{"id":89168,"topic":"ai","source":"GovTech","title":"AI Restrictions at NYCPS and LAUSD Reverberate Nationwide - GovTech","url":"https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","url_hash":"0ea7fef47b05818ba9c1de5521352d8cef109f01","author":"","summary":"AI Restrictions at NYCPS and LAUSD Reverberate Nationwide GovTech","content":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules.\nWhether other school systems follow remains to be seen, but there is a throughline of concerns driving district decision-making on the matter: Across school systems of vastly different sizes, leaders are drawing boundaries around student AI use based on age, instructional value, the risks of different tools and whether they support student thinking or replace it.\nRebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the nonprofit Brookings Institution, sees those concerns as signs of a new stage in schools’ quickly evolving relationship with AI.\n“We're sort of entering a third wave,” she said. “Like, wait, before we start, let's be really thoughtful about it. Let's slow down to get it right.”\nWinthrop described an initial period following ChatGPT’s arrival in November 2022, after which many schools shut down access while district leaders, policymakers and educators tried to understand the technology. That was followed by a period of experimentation and ideation to assess potential use and impact. Now, she said, districts are becoming more deliberate about when, how and by whom AI should be used in a school setting.\nBut not everyone sees this as a moment for slowing down. Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack, for example, had little praise for New York City’s approach.\n“I thought it was terrible,” Mack said. “The position of educators is to liberate the minds of the individuals they educate. We can't do that if we're going to shield them from technology, from ideas and/or skills that enable them to be more productive citizens and to be more work-ready employees.”\nTwo weeks after NYCPS's announcement, Florida set statewide parameters for AI use in schools while leaving districts and educators room to decide how the technology fits into instruction. The Sep. 16 rule includes a parental opt-in requirement for students interacting with AI, non-AI instructional alternatives and mandates around transparency, privacy and data security, according to Maya Israel, a University of Florida professor who co-directs the state’s K-12 AI Education Task Force.\nBut Florida’s strategy, Israel noted, should not be mistaken for a green light for students to use any AI tool they want.\n“I don't believe that young learners ought to be engaging with these broad AI tools either,” Israel said. “I think that developmentally they need to learn how to think for themselves.”\nAccording to Israel, the key distinction is between broad, general-purpose AI and constrained tools built to do something specific — an early-literacy application, for example, could be evaluated based on whether it is developmentally appropriate, aligned with effective teaching and backed by evidence.\nJesse Welsh, deputy superintendent of teaching and learning in Nevada’s Clark County School District (CCSD), also thought New York City’s moratorium went too far. Keeping students away from AI, he said, carries its own risk: sending young adults into college or the workforce without knowing how to effectively leverage a technology they are highly likely to encounter after graduating.\nHowever, Welsh said CCSD — the fifth-largest school district in the country and the largest in Nevada, serving both rural and metropolitan communities — has drawn a line of its own, concentrating student use of generative AI in the secondary grades and not implementing the technology in elementary classrooms.\nAccording to Welsh, students need to shoulder the “cognitive lift and load” of learning, and when AI reduces that mental effort, it produces the opposite of what educators want.\n“We need students to develop those critical thinking skills,\" he said. \"There's definitely a worry if you start too early that it just becomes a crutch.\"\nBalancing concerns surrounding AI with the simultaneous desire to deploy it is not confined to the nation’s largest school systems, though.\nWinterset Community School District, a rural Iowa district of less than 1,600 students, has spent several years developing its own approach to AI. Assistant Principal Chad Sussex, who leads the district's AI task force, said New York City's decision initially made him wonder whether its leaders were seeing risks he had not.\n“What do they know that I don't know that I feel like I need to?” Sussex recalled thinking. “What are they afraid of?”\nWinterset has not banned generative AI across the board, but neither has it given students open access. ChatGPT and Claude are blocked on school devices, as are roughly 20 AI companion-chatbot sites, Sussex said. Gemini, meanwhile, is available to students through the district's Google for Education environment.