Key Biscayne parents could soon decide whether their children use artificial intelligence tools in the classroom, under a proposed Florida Department of Education rule that would also ban AI apps designed to simulate friendships with students.

The draft amendment to Rule 6A-1.0957, Florida's internet safety policy, would require Miami-Dade County Public Schools and every other district in the state to give parents the right to opt their child in or out of each AI instructional tool. Classrooms at Key Biscayne K-8 Center, MAST Academy on Virginia Key and George Washington Carver Middle School are impacted.

A public workshop on the rule is set for Wednesday, Aug. 5, at 3 p.m. via Microsoft Teams. Families can submit comments through the DOE's rulemaking page at web02.fldoe.org/rules before the meeting. If adopted, districts would need to comply by January 2027, according to reporting by the Key Biscayne Portal.

Information parents would get

Schools would have to notify parents before deploying any AI tool and disclose the specific platform, which grade levels and subjects will use it, and whether students interact with it directly. Parents who opt in could also cap the amount of time their child spends on any approved tool.

Parents who opt out would receive information on non-AI alternatives.

Districts would also be required to maintain logs of every student's interactions with AI tools and make those records available to parents on request. Each district would have to publish a publicly accessible list of all approved AI instructional tools.

What the rule would ban

The draft explicitly prohibits AI tools that simulate friendships or companionships, employ relationship-building design features, or are configured to meet students' social needs. Tools that subject students to undisclosed behavior monitoring, social scoring or psychological profiling would also be forbidden.

The rule states that approved tools cannot replace "the professional judgment of teachers" or "the primary right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children." Selling, monetizing or commercially exploiting student data to train AI models would be barred.

Industry pushback

Not everyone is on board.

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) warned in written comments submitted ahead of the Aug. 5 workshop that the rule's broad definition of "artificial intelligence" could sweep in district-vetted adaptive learning tools alongside general-purpose chatbots. Sara Kloek, SIIA's vice president of education and children's policy, wrote that the opt-in requirement risks disproportionately cutting off struggling readers, English language learners and students with disabilities from the adaptive tools that help them most.

Context and what's next

The DOE is citing FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, and existing Florida laws protecting student data as the legal basis for the rule, according to the Miami Herald. A broader AI Bill of Rights failed in the state legislature earlier this year after the House blocked it from reaching Gov. Ron DeSantis' desk.

Vanessa Dennen, a Florida State University professor who studies technology-based learning, told Action News Jax on July 22 that the cumulative privacy risk is real. "Students themselves, if they're using it, they can be putting in little pieces of information, and over time they've given away a lot of information about their identity," she said.

The Wednesday, Aug. 5, workshop begins at 3 p.m. on Microsoft Teams (Meeting ID: 243 660 447 318 324, Passcode: ce9WF6d7).