01 / The finding
Who's Writing the Rules for AI in Schools?
As of September 2026, most states have provided some AI guidance to their school districts. Ten have not, including three states with the largest school systems in the country.
Four of the six largest districts in the country restricted or cancelled student generative AI access within eleven weeks while allowing teachers to maintain some level of access. New York City and Los Angeles in early September, Broward in August, and Chicago in May. Katy and Orange County did the same at a smaller scale in July.
02 / The map
What's happening in your state?
Each square is one state. Select a state to see when its guidance was issued and where its largest districts stand.
Statewide guidance means a K-12 AI guidance document issued by the state education agency, as catalogued by the Playlab AI State Policies tracker, updated September 22, 2026, and verified state by state on September 29, 2026 for the ten states the tracker does not list. The district panel covers the 50 largest US public school districts by enrollment, from NCES Table 215.30, Digest of Education Statistics 2022. SquareOne checked each district's public web presence on September 30, 2026. This was a targeted search, not an exhaustive review of every board portal and staff handbook, so "none found" means not located rather than proven absent. Twenty-eight districts have published guidance, eight are in progress, and fourteen returned nothing. Only eighteen states contain a district among the fifty largest. The District of Columbia is not covered by the state tracker and is not shown.
03 / Policy and practice
Inconsistency across states and school districts
Two of the four largest school systems in the country show states and school districts are taking different approaches to AI regulation.
Miami-Dade vs. New York City
Miami-Dade · 3rd largest
100,000 high school students and teachers are using Gemini for Education under a Google partnership. The school board directed the superintendent to write AI guidance in August 2025 and set an October 1 deadline. Though there is still no public trace of that guidance, the school system is building education and workforce partnerships to train students and educators in AI use.
New York City · Largest in the country
Barred generative AI for 600,000 students from 2-K through grade eight on September 2, 2026, and barred all student-facing generative AI and companion chatbots in every grade. The AI components of more than 38 previously approved programs were disabled. Teachers kept their tools. Up to 50,000 high schoolers are piloting five vetted ones.
Texas
No statewide guidance · 8 of the 50 largest
With eight districts in the top fifty, there is no statewide guidance so far. Houston, Dallas, and Katy each wrote their own. Fort Bend has an AI department page. Northside and Fort Worth each launched ChatGPT for Teachers districtwide in August 2026. Cypress-Fairbanks advanced a policy in April and pulled it for review. Austin has nothing findable.
What this page does not claim
This page shows who has published rules, not whether those rules are any good or whether anyone follows them. A state with guidance may have issued two pages. A state without may have districts doing serious work, which is exactly the case in Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania. The district scan covers only the fifty largest districts and rests on public evidence, so a district doing work privately is absent here, and "none found" means not located rather than proven absent. Section 04 draws on a different and older set of 79 districts that CRPE selected without publishing its criteria, so it describes districts with visible public activity rather than a representative sample. Trackers disagree on New Jersey, Tennessee, and Kansas, and this page follows the one named in the sources. CRPE's 2026 state database codes Kansas as having April 2024 guidance that three other trackers do not list. This is a snapshot dated September 30, 2026, and it is moving fast: six of these districts changed posture in the eleven weeks before publication, so expect some of it to be out of date within months.
04 / What districts changed
What districts changed
CRPE catalogued 79 districts with public AI activity in summer 2025, coding each on seven measures. Across them, guidance and training are the most common activities. Rewriting learning standards is the rarest by a wide margin.
Only six out of seventy-nine districts studied are changing what students are expected to know. The rest are governing AI use and access.
05 / Sources
Where these numbers come from
- Statewide AI guidance by state. AI State Policies, Playlab Learning Hub, updated September 22, 2026. Supplies guidance status and issue dates for 40 states and Puerto Rico. learn.playlab.ai / AI State Policies →
- District-level AI activity. AI Early Adopter Database, External Summer 2025, Center on Reinventing Public Education, "Database" tab, 79 rows. Supplies every district count and every figure in section 04. crpe.org →
- NYC district guidance. Guidance on Artificial Intelligence, New York City Public Schools, September 2, 2026. schools.nyc.gov / AI →
- Miami-Dade board order. Miami-Dade County School Board, agenda item H-4 (revised), August 12, 2025. Directed the superintendent to develop AI guidance and report back by October 1, 2025.
- District reporting and announcements. Axios Chicago, August 24, 2026, on the scrapped Chicago Public Schools Gemini rollout; browardschools.ai, Broward County Public Schools AI hub; Community Impact, July 24, 2026, on the Katy ISD AI framework; Loudoun Now, September 2026, on the Loudoun County Public Schools Gemini pilot; Google for Education blog, August 13, 2025, on the Miami-Dade Gemini deployment; Houston Landing on Houston-area district AI rules; and EdSurge, September 14, 2026, on district survey responses including Clark County. browardschools.ai →
- District guidance scan. SquareOne analysis of the 50 largest US public school districts, September 30, 2026. Universe from NCES Table 215.30, Digest of Education Statistics 2022. Supplies every district status and evidence line in section 02 and the cases in section 03. Underlying sources include Google for Education's Miami-Dade case study, district AI pages at schools.nyc.gov, cps.edu, houstonisd.org and gcpsk12.org, and board actions reported by named local outlets. nces.ed.gov / Digest Table 215.30 →
Sources retrieved September 29 and 30, 2026. Calculated rather than reported on this page: the count of ten states without guidance, which is the fifty states minus the forty the tracker lists, each of the ten verified individually; and the per-state district counts, which are tallies of the CRPE database by its State column. Every other figure is reported as published.