A parent told the Venus Independent School District Board of Trustees on Oct. 20 that a Hill College professor for a dual‑credit English course used AI‑detection software to assign zeros and that Venus ISD staff had declined to intervene.

At the same meeting the district’s AI lead described Venus ISD’s multi‑year effort to pilot and scale teacher‑created “intelligent tutors,” said teachers control the tutors and that the district blocks most other AI systems on school devices.

The parent, identified in public comment as Jeremy Windle, said the Hill College instructor’s practice was to run students’ essays through AI detectors without reading them first, and to assign a zero if any AI‑generated text was detected. “If the essays are detected as having any portion of AI writing, the student receives a grade of 0,” Windle said, adding that students were told to “dumb down” papers to avoid being flagged. He said district staff had told him Hill College, not Venus ISD, must handle the matter.

District staff framed the issue as two separate matters: college‑level academic policy for dual‑credit courses and the district’s own classroom AI systems. Doctor Pucci, who presented the district’s AI update, said the district began an AI committee in 2023, ran classroom trials and updated the district acceptable‑use policy to add AI guidance for staff and students.

“We had AI trials determining how we wanted to use it in the district,” Pucci said. She described teacher controls in the district’s chosen platform — teachers can create custom tutors, see student chats and block inappropriate interaction — and provided usage data: last year teachers created 189 custom tutors with 84,673 student prompts; this year she reported 62 custom tutors and 25,779 student prompts so far.

Pucci said the district’s platform is designed to support individualized learning — for example, to provide immediate feedback on writing through an implemented tool (Curapod) at middle school and intelligent tutors at the high school. She said the district does not run a separate AI‑detection tool that flags whether students used an outside large language model in a submitted essay; instead, the district platform flags inappropriate or concerning content in chats and not the presence of AI in students’ homework. “Our platform only flags inappropriate content,” she said.

On supervision and restrictions, Pucci said the district has blocked most external AI systems on school devices and permits only vetted platforms on its network. For staff, she said the district recommends two enterprise products — Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot — because the district has enterprise subscriptions and data protections in place.

Pucci also told the board that dual‑credit classroom policy is set by the college and, in many cases, by the college professor: “It is truly up to the college professor how they determine what the students do in their classroom,” she said. She added that Venus ISD’s monitoring applies only to district‑managed platforms and does not extend to independent policies or tools that Hill College faculty may use in the college’s coursework.

Trustees and other questioners pressed on teacher training and oversight of the district platform. Pucci said teachers received an initial 90‑minute training in August and ongoing in‑service support; she said she meets with teacher PLCs regularly (every four weeks this year) and monitors back‑end usage data.

The parent’s complaint to the board asked that Venus ISD take a more active role advocating for students enrolled in outside colleges through dual credit; district staff said the district can provide AI literacy and training to its students but cannot unilaterally change a college professor’s grading policy.

The board did not take formal action on the public comment or the Hill College matter during the Oct. 20 meeting. The district said it will continue to refine classroom AI guidance, teacher training and the vetting of third‑party platforms.