If you have a child in a Florida public school, something changed on September 16 that you will feel by next fall, and it is worth understanding in plain words, because the rule was written so that you can use it.
The Florida State Board of Education, the seven-member body that sets rules for the state’s public schools, voted unanimously at a public meeting in Winter Haven to require every school district and every charter school in Florida (the publicly funded schools that run under their own charters rather than the district) to write rules for how artificial intelligence may be used in the classroom. Artificial intelligence here means software that can answer questions, write, tutor, grade, or hold a conversation, the kind of thing a student might use to practice math or get feedback on an essay. The districts have until July 1, 2027, to adopt their rules. That is the date to write down.
What you will be told
Under the state rule, a district that approves an AI teaching tool for use in its classrooms has to tell parents. Not bury it in a handbook: notify you that a specific tool has been approved and will be used. The rule also lets a district give parents a way to limit how much time their child spends with such a tool.
What you can refuse
You can opt your child out. If you do, the district must provide a non-AI way for your child to do the same work: a teacher, a worksheet, a textbook, whatever the lesson would have been before the software arrived. That last part is the piece most states have not written. An opt-out with no alternative is a punishment; an opt-out with an alternative is a choice. Florida wrote the second kind.
What the software is now forbidden to do
The rule draws a line between a teaching tool and something else, and the something else is banned from classrooms. A tool used in a Florida school may not be built to meet a child’s social needs, simulate friendship or a relationship, or use human-like features to keep a child coming back. It may not monitor a student’s behavior without disclosure, grade or rank a student’s personality or mental state, or sell student data to train an AI system. Tools meant for children in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade get extra scrutiny before approval.
Governor Ron DeSantis, in the statement his office released after the vote, put it this way: “Florida will not outsource childhood to a chatbot.” Read the list above and that is what it means in practice. The rule does not ban AI from schools. It bans the version of AI that is designed to be a friend rather than a tool, and it makes every other version something a parent can see and decline.
Why this matters outside Florida
Two reasons. First, school rules travel. State boards read each other’s work, and Henry Mack, Florida’s education commissioner, the state’s top schools official, said at the meeting that he knew of no other state that had regulated classroom AI this way, which means the next state to try will start from this text. Second, and more important for readers of this site: this is what a rule with a record looks like at the scale where most families will meet this technology first. A public meeting. A vote count. A deadline. A right you can exercise. A list of things the software may not do. Nobody at that meeting settled the question of whether artificial intelligence will remake the world. They settled what it may do to a nine-year-old in a classroom, and wrote it down where a parent can find it.
What to do with this
If you are in Florida: ask your district, this fall, when it plans to adopt its AI rules and whether it will publish the list of approved tools. The deadline is July 1, 2027, but nothing stops a district from moving sooner, and the ones that do will set the pattern for the ones that wait. If you are not in Florida: ask your own district whether it has a rule at all. Most do not. The Florida text is a reasonable thing to hand them and say, start here.
We will check back on this in the spring, when the first districts adopt their rules, and report what the approved-tool lists actually contain.
The Inference, our weekly newsletter, covers the state and federal fights over AI in more depth; this week’s issue puts the Florida vote beside the week’s arguments in Washington. This post is written with substantial help from Claude, an AI system made by Anthropic; the full disclosure is on our about page.