Council Rock School District administrators and a vendor representative outlined plans on Sept. 11 to adopt Magic School, a classroom-focused artificial-intelligence platform, as the district's recommended tool for teachers and a controlled option for student use.
Haley Grossman, account executive for Magic School, said the platform was designed for schools and that district data entered into the system is not used to train large language models: "None of the information put into Magic School is ever used to train large language models," she said.
District staff described a year-long vetting process. Andrea Mangold, the district communications lead who coordinated the Council Rock AI guidelines, said a cross-district AI committee spent about 18 months developing rules that prioritize student data protection and require teacher oversight. "Those guidelines are telling teachers you must be an agent in this process; you cannot allow students to use AI without explicit instructions," Mangold said. The guidelines require teachers to give explicit instruction about how and when students may use AI and recommend using a single, sanctioned platform for classroom activity.
Magic School staff reported 527 district educators used the platform during the pilot and that users had created more than 12,000 resources. Grossman said the company builds additional safeguards into its tools: the platform can remove or scrub personally identifiable information, offers student-facing prompts and acceptance screens, and can be configured to meet state and federal privacy requirements, including Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protections. Grossman said the platform is hosted in the U.S. on Amazon Web Services and that district data would be owned by the district and deleted within 60 days of contract termination if the district requests deletion.
Key controls described to the committee:
- Teacher-controlled student access: student features are enabled only when a teacher activates them for a class or assignment.
- Administrative oversight: district administrators designated as org admins can view usage dashboards for staff and students, review flagged material and moderate which tools are available to teachers and students.
- Tool moderation and phased rollout: the district can toggle individual tools on or off (for example, exposing a small set of tools to all teachers and adding more later) and set instructional parameters when assigning tasks.
Grossman also said Magic School does not include AI-authorship detection because existing detection tools are unreliable; instead, the company emphasizes AI literacy training and classroom workflows that teach responsible use. "We firmly believe that that potential to incorrectly detect whether something is AI generated, can damage student teacher relationships," Grossman said.
Cost and training: district staff said the three-year, budgeted contract is prorated in year one and totals $43,995 for year one, $60,690 for year two and $63,630 for year three. The vendor will provide an in-person four-hour training session and several virtual sessions at no charge (staff valued the free training at approximately $5,500). District staff said the expense was included in the approved budget.
Board members asked about parental access and out-of-school use. District staff said parents do not have access to the student-facing platform directly; access is controlled by teacher assignment and network filters. Staff acknowledged it is technically possible for a student with outside access to use other AI systems outside school and said the district is addressing that risk through layered filtering, teacher guidance and AI literacy instruction.
Next steps: committee members said the AI guidelines will be presented to the full board in an education committee meeting; staff indicated they plan a phased rollout with teacher professional development and district-level moderation of student tools before wide student deployment.