Florida Just Mandated District AI Policies. Montana Should Expect Its Own Version Next Legislative Session.

by   |   Sep 21, 2026

On September 16, the Florida Board of Education unanimously approved statewide rules governing how artificial intelligence can be used in K-12 public schools and the state's 28 public colleges. Districts have until July 1, 2027, to adopt compliant policies ahead of the 2027-28 school year.

That timeline will sound familiar to anyone who read our post on Idaho's new AI framework back in August. Same deadline window, same basic shape: a state government telling districts their AI policy can no longer be optional. But Florida did something Idaho, Ohio, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Virginia did not. It built individual parental consent into the rule itself. That is the detail worth understanding, because if a version of this lands in Montana, the consent requirement is the part that will actually change how your front office operates day to day.

What Florida Actually Approved

Florida's board didn't pass a new AI statute the way Idaho's legislature did with SB 1227. Instead, the State Board of Education used its existing rulemaking authority to amend Rule 6A-1.0957, the state's Internet Safety Policy rule, to fold AI governance into it. Every district school board and charter school governing board now has to update that policy to address artificial intelligence specifically.

Here's what the rule requires for K-12 schools:

  • Parental notification and consent. Districts must tell parents before a student uses an AI product, identify which courses are involved, and explain how the student will interact with the tool. Parents can decline, and if they do, the district has to offer a comparable non-AI alternative.
  • No unsupervised use. Students can't use AI tools without supervision, full stop.
  • A ban on emotional simulation. AI tools can't be designed or used to meet a student's social or emotional needs, or to simulate a relationship with a student. No behavior monitoring, social scoring, or psychological profiling without disclosure, either.
  • Extra review for young learners. AI tools used in PreK through fifth grade go through an additional approval step.
  • Staff training. Teachers and administrators have to be trained on AI risks, limitations, safety, and compliance before this rolls out.
  • A kill switch requirement. School personnel must be able to immediately suspend or disable an AI product without waiting on the vendor.
  • Data privacy guardrails on vendors. Districts are directed to prioritize vendors that keep student data inside the United States. Vendors are barred from selling, monetizing, or using student data to train commercial AI models.

On the college side, Florida's 28 state colleges now have to bar students from using AI on graded assignments or assessments unless an instructor specifically allows it.

Education Commissioner Henry Mack framed the approach as neither banning AI nor leaving it unregulated, describing the goal as staying ahead of a technology that's already in classrooms rather than reacting to it after the fact. That's a familiar line. Every state adopting one of these frameworks says some version of it.

The Part That's Actually New

Every one of the states that has passed an AI-in-schools mandate this year has required districts to adopt a written policy. None of them, until Florida, required individual, per-student, opt-in consent as the operating mechanism.

Ohio's law (Ohio Revised Code 3301.24, tucked into the 2025 budget bill) required every district to adopt a board-approved AI policy by July 1, 2026. Idaho's SB 1227 required districts to adopt a policy aligned with a state framework. Maryland's AI Ready Schools Act requires districts to adopt aligned policies and appoint an AI coordinator. Oklahoma's Responsible Technology in Schools Act requires a written policy before the 2027-28 school year and lets parents opt their kids out. Virginia's HB 1186 requires policies aligned with state guidance.

Notice the pattern: policy exists, and in Oklahoma's case, a parent can opt out if they ask. Florida flips that default. A Florida parent has to affirmatively say yes before their child touches an AI product tied to instruction, and the district has to track that consent and be ready to offer an equivalent non-AI path if the answer is no. That's a real administrative lift, not just a policy document sitting in a board packet. It touches scheduling, rostering, communication systems, and whatever platform tracks permission slips.

If a Montana bill in the 2027 session borrows from Florida rather than Idaho or Ohio, that's the piece your district needs to be ready to operationalize, not just write down.

Six States In, and the List Keeps Growing

Add it up and at least six states, Ohio, Idaho, Maryland, Oklahoma, Virginia, and now Florida, have moved from AI guidance to some form of mandatory district policy in roughly the past twelve months. As of this summer, something like 37 states had issued official AI guidance for K-12 schools in one form or another. The mandate states are a smaller, faster-moving subset, but that subset just added its most detailed and most parent-facing framework yet.

