PA Unplugged grew organically. We just started connecting with Facebook groups, Wait Until 8th groups, any website, any social media posts to find other advocates and bring them together. 

In Pennsylvania we also created an edtech survey for parents to fill out that captures what district you're in and that builds a database of information. You can say “Look 50 parents from our district filled this out and this is how they feel.” It's a great way to connect - sharing that information - talking about it in your communities and with other parents creates swirl and stirs up interest. For us, we started PA Unplugged as a way to replicate what the Distraction Free Schools project does nationally on Wednesday’s Community of Practice calls. We wanted to do that locally for Pennsylvania because we were hitting dead ends with individual school districts as just individual parents. As a small group of parents doing it we got together with shared resources, shared strategies, shared talking points, and shared knowledge about resonated and what worked. We also created a database that tracked schools that were doing good things like going bell-to-bell or schools that were pulling back on one-to-one devices. We connected with the superintendents or school board members from those schools that aligned with our goals and implemented those policies and then were able to take information from them back to our own districts. We then could show that there was precedence and that what we were asking for is not extreme. You could say, “Hey there's a district in this county or in the neighboring county, same size, same demographics, doing this - and it’s working.” We often found that encouraging peer-to-peer conversations was also a huge help so instead of telling a parent, “Hey just call the superintendent, you two talk.” You then already have all this information from other parents, peers, educators, and community members to enter into these conversations and allow for more peer-to-peer generative conversations.