Speaking at the Education Commission of the States' National Forum on Education Policy on July 9, Maine Department of Education officials Beth Lambert and Emma-Marie Banks described how the state abandoned the standard policy-drafting cycle for AI guidance. "With AI, by the time you finish that cycle, the technology had already changed," Lambert said. Instead, Maine built a six-step approach: identify needs, convene stakeholders, establish principles, align with existing computer science and digital literacy work, develop a living guidance toolkit, and support implementation through ongoing coaching. The toolkit gets updated as feedback comes in rather than sitting still until the next legislative cycle.

Several states, including Idaho, Maryland, Oklahoma and Virginia, passed new laws this year requiring districts to adopt AI policies, per K-12 Dive reporting, joining Ohio and Tennessee, which set earlier deadlines. Most of these produce a single static document. Maine's model treats the policy as something that has to keep moving, which matches how the technology itself behaves. If your district's AI guidance hasn't changed since it was written, ask why, and bring Maine's six steps to whoever owns that document.

Fifteen states filed a new lawsuit on July 10 alleging the U.S. Department of Education is trying to "terminate" up to $1 billion in school mental health grants, the same funding a federal court permanently blocked the department from "discontinuing" in a December 2025 ruling. The grants, established after the Parkland and Uvalde shootings, fund mental health staff in schools nationwide. New York Attorney General Letitia James said the department is running "the same illegal scheme" through a different legal door. The department maintains the earlier injunction never guaranteed states an entitlement to the funding at all.

The department says it plans to end some or all of these grants starting July 31, days before most districts open for the fall semester. New York alone says it stands to lose $19 million, funding that supports mental health professionals in schools serving more than 9,000 rural students. If your building's counselor, social worker, or mental health partnership is grant-funded, this lawsuit is the reason you may or may not have that person in the building come September.

As the UK moves toward banning social media for under-16s, an analysis published in The BMJ by Amrit Kaur Purba and colleagues argues that restrictions operate inside a wider system of teens, families, schools, platforms, and governments, not as a switch that simply turns risk off. The authors warn that companies may redefine what counts as "social media" to sidestep new rules, while teens themselves may shift to encrypted messaging apps or AI-based chat systems that are harder for any adult to see into. The benefit of a restriction, they add, is also uneven: teens with strong family and school support gain more from it than teens who are already isolated.

If your state or district is weighing a social media restriction, and many are in 2026, the ban itself is not the finish line. A student who loses access to a public platform may resurface in a private, encrypted space or an AI companion app where you have no visibility at all. The students most likely to end up there without support are the ones already least connected to a trusted adult, which is the same population this brief has flagged before as vulnerable to AI chatbots standing in for real relationships.