Assembly Bill 467, gutted and rewritten by Assemblymember Mike Fong on June 9, would codify the California Center for Climate Change Education into state law. The bill started in February 2025 as routine legislation on teleconferencing for Los Angeles neighborhood councils, passed the Assembly 65-7 in May 2025 in that form, then sat in two Senate committees for more than a year before Fong repurposed it. It now has until July 2 to clear the Senate Education and Appropriations committees or die for the session. A nearly identical effort, Assembly Bill 3142, passed both houses of the Legislature in 2024 and would have funded a Mobile Unit for Climate Change Education out of the center; Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it, citing cost.
A statewide climate education center sounds like infrastructure for your classroom, not a bill you need to track. But the center's job would be exactly the gap most science teachers already work around alone: vetted lesson materials, professional development, and a coordinating body so climate content does not depend entirely on what an individual teacher has time to find and adapt. Newsom's 2024 veto was about cost, not content, which tells you the policy idea has support and the obstacle is budget timing. If Fong's bill dies again on July 2, the underlying need does not go away, it just stays on your own desk for another year.
Wake County Public School System administrators presented a revised draft AI policy to the school board on June 17, according to WRAL, after board members complained the previous version lacked specific direction. The new draft states that WCPSS "does not support" AI-detection programs, citing their technical unreliability and their potential for bias against student populations including English-language learners. In place of detection, the policy requires students to acknowledge and explain how they used AI on an assignment. The draft is notably more cautious than the version it replaces, naming bias, misinformation, privacy erosion, and overreliance on automated systems as real risks rather than hypothetical ones. The board will not vote before August at the earliest, since district rules require approval at two separate meetings.
If your own school still leans on a detector to flag AI-written work, Wake County's reasoning is worth reading before your district's next policy revision. A disclosure requirement puts the burden on the student to name their process, which is harder to game quietly than it sounds, since a vague or missing disclosure becomes its own signal. It also sidesteps the false-positive problem that has made detectors a liability with English-language learners and other students whose writing patterns trip the software for reasons that have nothing to do with AI use.
The Texas State Board of Education voted 9-5-1 on Friday, June 26, to approve a required reading list of more than 200 titles for K-12 English and literature classes, according to CNN, the Texas Tribune, and Houston Public Media. The list includes roughly a dozen biblical texts alongside classic literary titles: an excerpt from the Book of Exodus for fifth graders, the Shepherd's Psalm for seventh graders, among others. The change affects more than 5 million Texas public school students, though implementation does not begin until the 2030-31 school year. Board member Evelyn Brooks, the only Republican to vote against the list, called the move unconstitutional during debate. Opponents argue the list favors Christianity over other faiths and violates the separation of church and state; supporters frame the biblical selections as literature and cultural-foundation texts rather than religious instruction.
Texas reading-list decisions carry weight beyond Texas because textbook publishers build to the largest markets first, the same dynamic that played out when the state rewrote its social studies standards earlier this year. English teachers outside Texas may see commercial anthologies and literature units shift to reflect this list whether or not their own state adopts it. The classroom problem is more immediate than the legal one: teaching a biblical passage as literature requires a different pedagogical frame than teaching it as religious doctrine, and that line will fall to individual teachers to draw, with limited guidance from the state on how.
Colorado House Bill 25-1135 requires every public and charter school district, plus the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind, to adopt, implement, and post online a student cellphone-use policy by July 1, the law Governor Jared Polis signed earlier this year. The policy does not have to be an outright ban, but it must spell out when students can possess or use devices, with exceptions for disability accommodations, medical needs, and emergencies. Spring 2026 survey data show adoption splitting sharply by grade level: roughly 89 percent of Colorado elementary schools and 84 percent of middle schools have adopted full bell-to-bell restrictions, compared with just 22 percent of high schools, many of which are choosing looser, schedule-based restrictions limiting phone use to lunch or passing periods instead.
The gap between grade bands is the actual story here, not the deadline itself. Elementary and middle schools are converging on full bans because younger students have less autonomy and fewer legitimate reasons to need a phone mid-day. High schools are visibly choosing a different, more permissive model under the identical law, which means the policy your high school adopts by July 1 may look nothing like the one at the middle school down the street, and that gap is worth explaining to students directly rather than letting them assume it is inconsistency for its own sake.