The Bill The Students Wrote

Between Friday, July 17 and Sunday, July 19, one hundred high school students, two from every state in the country, walked into the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston, took their seats under the recreated Senate ceiling, and, for a weekend, became national Student AI Senators.¹ The three-day fellowship was organized by the nonprofit Day of AI, MIT RAISE, and the School Superintendents Association. It ended, on Sunday, in a Senate-style roll-call vote on a model AI policy for K through 12 public schools in the United States. The final tally was eighty-three in favor, fifteen opposed, two absent.¹

The document itself will not be released for a few weeks.¹ What is already public is enough. According to the reporters who watched them work, the students voted to make AI literacy instruction mandatory the moment a device enters the classroom. They voted to ban most AI use below the eighth grade. They voted to keep AI out of artistic assignments. They voted, notably, to prohibit a teacher from typing a student's identifiable information into an AI tool while writing an individualized education plan.²

The concerns they named, out loud, on the floor, were these: cheating, transparency, hallucinations, cognitive offloading, mental health, and the environment.¹

The Phrase Worth Rereading

The phrase most worth rereading is cognitive offloading. It is a term from cognitive science that has, over the last two years, migrated slowly into the education press. It describes what a student does when she hands over to a tool the small acts of remembering, connecting, or composing that the older curriculum expected her mind to do. Adults have been arguing about the concept for two years. The students, when asked what worried them, offered the word themselves.

There is a long history in American schools of adults writing policy for children about things the children understand more concretely than the adults do. The last time this happened at national scale was social media, and by common admission the adults arrived about a decade late. This time, the students have offered to close the distance themselves. The document they produced will be shared, according to Day of AI, with a network of more than ten thousand school leaders.¹

What They Asked For

What is most striking about the bill is not what the students banned. It is what they asked for. They asked, above all, for AI literacy, and they asked for it to arrive at the same moment the device does. They asked for transparency about when and how a teacher uses AI on their behalf. They asked to preserve the in-person interactions the room was built for.² The bill reads, from a distance, like a request. The request is that the adults not skip past the reason school was ever attended in the first place.

The provision worth sitting with longest is the one about individualized education plans. The students voted to prohibit teachers from entering identifiable student information into an AI tool while writing them.² It is a data-privacy provision on its face. Underneath, it is a request about who the child is to the machine. The child, in that provision, is not a data point. She is the person the plan is for.

Extend that idea one degree further and it becomes the whole of what the students named. They are asking not to be reduced to output. Cognitive offloading is the technical version of the same worry. So is a ban on AI in art. So is the request for literacy before use. The work the student does is the person the student is becoming. The tools should preserve the work, not replace it.

The Layer Under The Bill

The layer we work on at Koan is that one. When a student writes, she pauses. She reaches for a word. She erases a sentence and rewrites it. She copies a passage in from another window, and then, sometimes, she puts it in her own language. The finished paragraph does not preserve any of that. The record of how the paragraph was made is what the fall's teachers will most want to have, whether or not the bill the students wrote becomes national policy.

The students, quietly, have already made the case for that record. They asked for literacy so they would know what a tool does to their thinking. They asked for a ban on AI in art so they would keep the practice of making. They asked for transparency so they could see what was being done for them and what was being done to them. Each of those requests is easier to grant when the process itself is preserved.

Fall 2026

The Day of AI recommendations will be published in the coming weeks. The bill has no force of law, and none of the students who wrote it can vote yet. What it does have is the moral weight of one hundred children who, given the chance to write down what they wanted, wrote down something the adults have not been able to write for themselves.

Eighty three of them said yes. Fifteen said no. Two were not in the room. The vote is not the point. The vocabulary is.

If the students already know what they are trying not to lose, what will the rest of us build to help them keep it?