Parents across the country who are worried about excessive screen time in schools are lobbying educators to go back to pencils and paper. In places like Pennsylvania's Lower Merion School District, some families are taking it even further. Over 600 people have signed a petition asking to preserve parents' ability to opt their children out of digital devices, setting off a clash with the school district. At a meeting Monday night, school board members said it’s not feasible to let hundreds of students opt out of technology that is essential to the curriculum.

A system that thousands of schools and universities use to support instruction was back online Friday after it went down during a cyberattack, creating chaos as students tried to study for finals. The hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft. Instructure, the company behind Canvas, said in an update late Thursday that the system was available for most users. An expert says the hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed.

A system that thousands of schools and universities use was offline Thursday during a cyberattack, creating chaos as students tried to study f…