\nOther tools are introduced within tighter instructional boundaries. For example, through MagicSchool, an AI platform used by teachers and students, Sussex said educators can create controlled student rooms for specific assignments, allowing them to monitor interactions and pause access if needed. He also pointed to a writing assistant through the application that provides feedback on students’ work while redirecting them when they try to take the conversation beyond the assigned task.\nAccording to Winthrop, the details surrounding AI use vary considerably from one school system to another, but the dividing lines are becoming clearer: Even leaders who think NYCPS swung too far to one direction in its moratorium are weighing students’ age, the kind of AI they are using and whether a tool is helping them think or doing the thinking for them.\n“There’s a big difference between using AI to learn in school and schools teaching about AI,” she added.\nWinthrop said she sees little reason for elementary and middle school students to spend extensive time using today’s AI tools to prepare for a future in which the technology will almost certainly look different. At those ages, she said, developing critical thinking and creative problem-solving matters more, and much of what students need to understand about AI can be taught through discussion and limited interaction with the technology.\nThat is also why Winthrop's recent call for schools to “go slow to go fast” in a recent column for Brookings is not an argument for keeping AI out of education altogether. In it, she drew a sharp distinction between broad, general-purpose AI and narrower tools designed and vetted for a particular instructional purpose.\n“We're just really over our skis in terms of evidence,” Winthrop said.\nNew York City and Los Angeles may have brought new attention to concerns about student-facing AI, but the varied response from educators nationwide suggests there is no single model taking hold. States and districts large and small are instead deciding where to put their own limits — which students get access, which tools make the cut and what evidence is necessary before AI becomes a routine part of pedagogy, learning and operations.","image_url":"https://erepublic.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/5846f6f/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3341x1624+0+129/resize/1440x700!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ferepublic-brightspot.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fb3%2Fe0%2Fcdbfb97d4f2d96f38778e0ef427b%2Fpublic-reaction.jpeg","lang":"en","published_at":"2026-09-23T23:18:31+00:00","fetched_at":"2026-09-24T00:15:05+00:00","status":"read","starred":0,"extract_state":"ok","summary_auto":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules. Whether other school systems follow remains to be seen, but there is a throughline of concerns driving district decision-making on the matter: Across school systems of vastly different sizes, leaders are drawing boundaries around student AI use based on age, instructional value, the risks of different tools and whether they support student thinking or replace it.","cluster_id":null,"extract_retries":0,"extract_error":null,"contract_version":"news_item.v1","format_contract_version":"news_item_formats.v1","dedup_url":"https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7057 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557,"usable_text_length":7057,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557}},"news_item":{"id":89168,"canonical_url":"https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","source_url":"https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","title":"AI Restrictions at NYCPS and LAUSD Reverberate Nationwide - GovTech","source_name":"GovTech","author":null,"published_at":"2026-09-23T23:18:31+00:00","locale":"en","topic":"ai","tags":[],"rss_summary":"AI Restrictions at NYCPS and LAUSD Reverberate Nationwide GovTech","full_text":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules.\nWhether other school systems follow remains to be seen, but there is a throughline of concerns driving district decision-making on the matter: Across school systems of vastly different sizes, leaders are drawing boundaries around student AI use based on age, instructional value, the risks of different tools and whether they support student thinking or replace it.\nRebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the nonprofit Brookings Institution, sees those concerns as signs of a new stage in schools’ quickly evolving relationship with AI.\n“We're sort of entering a third wave,” she said. “Like, wait, before we start, let's be really thoughtful about it. Let's slow down to get it right.”\nWinthrop described an initial period following ChatGPT’s arrival in November 2022, after which many schools shut down access while district leaders, policymakers and educators tried to understand the technology. That was followed by a period of experimentation and ideation to assess potential use and impact. Now, she said, districts are becoming more deliberate about when, how and by whom AI should be used in a school setting.\nBut not everyone sees this as a moment for slowing down. Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack, for example, had little praise for New York City’s approach.