by Stuart Jenner.
The Highline School District held a board work session on March 12, 2025 to discuss the opportunities and challenges of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Most of the hour-long session was a presentation by Teshon Christie, Chief of Digital Transformation and Innovation, and Meghan Terwillegar, Director of Digital Learning & Libraries.
At the start, Holly Ferguson briefly discussed two school district policies, 2022 and 2026, related to digital learning. These will need to be updated to account for AI. At the end, there was a brief time of questions from the three current school board members.
Main points of the presentation:
- AI use is transforming many areas of society and education. The school district needs to lead, not be led, in using AI.
- AI use and deployment need to fit with the strategic plan.
- Generative AI considerations include:
a. Equity: all students need access to AI tools and resources
b. Ethics: look at the moral implications, including data privacy and AI in decision-making processes
c. Bias: confront the potential for AI to perpetuate or amplify biases found in data - The state superintendent has created human-centered AI guidance.
- Highline has “AIAs” – Artificial Intelligence Ambassadors – who are teachers, administrators, parents, and students participating in AI-related pilots and applications to the classroom.
AI use in education is definitely in a formative stage. This work session is a part of ongoing communication and discussion. While the meeting could not begin to cover everything related to AI, Dr Duran did mention a pilot in two kindergarten classrooms using Magpie, which uses AI to help students learn reading skills.
The use of AI by the school district in anything related to social-emotional learning (SEL) was not mentioned. On March 12, the Seattle Times ran a story about a service called Gaggle that some school districts use to evaluate and monitor student messages, comments, and writing. The story mentioned Highline was using the service, but I learned that’s no longer the case. Highline quit using Gaggle a few years ago.
The AI Ambassador program will have more opportunities for participation in the future, and the school board and district staff will continue to work on ways of wisely using AI.
Follow up letter to the Highline School Board, sent March 13:
Hi, the discussion yesterday was interesting. I was thinking about how important critical thinking is, and how important to get citations.
This morning, I looked at the AI summary of a recording my dad has made through a service called Remento. It is a great idea; people talk about their lives, then the service turns the recordings into a book.
However, the summary paragraphs of his 15-minute recording is “not well done” to be polite. There are several statements that are just plain wrong. There are key points that are not included in the summary, and in my opinion, some points that are over emphasized. I would not go so far as to call it “Artificial Stupidity,” but it is definitely not “Intelligent.”
One item not discussed last night was the impact AI is going to have on careers. There has been a major shift in opportunities for new grads in computer science, with AI apparently having an impact on entry-level opportunities. I have read about the importance of hands-on skills: classes like shop, design and engineering, art, home skills such as sewing, may all be a lot more important. There are only so many hours in the day, so what gives?
In middle school, I think the easiest way to give kids hands-on learning for a half year would be to reduce world language from a year to a half year. But I realize that would be a major shift ideologically.
Best wishes,
Stuart
One Response
AI is definitely something to be integrated into classwork, but carefully. Not everything we read in books, magazines, or newspapers is true; not everything we see on television is true; and not everything on the internet is true. Critical thinking skills could be taught along side of AI as well. Trust but verify is important, especially in an age of disinformation and misinformation. Simple skills such as checking another source of information before relying on an AI generated answer would be good practice, at least until the validity and reliability of AI responses is much better than it is.
AI is certainly going to affect careers; some will change dramatically, some will disappear. But likely, regardless of career choice, more and more education is going to be required as has been noted, there is just not enough time is the school year to cram everything into it.