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This year brings a new challenge for Armaghan Khan and many other teachers in the nation’s second-largest school district: Ban screen time for younger students, and significantly limit it for older kids.

“This is going to be a big impact for me,” says Khan, who’s spent his career in the Los Angeles Unified School District. “I would say about 75% of our work was on some kind of screen-based activity.”

As a science teacher Khan, has embraced technology. Not only because his students at Johnnie L. Cochran Middle School can perform large-scale experiments on their laptops — like a car crash simulator to understand things like Newtonian forces — but also because it’s his best option.

“My hands are kind of tied in terms of just what I can offer,” he says. “We have a lab space, but we do not have a lab budget.”

Many districts and a growing number of states have passed similar limits this year, but the rapid roll out in Los Angeles for teachers and the district’s more than 400,000 students is unique. The school board passed the resolution this spring: Starting this week, 1st grade and under will have no screen time at all, in November, the rest of elementary school classes will have limits, with middle and high school students following later in the year.

The new rules are a departure for LAUSD, which only a few years ago was a national leader in bringing technology into the classroom. Khan said he was surprised by the new policy and subsequent lack of guidance: “I don’t feel like I’m being set up for success.”

A rapid rollout

Pia Sadaqatmal, the district’s new chief academic officer who is overseeing the new screen time rules, says she knows it’s not flawless.

“There is no perfect solution on how to roll out to a school district the size of ours.”

She encourages teachers to see this year as a transition year and not expect overnight improvements.

President Trump’s Department of Justice walked away from the case against David “Davey” Hearn.

Prosecutors charged Hearn with vandalism in relation to peeling paint in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The charges have since been dismissed.

But President Trump can’t let the case go .

Trump continues to insist it was so-called vandalism that led to peeling paint and blooming algae on the National Mall reflecting pool – not a botched repair project as prosecutors ultimately concluded.

What’s it like to have the President beat the drum for your arrest?

This episode was produced by Jason Fuller and Linah Mohammad, with audio engineering by Ted Mebane. Our director is Kai McNamee.

Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning who also edited today’s episode along with Patrick Jarenwattanon.

For tickets to a live taping of Sources & Methods, NPR’s national security podcast, visit this link on or after Tuesday, August 11: npr.org/sourcesliveshow

Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.

On a typical day, Alaska Airlines operates roughly 1,500 flights, most of them guided by a team of dispatchers on the sixth floor of an office building near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport known as “The Hub.”

The dispatchers sit in a big open room, surrounded by as many as five flat-screen monitors that display real-time information on air traffic, weather, upper-level wind patterns and more.

It’s a lot to process. But these dispatchers are getting some help from a software tool called Flyways AI.

“It ingests all that information,” said Alek Mead, a manager in Alaska’s Network Operations Center, “and it really kind of puts us all together in a nice little package for the dispatcher to look at, take some options, maybe play around with some different ideas, and then pick the most efficient and the safest route.”

When Alaska wanted to optimize its operations, it turned to a small startup called Air Space Intelligence. Now the Federal Aviation Administration has tapped the same company to carry out a major reboot of the entire U.S. airspace.

The FAA wants to use technology — including artificial intelligence — to make the nation’s airspace more efficient. And Flyways offers a glimpse of how that might look in practice.

Alaska was the first airline to start using the Flyways system back in 2021 to do things that would be challenging, if not impossible, for a human dispatcher working alone.

“It doesn’t decide the route or waypoints that a dispatcher uses to get an airplane from A to B, but it does help provide suggestions that might be more efficient,” explained Capt. Bret Peyton, the managing director of Alaska’s network operations control. “That’s where Flyways is really excelling for us.”

Alaska says it’s saving tens of thousands of hours in the air and roughly a million gallons of fuel per year because of Flyways.

The system works by basically crunching data on air traffic, wind, weather and other factors to anticipate what is going to happen during flight before it does.

Phillip Buckendorf, the CEO and co-founder of Air Space Intelligence, speaking at a conference in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

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Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

“It’s actually a really fundamental change, a massive behavior change,” said Phillip Buckendorf, the co-founder and CEO of Air Space Intelligence, the company that built Flyways, in an interview on the podcast Crossing the Valley last year.