\n“I thought it was terrible,” Mack said. “The position of educators is to liberate the minds of the individuals they educate. We can't do that if we're going to shield them from technology, from ideas and/or skills that enable them to be more productive citizens and to be more work-ready employees.”\nTwo weeks after NYCPS's announcement, Florida set statewide parameters for AI use in schools while leaving districts and educators room to decide how the technology fits into instruction. The Sep. 16 rule includes a parental opt-in requirement for students interacting with AI, non-AI instructional alternatives and mandates around transparency, privacy and data security, according to Maya Israel, a University of Florida professor who co-directs the state’s K-12 AI Education Task Force.\nBut Florida’s strategy, Israel noted, should not be mistaken for a green light for students to use any AI tool they want.\n“I don't believe that young learners ought to be engaging with these broad AI tools either,” Israel said. “I think that developmentally they need to learn how to think for themselves.”\nAccording to Israel, the key distinction is between broad, general-purpose AI and constrained tools built to do something specific — an early-literacy application, for example, could be evaluated based on whether it is developmentally appropriate, aligned with effective teaching and backed by evidence.\nJesse Welsh, deputy superintendent of teaching and learning in Nevada’s Clark County School District (CCSD), also thought New York City’s moratorium went too far. Keeping students away from AI, he said, carries its own risk: sending young adults into college or the workforce without knowing how to effectively leverage a technology they are highly likely to encounter after graduating.\nHowever, Welsh said CCSD — the fifth-largest school district in the country and the largest in Nevada, serving both rural and metropolitan communities — has drawn a line of its own, concentrating student use of generative AI in the secondary grades and not implementing the technology in elementary classrooms.\nAccording to Welsh, students need to shoulder the “cognitive lift and load” of learning, and when AI reduces that mental effort, it produces the opposite of what educators want.\n“We need students to develop those critical thinking skills,\" he said. \"There's definitely a worry if you start too early that it just becomes a crutch.\"\nBalancing concerns surrounding AI with the simultaneous desire to deploy it is not confined to the nation’s largest school systems, though.\nWinterset Community School District, a rural Iowa district of less than 1,600 students, has spent several years developing its own approach to AI. Assistant Principal Chad Sussex, who leads the district's AI task force, said New York City's decision initially made him wonder whether its leaders were seeing risks he had not.\n“What do they know that I don't know that I feel like I need to?” Sussex recalled thinking. “What are they afraid of?”\nWinterset has not banned generative AI across the board, but neither has it given students open access. ChatGPT and Claude are blocked on school devices, as are roughly 20 AI companion-chatbot sites, Sussex said. Gemini, meanwhile, is available to students through the district's Google for Education environment.\nOther tools are introduced within tighter instructional boundaries. For example, through MagicSchool, an AI platform used by teachers and students, Sussex said educators can create controlled student rooms for specific assignments, allowing them to monitor interactions and pause access if needed. He also pointed to a writing assistant through the application that provides feedback on students’ work while redirecting them when they try to take the conversation beyond the assigned task.\nAccording to Winthrop, the details surrounding AI use vary considerably from one school system to another, but the dividing lines are becoming clearer: Even leaders who think NYCPS swung too far to one direction in its moratorium are weighing students’ age, the kind of AI they are using and whether a tool is helping them think or doing the thinking for them.\n“There’s a big difference between using AI to learn in school and schools teaching about AI,” she added.\nWinthrop said she sees little reason for elementary and middle school students to spend extensive time using today’s AI tools to prepare for a future in which the technology will almost certainly look different. At those ages, she said, developing critical thinking and creative problem-solving matters more, and much of what students need to understand about AI can be taught through discussion and limited interaction with the technology.\nThat is also why Winthrop's recent call for schools to “go slow to go fast” in a recent column for Brookings is not an argument for keeping AI out of education altogether. In it, she drew a sharp distinction between broad, general-purpose AI and narrower tools designed and vetted for a particular instructional purpose.\n“We're just really over our skis in terms of evidence,” Winthrop said.