During a special bill signing ceremony at Valley Elementary School in Eden, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox declared it had been a great year for education in the state Legislature.

“This was a really great legislative session,” he told a crowd of Valley students, legislators and other officials in the school’s library Thursday morning. “I know we were all worried about the budget for sure and what the budget would look like for education, but as always, our legislators came through in a very, very big way.”

He said Thursday had an important focus.

“Our focus here today is on education because education is so important to our state,” he said. “You are the future of our state. I don’t know if you know this, but Utah’s been ranked the No. 1 state in the country three years in a row. We’re the best. They look at a whole bunch of different areas, but one of the areas that we lead in is education. It’s really important — when they’re judging which states are the best, education is what they look at.”

Following his opening statement, Utah First Lady Abby Cox — a former teacher herself — took the podium to tout the importance of education and taking on one of the biggest challenges facing it today.

“We’ve been doing a conference around teachers, but my real worry as we were having the conversation, we sat around the table talking about the really critical and important issues in education,” she said. “I was with my friend (Sen.) Ann Millner — she was part of that discussion — and afterwards she came up to me and told me, ‘If you want to really make a difference in education, you will start focusing on literacy. We have a problem.'”

She said that the main culprit has been an over-use of cell phones and social media.

“When you have a phone and you have social media, that is sucking your attention from the best things that we can do,” she said.

Mrs. Cox used the example of the very library the students were in during the ceremony.

“These books — that is the way we learn, that’s how we grow, that’s how we become intelligent human beings, that’s how we become leaders, that’s how we perpetuate our democracy is if we’re really good readers,” she said. “A lot of our kiddos from the time they’re babies and growing up — we all have a responsibility in this — we haven’t been reading as much. We haven’t been teaching kids to read. Our teachers are doing the best they can and they’re learning this really incredible skill of how to teach kiddos how to read, but they need our help and they need us as a community to come together.”

She said that there is something that can be done about the issue.

“As we’ve seen social media uptick over the last decade, we’ve seen literacy decline and that is not unrelated,” she said. “We need to make sure, as we’ve done as a state, pull that out of the classrooms, out of the hands of kids, get us reading again — we know those literacy skills are going to be so important and they’re going to be perpetuated as we continue to be vigilant.”

Several of the bills signed at Thursday’s ceremony dealt with cell phones and other tech in the classroom along with social media and its impact on youth.

Thursday’s bill signing included the following legislation from the 2026 Session:

• House Bill 218 which creates a digital skills course for grades 7-8;
• House Bill 273 which “requires the State Board of Education to create model policies on the use of technology and artificial intelligence in a public school classroom,” according to its description;
• House Bill 393 which creates the Dyslexia Screening Pilot Program;
• Senate Bill 69 which establishes the default standard device use from prohibited during instructional

  time to prohibited during the school day;

• Senate Bill 165 which establishes a partnership to support community-based partnerships focused on

  educational and economic outcomes.

• Senate bill 81 which addresses dyslexia assessment and diagnosis;
• Senate Bill 287 which imposes a tax on targeted advertising in the state;
• Senate Bill 241 which establishes a framework of literacy interventions in kindergarten through grade 3 within the public education system.”

All of the bills had been officially signed by the governor prior to Thursday.

Gov. Cox noted towards the end he’s living what he’s advocating for Utah’s students.

“I know you hear a lot of parents telling you what to do and not to do, and sometimes you think, ‘Well why don’t you guys do it?'” he said. “I want you to know that I deleted social media off of my phone in December and I’ve started reading more books. Lots more books. We’re trying to do this too. In fact, I’m really excited — I’m finishing a book today called ‘East of Eden,’ which I thought was appropriate since we’re here in Eden.”