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Oldham County forms AI work group, proposes phased guidance for students and staff
Summary
The board heard a district plan to form an AI work group, inform parents and give teachers brief hands-on tasks while recommending modest policy language added to existing acceptable-use policies.
District leaders told the Oldham County Board of Education they have created a work group to develop an approach to artificial intelligence in classrooms that balances opportunity and safety.
“We have seniors in our schools right now that are going to college. They are living in a world full of AI,” Dr. Smith said, explaining why the district sent leaders to the ISTE technology conference and convened the work group.
Dr. Smith presented three audience groups for district planning: parents, teachers and the board. For parents the district intends “an opening conversation” about how the district will explore AI in school and how it will align with guidance from the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE). For teachers the district plans short, practical tasks (she described them as ‘‘one-minute tasks’’) to let teachers experiment with prompts and tools without a heavy time burden. For the board, Dr. Smith recommended adding AI language to existing acceptable-use policies rather than creating an entirely new policy.
Dr. Smith cited vendor and public examples discussed at ISTE, and displayed comparative performance graphs for language models, saying ChatGPT 3.5 and GPT-4 “outperformed” large shares of test-takers on certain standardized assessments. She cautioned that external chatbots have age-restricted access through vendor rules and noted that OpenAI’s ChatGPT requires account holders to be at least 18; she said Google’s Gemini for teens is being positioned with a 14-year threshold.
The district plan includes graduated classroom use: elementary instruction will build on existing digital-citizenship curriculum (emphasizing that anything entered into a chatbot can be retained or used in model training), middle-school pilots will explore rubric-based feedback tools that do not rely on interactive chat, and high-school work will expand conversations about plagiarism, bias and validation of AI outputs.
Dr. Smith said the committee will compile recommended tools and will track positive and negative classroom experiences to inform ongoing training and policy language. She emphasized that the work is intended to be ongoing, not a single-year initiative, and urged early and clear communication with families before classroom pilots begin.