\nNew York City and Los Angeles may have brought new attention to concerns about student-facing AI, but the varied response from educators nationwide suggests there is no single model taking hold. States and districts large and small are instead deciding where to put their own limits — which students get access, which tools make the cut and what evidence is necessary before AI becomes a routine part of pedagogy, learning and operations.","excerpt":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules. Whether other school systems follow remains to be seen, but there is a throughline of concerns driving district decision-making on the matter: Across school systems of vastly different sizes, leaders are drawing boundaries around student AI use based on age, instructional value, the risks of different tools and whether they support student thinking or replace it.","extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7057 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7057 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557,"usable_text_length":7057,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557}}},"display_formats":["compact","card","full","digest_section","json"]},"daily_stack_record":{"title":"AI Restrictions at NYCPS and LAUSD Reverberate Nationwide - GovTech","url":"https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","summary":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules. Whether other school systems follow remains to be seen, but there is a throughline of concerns driving district decision-making on the matter: Across school systems of vastly different sizes, leaders are drawing boundaries around student AI use based on age, instructional value, the risks of different tools and whether they support student thinking or replace it.","source":"GovTech","date":"2026-09-23T23:18:31+00:00","content":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules.\nWhether other school systems follow remains to be seen, but there is a throughline of concerns driving district decision-making on the matter: Across school systems of vastly different sizes, leaders are drawing boundaries around student AI use based on age, instructional value, the risks of different tools and whether they support student thinking or replace it.\nRebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the nonprofit Brookings Institution, sees those concerns as signs of a new stage in schools’ quickly evolving relationship with AI.\n“We're sort of entering a third wave,” she said. “Like, wait, before we start, let's be really thoughtful about it. Let's slow down to get it right.”\nWinthrop described an initial period following ChatGPT’s arrival in November 2022, after which many schools shut down access while district leaders, policymakers and educators tried to understand the technology. That was followed by a period of experimentation and ideation to assess potential use and impact. Now, she said, districts are becoming more deliberate about when, how and by whom AI should be used in a school setting.\nBut not everyone sees this as a moment for slowing down. Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack, for example, had little praise for New York City’s approach.\n“I thought it was terrible,” Mack said. “The position of educators is to liberate the minds of the individuals they educate. We can't do that if we're going to shield them from technology, from ideas and/or skills that enable them to be more productive citizens and to be more work-ready employees.”\nTwo weeks after NYCPS's announcement, Florida set statewide parameters for AI use in schools while leaving districts and educators room to decide how the technology fits into instruction. The Sep. 16 rule includes a parental opt-in requirement for students interacting with AI, non-AI instructional alternatives and mandates around transparency, privacy and data security, according to Maya Israel, a University of Florida professor who co-directs the state’s K-12 AI Education Task Force.\nBut Florida’s strategy, Israel noted, should not be mistaken for a green light for students to use any AI tool they want.\n“I don't believe that young learners ought to be engaging with these broad AI tools either,” Israel said. “I think that developmentally they need to learn how to think for themselves.”\nAccording to Israel, the key distinction is between broad, general-purpose AI and constrained tools built to do something specific — an early-literacy application, for example, could be evaluated based on whether it is developmentally appropriate, aligned with effective teaching and backed by evidence.\nJesse Welsh, deputy superintendent of teaching and learning in Nevada’s Clark County School District (CCSD), also thought New York City’s moratorium went too far. Keeping students away from AI, he said, carries its own risk: sending young adults into college or the workforce without knowing how to effectively leverage a technology they are highly likely to encounter after graduating.\nHowever, Welsh said CCSD — the fifth-largest school district in the country and the largest in Nevada, serving both rural and metropolitan communities — has drawn a line of its own, concentrating student use of generative AI in the secondary grades and not implementing the technology in elementary classrooms.\nAccording to Welsh, students need to shoulder the “cognitive lift and load” of learning, and when AI reduces that mental effort, it produces the opposite of what educators want.