District Responsibilities

Every district needs AI policies. These need to address:

• Teacher usage of AI

• Student usage of AI

An AI policy tells teachers what is and isn't okay within their district. AI policies will likely fall into 1-of-3 categories

• Discouraged/No use

• At the discretion of the schools/teachers

• Encouraged use

and a district may decide that they're okay with teachers using AI, but not students due to academic dishonesty concerns.

Oregon put out a great worksheet called Developing Policy and Protocols for the use of GenAI in K-12 Classrooms (2025), containing 4 pages on guidance/instruction and a 12 page worksheet to be used with Oregon's "Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in K-12 Classrooms" guidance. Together these provide guidance and instruction for districts to develop their own AI guidance policies that match their already-existing district policies and goals.

Though the document outlines that it's appropriate for schools to have a stance against using AI in schools, I would argue that this is a bad stance for several reasons and all schools should have some allowance for AI usage and training within their schools:

1. AI is the fastest growing technology the world has ever seen. It's not a fad.

2. AI is being embedded into anything and everything, from the appliances in our homes (AI refrigerator) and smart devices we carry (or attach) to us, to the vehicles we drive, stoplights that control traffic flow, and surveillance systems in stores we visit.

Side note: I had a conversation with a traffic control programmer for the City of Salem who admitted to using AI on a few occasions to see if it could generate a better/more efficient program for controlling the city's traffic lights (at that time, it did not).

3. AI literacy is vital for students in this new digital era

4. Many companies report that they won't hire someone who doesn't have experience with AI prompting related to their field.

5. If we don't prepare students for AI use, we should not be surprised when they use it inappropriately and leave our schools ill-prepared for the world ahead.

We should not be preparing students for work in today's world - we should be preparing them for work in a futuristic world. - This is my take on a statement I heard from another AI literacy promoter.

Districts are responsible for providing AI training to educators. This includes:

• PII (Personally Identifiable Information) - the data about us or our students and how easy it is to unintentionally divulge information about ourselves or students. Divulging student PII to a system that doesn't honor national, state, or district laws/policies on data privacy could result in legal remifications against the school or teacher.

• Explorations of how to use AI as a teacher:

  • Brain break, class warmup, and exit ticket ideas

  • Worksheet/assignment generators

  • Lesson Planning

  • Image generation (for classroom slideshows)

  • Presentation (slideshow) suggestions (or even generator depending on your AI model)

  • Unit Planning

  • Grading (and the ethical issues around this)

  • Plagiarism/cheat detectors (and the ethical issues around this)

  • Email drafters or grammar/tone checkers

  • Alignment partners ("Help me align my lesson with MYP requirements")

  • Differentiated instruction

  • ...and the list goes on.

• AI Hallucinations, Bias, and other ethical concerns that could find their way into our teaching if we are not reviewing the work and considering those concerns.

• Necessity of explicitly identifying when AI is used in teacher resources/lessons.

Districts should have a signed data agreement policy from at least 1 major AI provider that allows teachers and students access to AI that honors not only national data privacy laws, but state laws and district policies as well. 

Schools that do not provide a safe space for AI use paired with age-appropriate training in an era where AI use is flooding society are leaving the rising generation to explore these on their own without supervision, training, or guardrails. They also run the risk of teachers accidentally disclosing student PII with AI organizations. 

AI organizations that don't provide these agreements should be discouraged by districts for the privacy protections of students as well as the legal ramifications that could come from knowingly allowing students to use AI systems that don't honor national or state laws. AI organizations that do provide these agreements get the benefit of students becoming familiar with their products early on which potentially instills trust and loyalty to their brand.