Pasco County Schools is telling parents to cut back on screen time this year — then handing them a new app to spend more time on their phones.

District leaders unveiled “Pasco One,” a consolidated app that folds transportation schedules, cafeteria payments, and school communications into a single login. It replaces roughly three separate apps families previously juggled, according to the district.

Superintendent Dr. John Legg, whose leadership last year saw Pasco become an “A” rated district, framed the rollout around parental engagement rather than technology for its own sake. “Prioritize students being engaged in academics, to put down the screen time, to lower that screen time at home, have conversations with your students about education, why school is so important,” Legg said.

That message comes alongside a district-wide push to limit screen time inside classrooms this year — a policy that puts Pasco among a growing number of Florida districts scaling back device use during instruction, a trend parents and taxpayers alike have largely welcomed as schools reckon with the toll of screens on attention spans and learning.

The irony hasn’t escaped notice: even as officials preach less screen time for students, they’re asking parents to spend more of theirs logged into district software. Legg defended the app as a convenience, not a contradiction. “We also have a new app called Pasco One where parents can log in and do all their interaction with the school district, all the forms they need to fill out, all their payments, so they don’t have to go to multiple apps,” he said.

For parents accustomed to navigating a patchwork of disconnected district portals — a common complaint in public school systems statewide — the consolidation could mean less time wrestling with bureaucracy and more time on what officials say actually matters: talking to their kids. Legg pointed to research suggesting teenagers need roughly 10,000 words of daily conversation with parents to support healthy development, and said the app’s real value is freeing up time for that kind of direct engagement, not replacing it.

Pasco One is available now on iOS and Android as students return to class this month.

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