\n“We need students to develop those critical thinking skills,\" he said. \"There's definitely a worry if you start too early that it just becomes a crutch.\"\nBalancing concerns surrounding AI with the simultaneous desire to deploy it is not confined to the nation’s largest school systems, though.\nWinterset Community School District, a rural Iowa district of less than 1,600 students, has spent several years developing its own approach to AI. Assistant Principal Chad Sussex, who leads the district's AI task force, said New York City's decision initially made him wonder whether its leaders were seeing risks he had not.\n“What do they know that I don't know that I feel like I need to?” Sussex recalled thinking. “What are they afraid of?”\nWinterset has not banned generative AI across the board, but neither has it given students open access. ChatGPT and Claude are blocked on school devices, as are roughly 20 AI companion-chatbot sites, Sussex said. Gemini, meanwhile, is available to students through the district's Google for Education environment.\nOther tools are introduced within tighter instructional boundaries. For example, through MagicSchool, an AI platform used by teachers and students, Sussex said educators can create controlled student rooms for specific assignments, allowing them to monitor interactions and pause access if needed. He also pointed to a writing assistant through the application that provides feedback on students’ work while redirecting them when they try to take the conversation beyond the assigned task.\nAccording to Winthrop, the details surrounding AI use vary considerably from one school system to another, but the dividing lines are becoming clearer: Even leaders who think NYCPS swung too far to one direction in its moratorium are weighing students’ age, the kind of AI they are using and whether a tool is helping them think or doing the thinking for them.\n“There’s a big difference between using AI to learn in school and schools teaching about AI,” she added.\nWinthrop said she sees little reason for elementary and middle school students to spend extensive time using today’s AI tools to prepare for a future in which the technology will almost certainly look different. At those ages, she said, developing critical thinking and creative problem-solving matters more, and much of what students need to understand about AI can be taught through discussion and limited interaction with the technology.\nThat is also why Winthrop's recent call for schools to “go slow to go fast” in a recent column for Brookings is not an argument for keeping AI out of education altogether. In it, she drew a sharp distinction between broad, general-purpose AI and narrower tools designed and vetted for a particular instructional purpose.\n“We're just really over our skis in terms of evidence,” Winthrop said.\nNew York City and Los Angeles may have brought new attention to concerns about student-facing AI, but the varied response from educators nationwide suggests there is no single model taking hold. States and districts large and small are instead deciding where to put their own limits — which students get access, which tools make the cut and what evidence is necessary before AI becomes a routine part of pedagogy, learning and operations.","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7057 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7057 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557,"usable_text_length":7057,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557}},"tags":[]},"fallback_formats":["markdown","json","html"],"actions":{"read":"/item/89168","export_markdown":"/api/items/89168/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/89168/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide"},"formats":{"full":{"id":89168,"title":"AI Restrictions at NYCPS and LAUSD Reverberate Nationwide - GovTech","url":"https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","source":"GovTech","author":null,"published_at":"2026-09-23T23:18:31+00:00","locale":"en","topic":"ai","tags":[],"excerpt":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules. Whether other school systems follow remains to be seen, but there is a throughline of concerns driving district decision-making on the matter: Across school systems of vastly different sizes, leaders are drawing boundaries around student AI use based on age, instructional value, the risks of different tools and whether they support student thinking or replace it.","full_text":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules.\nWhether other school systems follow remains to be seen, but there is a throughline of concerns driving district decision-making on the matter: Across school systems of vastly different sizes, leaders are drawing boundaries around student AI use based on age, instructional value, the risks of different tools and whether they support student thinking or replace it.\nRebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the nonprofit Brookings Institution, sees those concerns as signs of a new stage in schools’ quickly evolving relationship with AI.\n“We're sort of entering a third wave,” she said. “Like, wait, before we start, let's be really thoughtful about it. Let's slow down to get it right.”