Vermont Bills Would Regulate Classroom Technology for Kids

Blake Fabrikant switched his film and philosophy students at Sharon Academy to pen and paper this school year, and the results surprised him.

Fabrikant, dean of students at the independent school in the central Vermont town of Sharon, has taught the class for a decade. In prior years, students wrote their essay responses on Google Chromebook laptops. This year he pulled the laptops out entirely. “It felt like the students, when you asked them to do something that was handwritten, were much more likely to turn it in, and much more engaged with the work,” he said.

His experience tracks with what a growing group of Vermont teachers, parents, and education advocates have been arguing at the Statehouse this spring: that the wave of education technology tools and software that has moved through classrooms over the last 10 years hasn’t delivered on its promises, and in some cases may be making things worse.

Two bills now moving through the Vermont Legislature would put new guardrails on classroom technology, and the educators pushing for them say the action is long overdue.

The first, H.650, sits in the Senate Education Committee after clearing the House. It would create a state registry requiring education technology providers to register annually with Vermont, giving the state a formal process to vet classroom tools for efficacy before schools can adopt them. Rep. Edye Graning, a Democrat from Jericho, sponsored the bill alongside Rep. Angela Arsenault of Williston. Graning said she brought the legislation because there’s “very little independent oversight into whether these products are actually doing what they say they’re going to do.”

“The hope is that we can get some legislation started so that we can begin regulating the industry and figure out how we can ensure that these products are actually educating,” Graning said.

The second bill, H.830, takes a different approach.

Arsenault sponsored H.830 to give parents the legal right to opt their children out of education technology use in school altogether. Presenting to the House Education Committee this month, Arsenault put the current situation bluntly: “No one was ever made to prove that using technology the way we are in education currently was the right thing for kids. And now parents are being asked to prove why it’s not.”

Advocates behind both bills point to research suggesting that digital learning tools haven’t improved academic results or standardized test scores, and that heavy screen use may be harming students’ cognitive development. The rollout of artificial intelligence tools in classrooms, as VTDigger has reported, has intensified those concerns. Advocates also cite worries about how education technology companies collect and use student data, an issue that student privacy researchers have flagged nationally for years.

The push didn’t come from nowhere. Vermont lawmakers passed legislation banning smartphones in schools last session, a move that itself reflected growing frustration with device saturation in public education. H.650 and H.830 extend that logic from phones to the broader classroom software environment.

For Fabrikant, the argument isn’t abstract. He watched his students produce better work without the devices. He’s seen how the presence of a browser or an AI tool changes the way a teenager approaches an essay, how it can short-circuit the slower, harder thinking that writing actually requires. The American Psychological Association has documented similar concerns about technology’s effects on adolescent cognition and attention, findings that advocates in Vermont are now citing directly in legislative hearings.

Sharon Academy is a small independent school, not a large district with procurement contracts and technology integration teams. But Fabrikant’s classroom is exactly the kind of ground-level evidence that Graning and Arsenault have drawn on to make their case to colleagues who might otherwise see regulation of education software as bureaucratic overreach.

H.650 and H.830 both still need Senate action before they could reach Gov. Phil Scott’s desk.