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Committee holds bill that would ban grading or tracking students’ subjective 'character' data after hours of heated testimony

Utah House Education Committee · February 12, 2026
AI-Generated Content: All content on this page was generated by AI to highlight key points from the meeting. For complete details and context, we recommend watching the full video. so we can fix them.

Summary

After extensive testimony from parents, researchers, educators and school officials, the committee voted unanimously to hold HB399, a bill that would prohibit schools from grading, scoring or tracking students’ subjective social‑emotional ‘character’ attributes and that would create enforcement mechanisms.

The House Education Committee voted to hold HB399 after an extended hearing in which witnesses and members sharply disagreed over scope, definitions and consequences.

Representative Lee, the bill sponsor, said HB399 protects parental rights and prevents schools and vendors from creating persistent records of subjective traits such as compassion and integrity. The sponsor cited vendor dashboards and a statewide "data backpack" that aggregate student measures and warned of what she called the risk of “personality passports” that could follow students. “Let schools be the judge of…

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