\nWinthrop described an initial period following ChatGPT’s arrival in November 2022, after which many schools shut down access while district leaders, policymakers and educators tried to understand the technology. That was followed by a period of experimentation and ideation to assess potential use and impact. Now, she said, districts are becoming more deliberate about when, how and by whom AI should be used in a school setting.\nBut not everyone sees this as a moment for slowing down. Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack, for example, had little praise for New York City’s approach.\n“I thought it was terrible,” Mack said. “The position of educators is to liberate the minds of the individuals they educate. We can't do that if we're going to shield them from technology, from ideas and/or skills that enable them to be more productive citizens and to be more work-ready employees.”\nTwo weeks after NYCPS's announcement, Florida set statewide parameters for AI use in schools while leaving districts and educators room to decide how the technology fits into instruction. The Sep. 16 rule includes a parental opt-in requirement for students interacting with AI, non-AI instructional alternatives and mandates around transparency, privacy and data security, according to Maya Israel, a University of Florida professor who co-directs the state’s K-12 AI Education Task Force.\nBut Florida’s strategy, Israel noted, should not be mistaken for a green light for students to use any AI tool they want.\n“I don't believe that young learners ought to be engaging with these broad AI tools either,” Israel said. “I think that developmentally they need to learn how to think for themselves.”\nAccording to Israel, the key distinction is between broad, general-purpose AI and constrained tools built to do something specific — an early-literacy application, for example, could be evaluated based on whether it is developmentally appropriate, aligned with effective teaching and backed by evidence.\nJesse Welsh, deputy superintendent of teaching and learning in Nevada’s Clark County School District (CCSD), also thought New York City’s moratorium went too far. Keeping students away from AI, he said, carries its own risk: sending young adults into college or the workforce without knowing how to effectively leverage a technology they are highly likely to encounter after graduating.\nHowever, Welsh said CCSD — the fifth-largest school district in the country and the largest in Nevada, serving both rural and metropolitan communities — has drawn a line of its own, concentrating student use of generative AI in the secondary grades and not implementing the technology in elementary classrooms.\nAccording to Welsh, students need to shoulder the “cognitive lift and load” of learning, and when AI reduces that mental effort, it produces the opposite of what educators want.\n“We need students to develop those critical thinking skills,\" he said. \"There's definitely a worry if you start too early that it just becomes a crutch.\"\nBalancing concerns surrounding AI with the simultaneous desire to deploy it is not confined to the nation’s largest school systems, though.\nWinterset Community School District, a rural Iowa district of less than 1,600 students, has spent several years developing its own approach to AI. Assistant Principal Chad Sussex, who leads the district's AI task force, said New York City's decision initially made him wonder whether its leaders were seeing risks he had not.\n“What do they know that I don't know that I feel like I need to?” Sussex recalled thinking. “What are they afraid of?”\nWinterset has not banned generative AI across the board, but neither has it given students open access. ChatGPT and Claude are blocked on school devices, as are roughly 20 AI companion-chatbot sites, Sussex said. Gemini, meanwhile, is available to students through the district's Google for Education environment.\nOther tools are introduced within tighter instructional boundaries. For example, through MagicSchool, an AI platform used by teachers and students, Sussex said educators can create controlled student rooms for specific assignments, allowing them to monitor interactions and pause access if needed. He also pointed to a writing assistant through the application that provides feedback on students’ work while redirecting them when they try to take the conversation beyond the assigned task.\nAccording to Winthrop, the details surrounding AI use vary considerably from one school system to another, but the dividing lines are becoming clearer: Even leaders who think NYCPS swung too far to one direction in its moratorium are weighing students’ age, the kind of AI they are using and whether a tool is helping them think or doing the thinking for them.\n“There’s a big difference between using AI to learn in school and schools teaching about AI,” she added.\nWinthrop said she sees little reason for elementary and middle school students to spend extensive time using today’s AI tools to prepare for a future in which the technology will almost certainly look different. At those ages, she said, developing critical thinking and creative problem-solving matters more, and much of what students need to understand about AI can be taught through discussion and limited interaction with the technology.