Taking steps into adulthood, I cast my first electoral ballot earlier this year.

I had longed for the opportunity to air my voice, to use my own experiences as a youth growing up in the modern world to influence positive change. Though I opened my mail-in ballot with the expectation that I would primarily be concerned with deciding which candidate to cast my vote for, another section caught my attention.

I was taken aback by two of the three measures that awaited my reading. The first concerned the California public education system; the second specifically pertained to the West Contra Costa Unified School District, where I have been a student for many years. I was surprised at the presence of two measures to which I could apply my own gripes and insight with the public schooling system.

I took a step back, taking time to educate myself on what a vote in favor of or against each measure would entail. Knowing the ramifications of my vote could impact the experiences of students like me, I could feel the weight of my decision in a new, profound way.

The measure that called for extra funding to our district was a notion I was strongly in favor of at first glance. I had long seen teachers suffer from a lack of supplies and educational materials.

An instance that comes to mind was being told by a teacher that one student would have to drop our AP English class simply because there were not enough desks to seat the nearly 40 students in our section. It is also hard to forget that a general lack of school supplies forced many of my teachers to dip into their own salaries (which are quite low considering the amount of work they do) to provide students with the likes of tissues, pencils and paper.

All things considered, a proposition to increase our district’s funding should be considerably easy for most to get behind. Upon further inspection, though, one stipulation of the text brought me doubt — much of the funding would be going toward classroom modernization, or as I had heard it referred to by countless unenthused teachers, creating “21st century classrooms.”

That was when I realized what they intended to do with some of this potential extra funding. It would not be raising the pay of much-deserving teachers or providing students with essential supplies in the way I had envisioned.

I believe that attempts to “modernize” classrooms are, more often than not, severely misguided. I have personally witnessed many teachers try to adopt the use of tablets, digital whiteboards and similar technologically focused gimmicks in the classroom at the behest of the district. Unsurprisingly, these costly changes to the class environment never pay off in a meaningful way.

Digital textbooks do not make learning more convenient — they hinder it. We are given expensive tablets that most of us have little use for while our faculty and students suffer from the lack of physical textbooks.

Such “modernization” seems misplaced when more fundamental issues run deep in the district, such as leaking ceilings, textbook shortages and abysmal teacher salaries. I am a recently graduated high school student, and it pains me to see plans to cram pricey technology into classrooms in place of much-needed facility repair and renovation.

There are countless issues that pervade Bay Area schools, and many of them are being overlooked in favor of these fruitless attempts at turning the classroom into something that it is not.

Max Keystone is a recent graduate of El Cerrito High School.