Petaluma City Schools Draft Tiered AI Plan for Students - GovTech

The issue falls under the purview of Heather Ramme — PCS’s director of technology, innovation and enrollment — who gave a presentation on AI during the district’s Sept. 15 Board of Trustees meeting, where educators discussed a draft board policy on the use of AI among students and teachers.

According to the draft policy, created by the district’s Technology and Innovation Committee and posted on the PCS website, district staff may “permit students to utilize ethical and legal use of AI as a supplemental tool to support and expand on classroom instruction, facilitate personalized learning opportunities and increase educational and learning opportunities.”

The draft policy, which has not been ratified, also contains a number of guidelines for AI use, including ensuring “that the AI system has been vetted and approved by the district or otherwise meets the district’s safety standards.”

The Technology and Innovation Committee plans to continue meeting to further shape the policy. No board vote on the issue was scheduled.

The new policy comes after California released a model policy over the summer for districts throughout the state to use and adopt, Ramme said, adding that the state’s expectations include “human oversight of AI-assisted decisions” as well as the protection of student data and privacy and increased “AI literacy for students and staff.”

The proposed guidance, as Ramme noted, would put teachers in charge of AI use in their classrooms. It also “requires students to acknowledge when they use it and limits school devices to privacy-vetted tools,” according to the Sept. 15 presentation.

“AI should be enhancing the work of educators, not replacing them, and students should not complete work that is not their own,” Ramme said. “And teachers need to be doing all the grading and all the assessing, not AI.”

The draft plan also lays out a general look at how AI could be used at each grade level. While students in kindergarten through second grades would not have any AI use in the classroom, the committee recommended that students in third through fifth grades have a basic introduction of AI, as recommended by the state, where students would be given an understanding of how it works yet “no student-facing tools” would be incorporated in the classroom.

Students in grades six to eight would learn about “responsible use, ethics and access limited to closed, school-focused AI environments,” while grades nine to 12 could have more “guided use of AI per teacher’s discretion” using tools like Canva and possibly Gemini.

“Across every grade,” Ramme said in her presentation, “educators may choose not to use AI at all, and any student use must be disclosed.”

This is, she emphasized, “the committee’s working stance, not yet adopted policy.”

Parents speaking on the issue during the Sept. 15 board meeting highlighted major concerns on artificial intelligence. Lendri Purcell pointed to a January report by the Brookings Institution titled “A New Direction for Students in an AI World” which finds “that at this point in its trajectory, the risks of utilizing generative AI in children’s education overshadow its benefits.”

Purcell said she worried that use of AI in the classroom would create a “doom loop of AI dependence, where students offload their own thinking onto the technology, representing the cognitive atrophy more common in aging brains.”

“And of course,” she added, “there’s the social and emotional and safety risks. Students are using AI for potentially dangerous uses.” She cited documented cases of students who died by suicide after turning to AI for mental health support, and of AI chatbots making “harmful proposals such as cutting off all human contact for a month and dropping out of school.”

“It’s been a nightmare for us,” Purcell said. “Please go back to books and human interaction.”

Board trustee Ryan Williams echoed those concerns, noting that he does not want students relying too much on AI for their learning.

“We are seeing test scores across the world, in reading and math, decrease,” Williams said. “And it really does look like it is AI-related, not the learning loss from the COVID era.”

“I also want us to be aware of the potential mental health issues of having students rely upon this at all, versus building them up confidently in their own skillset and not having this as a crutch,” Williams said.

According to the proposed AI guidance plan, students would be prohibited from using generative AI tools to “substantially complete assignments or exams, including entering exam or assignment questions” as well as using AI to “create, compose, generate or edit content they submit for a grade unless a teacher gives them permission to do so.”

“We acknowledge the potential negative consequences of generative AI tool use, but do not advocate for their full-stop removal from education,” the draft policy reads. “Therefore, it is important for educators to be aware of potential negative outcomes and consider them when incorporating AI tools in the classroom.”

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