart board in her classroom and asked her students to practice writing with a pen and paper. “If they’re struggling with writing, then everything else in the world is a struggle after that,” she said. She said that in more recent years, she was often pushed to use technology more. “If what I was doing was not working, then I’d understand, but these kids were actually making strides,” she said. In her final year, Roth said she felt “decisions were being made for me, not with me,” and the many mandates that burdened educators had become too much. “We should know by now one size does not fit all,” she said. Before retiring, Roth made sure to leave her fellow third and fourth-grade educators and several families with resources and information to support their students. The post Retired Teacher’s Parting Plea: Cool It On The Tech appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less