Bill 299 amends Schedule A of Nova Scotia’s Education Act by inserting the phrase “promote and support the safe, healthy and responsible use of technology” into multiple duties across the statute. The language is added to provisions governing the Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development, parents, students, principals, teachers, support staff, regional centres, and regional executive directors, and to provisions describing school and regional responsibilities.
The change is textual and widespread: it does not define “technology,” “promote,” “support,” or “healthy,” nor does it provide funding, enforcement mechanisms, or regulations. That makes this a policy-setting bill that elevates digital-wellness expectations into statutory duties while leaving implementation choices—and costs—to education authorities and schools.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill amends multiple clauses in Schedule A of the Education Act to add a new duty phrase—"promote and support the safe, healthy and responsible use of technology"—to obligations already assigned to the Minister, parents, students, school leaders, teachers, support staff, regional centres and school regions. It accomplishes this by inserting parallel clauses in Sections 9, 23(1), 25(1), 39(2), 42(1), 52(1), 61 and 66(2).
Who It Affects
Directly affected parties are the Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development, regional centres for education and regional executive directors, principals, teachers, support staff, students and parents in the public school system. Indirectly affected actors include school IT and procurement teams, curriculum planners, and professional development providers.
Why It Matters
By embedding digital-wellness duties into statute, the bill shifts responsibility for technology use from informal policy to a legal obligation. That will shape school policies, discipline protocols, training priorities and procurement choices—even though the bill leaves key terms, enforcement, and resources unspecified.
More articles like this one.
A weekly email with all the latest developments on this topic.
What This Bill Actually Does
Bill 299 does the same textual insertion across a chain of existing statutory duties: wherever the Education Act currently lists responsibilities for ministers, school authorities, staff, parents or students, the bill appends a clause requiring them to "promote and support the safe, healthy and responsible use of technology." The legislative technique is simple—strike-and-add edits to several clauses in Schedule A—but the practical reach is broad because it touches nearly every actor responsible for school governance and daily operations.
Because the bill does not include definitions, guidance, funding or penalties, it establishes a legal expectation without prescribing a single model of implementation. That means regional centres, school boards and individual schools will need to interpret what "promote and support" entails: curriculum content (digital literacy lessons), supervisory practices (acceptable-use rules), staff training, parental engagement, or operational changes such as filtering, monitoring, or device-management policies.The bill is silent on whether technical or programmatic measures required to meet the duty—like classroom monitoring tools, software filters, counselling services, or additional staff time—will receive central funding.
It also does not address trade-offs between promoting "healthy" use and protecting student privacy or freedom of expression, leaving those policy choices to local authorities and to any future regulations or ministry guidance.Operationally, the most immediate consequences are administrative: updates to codes of conduct, integration of digital-wellness objectives into school improvement plans, procurement standards for devices and apps, and new professional-development priorities. Over time the statutory language could be used by parents, unions or other stakeholders to demand concrete changes, but the bill itself creates no enforcement route or compliance timeline.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The bill inserts the exact phrase "promote and support the safe, healthy and responsible use of technology" into multiple statutory duties rather than creating a standalone new duty section.
Subsection 23(1) gains a new clause (f) that directs parents to "support the child in the safe, healthy and responsible use of technology.", Subsection 25(1) gains a new clause (f) that requires students to "use technology in a safe and responsible manner.", Clauses attached to school leadership and staff—39(2), 42(1) and 52(1)—are amended to require principals, teachers and support staff to promote and support safe, healthy and responsible technology use in the school context.
The bill does not define key terms ("technology," "promote," "healthy"), does not allocate funding, and does not add enforcement or penalty provisions; implementation will rely on existing governance tools and future ministry guidance.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
Every bill we cover gets an analysis of its key sections.
Minister: add duty to promote and support tech use
Section 9 is amended to add a clause requiring the Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development to "promote and support the safe, healthy and responsible use of technology" within the public school system. Practically, this places an expectation on the ministry to set tone and priorities—through policy, guidance, and system-wide initiatives—even though the bill does not itself create programs or allocate funds.
Parents: statutory expectation to support children's technology use
Subsection 23(1) acquires a new parental obligation to "support the child in the safe, healthy and responsible use of technology." That moves parental engagement on digital-wellness from informal expectation into statute, which could be cited in disputes over supervision, device rules at home versus school, or when schools seek parental cooperation for interventions.
