Senate Education Committee considers bill to register education-technology providers and commission study
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Summary
On April 8 the Senate Education Committee heard a bill that would require education-technology providers used in Vermont schools to register with the Secretary of State and charge the Agency of Education with studying whether a formal product-certification process is needed; members raised concerns about the law's broad definition, overlap with upcoming child-data protections and practical implementation.
The Senate Education Committee on April 8 considered legislation that would require providers of education-technology products used in Vermont schools to register with the Secretary of State and direct the Agency of Education to study a potential certification process for those products.
Rick Segal of the Office of Legislative Council told the committee the bill, as introduced, was pared back from a more regulatory proposal. "As it was introduced, it was a much more comprehensive EdTech bill," Segal said, explaining the current draft focuses on registration and a study rather than immediate certification or product approval. The draft definition read to the committee covers "any student-facing software, application, or platform that may collect, process, or transmit student data and that is used for teaching and learning purposes in a school," a formulation counsel and members said is intentionally broad.
Sponsor testimony stressed the bill is an initial transparency and consumer-protection step. The sponsor, who identified herself in the hearing as Erica Underhill, said education technology is "a multibillion dollar industry" that expanded after COVID and remains largely unregulated. "What we know is that education technology has grown in multiples to become a multibillion dollar industry in a very short amount of time," Underhill said, adding the bill would give the state a clearer picture of which products are used and what it would cost to monitor or certify them.
Under the draft, providers registering with the Secretary of State would provide contact information and a link to their privacy policy, list schools or districts where products are in use, identify which products are offered at no cost, and attest to compliance with existing student-privacy law. Segal said the Agency of Education would be asked to consult with the Secretary of State and schools, compile an inventory of EdTech products used statewide, recommend which state entity should oversee any certification, propose minimum certification criteria (including curriculum alignment, demonstrated advantages over nondigital methods, and data-privacy safeguards), and estimate implementation costs and timelines.
The committee was given several specific timing markers in the hearing transcript: the sponsor said the registration step would be implemented via Secretary of State filings, Segal said the AOE report would be due "on or before 02/15/2027," and the draft lists an effective date of July 1, 2026 for parts of the measure. Committee members and counsel repeatedly flagged practical questions about capacity and enforcement — how the Secretary of State would detect unregistered products, whether registration fees or different fee structures could fund enforcement, and how to narrow the bill's scope to avoid capturing incidental or informal uses of technology in classrooms.
Members pressed whether the bill would sweep in generic or third-party tools such as ChatGPT. "ChatGPT is not a tool that is designed and used for learning specifically," one committee member said during the exchange; counsel and the sponsor said tools not designed for instruction would likely fall outside the bill as drafted, but members urged adding explicit intent language so teachers could continue to use generative-AI tools for digital-literacy instruction without unintended legal consequences.
Members also discussed the relationship between the registration proposal and the state's forthcoming child-data protections (referred to in the hearing as "Kids Code"), which counsel said takes effect Jan. 1, 2027. Counsel described that law as prohibiting certain uses and sales of minors' data for covered businesses and said whether an EdTech provider is a "covered business" under Kids Code will depend on statutory definitions and the provider's data practices.
Committee members asked about distinctions between first-party processors (platforms like Canvas or Blackboard) and data brokers who sell or transfer data to others; counsel said first-party processors generally are not data brokers unless they sell student data onward. Several members and the sponsor stressed the value of partnering with nonprofit evaluators and multi-state consortia to reduce the Agency of Education's workload if the study points toward ongoing product reviews.
No formal vote was recorded in the hearing. The committee paused for a 15-minute recess at the session's close and did not adopt final action on the bill during the time covered by the transcript. The bill's next procedural steps were not specified in the provided record.
The hearing included multiple lines of questioning that the committee said it would revisit during line-by-line review with counsel and that the Agency of Education's forthcoming report should address — most notably: how to narrow the bill's definition to avoid unintentionally regulating incidental classroom uses, how registration data would be maintained and enforced, what fees (if any) would fund enforcement, and how the proposed regime overlaps with or differs from Kids Code protections.
