Richmond Community Schools presents AI plan, selects Magic School for student-facing instruction

Richmond Community Schools staff told the Board of Trustees on Dec. 11 that the district is using a state digital learning grant to provide teachers and students with access to the Magic School AI platform and to embed AI literacy across professional development and classroom work.

The district’s e-learning team, represented in the meeting by Tim Monk and Jeremy Hill, described a sequence of training since the arrival of widely available generative AI in late 2022 and said the Magic School tool was selected because it includes a student-facing component and includes contractual protections against harvesting student data. "Let's plan instead of ban," Monk told the board, summarizing the team's approach. "We're not gonna outsource the thinking. We're just gonna outsource the doing," he added.

Why it matters: district staff framed the effort as a combination of teacher training, classroom guardrails and student-facing instruction intended to reduce an emerging digital…