Students: added obligation to use technology responsibly
Subsection 25(1) adds a student duty to "use technology in a safe and responsible manner." This mirrors existing behavioural expectations but specifically names technology, which may affect codes of conduct and disciplinary procedures by making technology misuse a statutory concern rather than just a policy issue.
School leadership and staff: promote and support within schools
These amendments add parallel clauses for principals, teachers and support staff to "promote and support the safe, healthy and responsible use of technology in the school." The practical implication is that school-level actors have a duty to incorporate digital-wellness into school plans and daily supervision; it also creates a legal basis for staff-led initiatives and could be used to justify training, policy changes, or technology-management decisions.
Regional centres: system-level responsibility
Section 61 is amended to require regional centres to "promote and support the safe, healthy and responsible use of technology in its schools and programs." This places responsibility on regional governance structures for coordination, potentially affecting regional policy frameworks, procurement standards, and resourcing decisions.
School regions: promote and support tech use across regions
Subsection 66(2) is amended to add the same duty at the school-region level, ensuring the language appears at every level of the system’s governance ladder. Together with the ministerial and regional-centre provisions, this creates a multi-tiered statutory expectation for coordinated action—but leaves the precise division of labor and funding unclear.
This bill is one of many.
Codify tracks hundreds of bills on this topic across all five countries.
Explore this topic in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Students: elevated statutory focus on digital wellness could expand access to digital-literacy education, safer device-management practices, and school-based supports addressing online harms.
- Parents seeking support: parents who want schools to play a stronger role in shaping healthy technology habits get a clear statutory basis to request programming or cooperation from schools and regional centres.
- School leaders and teachers (policy backing): staff gain explicit statutory backing to introduce classroom norms, training and restrictions around technology use, reducing the perception that such measures are purely discretionary.
- Regional education authorities: the bill gives regional centres a legal mandate to coordinate system-wide approaches (policy templates, procurement rules, PD), which can streamline cross-school initiatives.
Who Bears the Cost
- Regional centres and individual schools: responsible for interpreting and operationalizing the duty—policy drafting, staff training, procurement changes, and program delivery—which will create administrative and potential financial burdens without accompanying funds.
- Teachers and support staff: likely to absorb additional responsibilities for supervision, curriculum delivery on digital wellness, and enforcement of technology rules, increasing workload unless staffing changes occur.
- School IT and procurement teams: pressure to select, configure and maintain technologies that support "healthy" use (filters, management software, privacy-preserving tools), which may raise capital and vendor-management costs.
- Parents (practical responsibility): the statutory parental duty could translate into expectations for at-home monitoring, restrictive device rules, or participation in school programs, shifting some behavioral compliance costs to families.
- Department of Education: expected to provide guidance, templates or oversight but with no new funding in the bill, placing strain on central resources and requiring prioritization among competing initiatives.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central dilemma is between elevating digital wellness to a statutory duty—which promises clearer expectations and greater school engagement—and the bill’s refusal to define terms or provide resources, which forces local actors to choose between costly technical controls (with privacy risks) and lower-cost educational approaches that may not satisfy stakeholders demanding concrete results.
The bill’s language is deliberately broad and phrased as an additive duty, but it leaves three implementation questions unresolved: what counts as "technology," what concrete actions satisfy "promote and support," and who pays for the measures schools will likely need to adopt. Those gaps shift the policy contest from the legislature into the ministry and regional centres, which will have to decide whether to rely on curriculum changes, staff training, technical controls (filters, device management), counselling services, or some combination.
The open wording risks unintended consequences. For example, enforcing responsible use by increasing monitoring or device-level surveillance could conflict with student privacy or freedom-of-expression norms; conversely, favoring only education and voluntary programs could make the duty feel nominal.
Smaller or rural schools with limited budgets and IT capacity face higher relative costs, which could produce uneven implementation across the province. Finally, because the bill creates duties but no penalties or reporting requirements, courts, unions or parents might test the scope of the obligation through disputes that force administrative clarifications or litigation.
There's more to this law than the bill.
Codify Laws traces every connection across the legislative lifecycle.