\nThat is also why Winthrop's recent call for schools to “go slow to go fast” in a recent column for Brookings is not an argument for keeping AI out of education altogether. In it, she drew a sharp distinction between broad, general-purpose AI and narrower tools designed and vetted for a particular instructional purpose.\n“We're just really over our skis in terms of evidence,” Winthrop said.\nNew York City and Los Angeles may have brought new attention to concerns about student-facing AI, but the varied response from educators nationwide suggests there is no single model taking hold. States and districts large and small are instead deciding where to put their own limits — which students get access, which tools make the cut and what evidence is necessary before AI becomes a routine part of pedagogy, learning and operations.","reading_time_min":6,"extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7057 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7057 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557,"usable_text_length":7057,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557}}},"quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7057 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557,"usable_text_length":7057,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557}},"actions":{"read":"/item/89168","export_markdown":"/api/items/89168/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/89168/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide"}},"digest":{"id":89168,"title":"AI Restrictions at NYCPS and LAUSD Reverberate Nationwide - GovTech","url":"https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","source":"GovTech","topic":"ai","published_at":"2026-09-23T23:18:31+00:00","excerpt":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules. Whether other school systems follow remains to be seen, but there is a throughline of…","quality_bucket":"high","quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7057 characters.","reading_time_min":6,"cluster_id":null},"card":{"display_title":"AI Restrictions at NYCPS and LAUSD Reverberate Nationwide - GovTech","subtitle":"GovTech · 2026-09-23","summary":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules. Whether other school…","badges":["quality:high"],"links":{"read":"/item/89168","original":"https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide"},"quality_warning":null},"export":{"title":"AI Restrictions at NYCPS and LAUSD Reverberate Nationwide - GovTech","url":"https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","summary":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules. Whether other school systems follow remains to be seen, but there is a throughline of concerns driving district decision-making on the matter: Across school systems of vastly different sizes, leaders are drawing boundaries around student AI use based on age, instructional value, the risks of different tools and whether they support student thinking or replace it.","source":"GovTech","date":"2026-09-23T23:18:31+00:00","content":"Later the same day, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it had temporarily blocked generative AI on district-issued student devices while it develops longer-term rules.\nWhether other school systems follow remains to be seen, but there is a throughline of concerns driving district decision-making on the matter: Across school systems of vastly different sizes, leaders are drawing boundaries around student AI use based on age, instructional value, the risks of different tools and whether they support student thinking or replace it.\nRebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the nonprofit Brookings Institution, sees those concerns as signs of a new stage in schools’ quickly evolving relationship with AI.\n“We're sort of entering a third wave,” she said. “Like, wait, before we start, let's be really thoughtful about it. Let's slow down to get it right.”\nWinthrop described an initial period following ChatGPT’s arrival in November 2022, after which many schools shut down access while district leaders, policymakers and educators tried to understand the technology. That was followed by a period of experimentation and ideation to assess potential use and impact. Now, she said, districts are becoming more deliberate about when, how and by whom AI should be used in a school setting.\nBut not everyone sees this as a moment for slowing down. Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack, for example, had little praise for New York City’s approach.\n“I thought it was terrible,” Mack said. “The position of educators is to liberate the minds of the individuals they educate. We can't do that if we're going to shield them from technology, from ideas and/or skills that enable them to be more productive citizens and to be more work-ready employees.”\nTwo weeks after NYCPS's announcement, Florida set statewide parameters for AI use in schools while leaving districts and educators room to decide how the technology fits into instruction. The Sep. 16 rule includes a parental opt-in requirement for students interacting with AI, non-AI instructional alternatives and mandates around transparency, privacy and data security, according to Maya Israel, a University of Florida professor who co-directs the state’s K-12 AI Education Task Force.