Montana sits in the guidance camp, not the mandate camp, and we covered exactly where that stands in our Idaho post: the October 2025 Montana AI in K-12 Education Guidelines from Superintendent Susie Hedalen's office, built with the Frontier Learning Lab at Montana Digital Academy; MTSBA's model policy language circulating to boards statewide; and the Board of Public Education's January 2026 resolution standing up an AI and Technology Special Committee. That's real groundwork. It's also still voluntary, district by district, on no fixed timeline.

Florida's rule adds a new wrinkle to how that conversation might play out here. Governor Ron DeSantis has publicly connected AI rules in schools to parental rights, and a spokesperson for a parental-rights advocacy group testified at the Florida board meeting that consent decisions belong with parents rather than schools, vendors, or algorithms. That framing travels well in a lot of state legislatures, Montana's included. If AI policy shows up as a bill in the 2027 session here, don't be surprised if it arrives wrapped in parental-consent language rather than the more procedural "districts must adopt a policy" language Idaho and Ohio used.

Why the Timing Matters for Montana Specifically

We've been tracking the Montana School Funding Interim Commission's package of bills heading into the 2027 Legislature, because several of them touch technology and infrastructure budgets directly. AI policy is shaping up to be a parallel track worth watching in that same session. Lawmakers who see six other states move on this in a single year, several of them explicitly citing parental rights as the rationale, tend to notice. Add in that Montana already has a state AI committee sitting at the Board of Public Education level, and the ingredients for a 2027 bill are mostly already assembled.

Districts that wait for that bill to pass before starting the conversation will be writing policy under a deadline while also trying to build consent-tracking workflows from scratch. Districts that start now get to shape their own policy on their own timeline, and if a state mandate does land, they'll be adapting an existing document instead of starting cold.

Start With the Frontier Learning Lab

If your district hasn't engaged with the Frontier Learning Lab at Montana Digital Academy yet, that's the place to start before anywhere else. We said this in the Idaho post and it's still true: it's the Montana-built resource that most districts we work with are underusing.

A few reasons it matters here specifically. The Lab co-authored the state AI guidelines your board policy will eventually reference, so the instructional guidance and your policy language come from the same source. It runs a free AI Help Desk staffed by actual people (reach it at ai.help@mtda.org) for questions about a specific tool or a specific student data concern. It offers no-cost professional learning for Montana educators, including a coaching course built for districts too small to staff a dedicated AI lead. And it maintains a vetted directory of AI, VR, and AR tools evaluated for classroom fit, student safety, and accessibility, which is exactly the kind of resource that makes a parental-consent workflow manageable instead of chaotic. If you already know which tools passed a privacy review, explaining them to parents gets a lot easier.

What to Do Before the 2027 Session Convenes

A handful of concrete steps, roughly in order:

  1. Write a policy now, even without a mandate. Start from the MTSBA model language and the OPI guidelines. Both were built for Montana's mix of rural, urban, and tribal districts.
  2. Decide your consent model on purpose. You don't have to require opt-in consent like Florida. But you should decide, deliberately, whether your district notifies parents, requires consent, or does neither, rather than backing into it when a state bill forces the question.
  3. Inventory the AI already running in your environment. Your student information system, your content filter, your assessment platform, and your helpdesk tools may have AI features switched on by default. You can't govern, or explain to a parent, what you haven't counted.
  4. Put vendor disclosure language in your procurement contracts. Florida and Idaho both now require it by statute or rule. Nothing stops a Montana district from requiring it by contract today, before any bill forces the issue.
  5. Book Frontier Learning Lab training this fall or winter while it's still free and while their calendar has room. Neighboring districts can often share a regional session.
  6. Watch the 2027 bill drafts closely, particularly whether any of them borrow Florida's consent language rather than Idaho's or Ohio's simpler "adopt a policy" model. That single design choice changes how much operational work your district is signing up for.

K12 Montana works with roughly 40 districts and nonprofits across the state on exactly the technical side of these decisions: tool inventory, data privacy configuration, filtering and access controls, and procurement language that actually holds up when a vendor pushes back. We're not the ones writing your instructional AI policy, that's the Frontier Learning Lab's expertise, but we can make sure the technical groundwork is in place before your board sits down to write it. If you want that mapped out before the conversation starts, get in touch.

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Jeff Patterson
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