Putnam schools to advertise staff and student AI policies after IT briefing

The Putnam County School Board voted unanimously Aug. 5 to advertise proposed staff and student artificial-intelligence policies, after an IT presentation that outlined how the district uses and plans to manage AI tools.

Landon Harvey, the district’s IT director, told the board that many familiar services use AI — from streaming recommendations to phone-voice systems — and that the district already uses education-focused AI tools in some products and through Google/Gemini pilots. "So what we wanna do is put some parameters, put some structure around AI usage for both staff members," Harvey said, explaining the policies are intended to prevent the sharing of personally identifiable information and to frame ethical use.

Harvey and district staff said the policies will ban staff from submitting student names or photos to third-party generative systems, and will require principals to set local classroom rules about allowable use. The district said it will not permit unsupervised student use of general-purpose generative AI such as ChatGPT on district systems, and will provide training to teachers on ethical and effective AI classroom uses.

Whitehurst and other staff said the policies were drafted with input from principals, district leadership and a small set of teacher leaders. The board moved to advertise the staff AI and student AI policies for public comment; the motion passed unanimously.

Board members also voted to advertise an amendment to policy 5,200 (student attendance) and other clerical policy updates during the same meeting. The district said it will continue staff training and update onboarding and technology-use agreements to reflect the new AI policy language.

The board’s action sends the draft AI policies to the public-advertising period where community feedback will be accepted before final adoption.