\nBut Florida’s strategy, Israel noted, should not be mistaken for a green light for students to use any AI tool they want.\n“I don't believe that young learners ought to be engaging with these broad AI tools either,” Israel said. “I think that developmentally they need to learn how to think for themselves.”\nAccording to Israel, the key distinction is between broad, general-purpose AI and constrained tools built to do something specific — an early-literacy application, for example, could be evaluated based on whether it is developmentally appropriate, aligned with effective teaching and backed by evidence.\nJesse Welsh, deputy superintendent of teaching and learning in Nevada’s Clark County School District (CCSD), also thought New York City’s moratorium went too far. Keeping students away from AI, he said, carries its own risk: sending young adults into college or the workforce without knowing how to effectively leverage a technology they are highly likely to encounter after graduating.\nHowever, Welsh said CCSD — the fifth-largest school district in the country and the largest in Nevada, serving both rural and metropolitan communities — has drawn a line of its own, concentrating student use of generative AI in the secondary grades and not implementing the technology in elementary classrooms.\nAccording to Welsh, students need to shoulder the “cognitive lift and load” of learning, and when AI reduces that mental effort, it produces the opposite of what educators want.\n“We need students to develop those critical thinking skills,\" he said. \"There's definitely a worry if you start too early that it just becomes a crutch.\"\nBalancing concerns surrounding AI with the simultaneous desire to deploy it is not confined to the nation’s largest school systems, though.\nWinterset Community School District, a rural Iowa district of less than 1,600 students, has spent several years developing its own approach to AI. Assistant Principal Chad Sussex, who leads the district's AI task force, said New York City's decision initially made him wonder whether its leaders were seeing risks he had not.\n“What do they know that I don't know that I feel like I need to?” Sussex recalled thinking. “What are they afraid of?”\nWinterset has not banned generative AI across the board, but neither has it given students open access. ChatGPT and Claude are blocked on school devices, as are roughly 20 AI companion-chatbot sites, Sussex said. Gemini, meanwhile, is available to students through the district's Google for Education environment.\nOther tools are introduced within tighter instructional boundaries. For example, through MagicSchool, an AI platform used by teachers and students, Sussex said educators can create controlled student rooms for specific assignments, allowing them to monitor interactions and pause access if needed. He also pointed to a writing assistant through the application that provides feedback on students’ work while redirecting them when they try to take the conversation beyond the assigned task.\nAccording to Winthrop, the details surrounding AI use vary considerably from one school system to another, but the dividing lines are becoming clearer: Even leaders who think NYCPS swung too far to one direction in its moratorium are weighing students’ age, the kind of AI they are using and whether a tool is helping them think or doing the thinking for them.\n“There’s a big difference between using AI to learn in school and schools teaching about AI,” she added.\nWinthrop said she sees little reason for elementary and middle school students to spend extensive time using today’s AI tools to prepare for a future in which the technology will almost certainly look different. At those ages, she said, developing critical thinking and creative problem-solving matters more, and much of what students need to understand about AI can be taught through discussion and limited interaction with the technology.\nThat is also why Winthrop's recent call for schools to “go slow to go fast” in a recent column for Brookings is not an argument for keeping AI out of education altogether. In it, she drew a sharp distinction between broad, general-purpose AI and narrower tools designed and vetted for a particular instructional purpose.\n“We're just really over our skis in terms of evidence,” Winthrop said.\nNew York City and Los Angeles may have brought new attention to concerns about student-facing AI, but the varied response from educators nationwide suggests there is no single model taking hold. States and districts large and small are instead deciding where to put their own limits — which students get access, which tools make the cut and what evidence is necessary before AI becomes a routine part of pedagogy, learning and operations.","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-restrictions-at-nycps-and-lausd-reverberate-nationwide","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7057 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7057 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557,"usable_text_length":7057,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7057,"summary_length":557}},"tags":[],"format_contract_version":"news_item_formats.v1"}}}