Wake school board favors AI, debating guardrails in first generative AI policy

Wake County school board members agree that students and teachers need to use artifical intelligence, but they're still delibrating potential guardrails designed to ensure students are still learning on their own and using the technology responsibly.

"At what point do we worry about students losing the ability to figure out how to do the work, to get those learning goals?" Board Chairman Chris Heagarty asked.

But the board must also be practical, Board Member Toshiba Rice said.

"Sometimes we fear what we don't know," she said. "There has to be a level of teaching and training," she added. "I think that our society is changing. It is what it is."

The Wake County Board of Education started discussing its first generative artificial intelligence policy Wednesday, taking a step toward formalizing the district's approach to using the technology that's upending work and education worldwide.

It's a technology the school system has been trying to embrace, rather than block, as some school systems initially did when ChatGPT first launched in November 2022.

"If we ban them and block them, then we provide no safe or measured use of these tools," said Allison Reid, district senior director of digital learning and libraries.

A final policy will likely take months to finalize, said Board Member Lynn Edmonds, who chairs the policy committee. Edmonds said she's gotten a lot of questions from constituents about what the school board would do about AI but not a lot of suggestions. Edmonds herself says she has a lot of homework to do on how other school boards, colleges or educators may be effectively addressing AI.

"We know it's something we need to do, and it was a good first conversation, but just the beginning," she said after Wednesday's policy committee meeting.

Artificial intelligence is "generative" when it responds to user input, such as generating a picture when a person asks it to.

Informally, the school system has embraced teaching students how to use generative AI. A policy would establish a consistent set of guidelines for all schools, publicly available for students and parents to see.

The draft policy largely stems from one created by the North Carolina School Boards Association, sent to school districts for consideration in March 2024. The Wake school district decided not to recommend it to the board back then, though the district was embracing some educational uses of it. Since, Superintendent Robert Taylor has directed the system to come up with a policy, telling them the district needed one.

Most school boards in central North Carolina adopted two stock paragraphs from that recommended policy, according to a WRAL News review of more than two dozen school board policy manuals. They outline that employees and students will be trained on generative AI, what it does, its limits and how ot use it effectively and ethically. The language also says district officials will adopt guidelines for its use, though those guidelines aren't contained in policy.

Wake would be one of the first to adopt a standalone policy on generative AI.

Wake's draft policy encourages students and teachers to use generative AI but would require them to be trained on "the effective, ethical, and safe use of generative AI tools." It promises to have safeguards to "ensure privacy, integrity, and inclusion and foster a culture of continuous innovation." That would in part include requiring students to cite their use of generative AI in their work and not allowing employees to share students' personally identifying information with certain AI systems.

The draft policy emphasizes, however, that generative AI won't replace humans. Rather, generative AI would add to what the humans can do.

"The focus is on automating routine tasks, to free up teachers to do the uniquely personal and human art and science of teaching and connecting with our students," Reid said. That might mean focusing on using AI to develop more personalized instruction for students, she said.

"While embracing technological advancements like AI, the district emphasizes that these tools should amplify human capabilities and not replace the role of students and educators who instruct, nurture, and assess students," the draft policy states. "Maintaining human oversight is critical in evaluating and reflecting on AI-generated content for learning and performance."

Generative AI can take on many roles in schools. Students can use it as a learning tool, but teachers and administrators can also use it to speed up a lot of the work they do.

Across the country, how schools and colleges are handling generative AI across the country is still emerging.

To curb the use of generative AI to cheat or do a student's homework for them, some teachers are doing more paper and pencil tests or oral presentations. It remains a concern among educators.

That's one of the main concerns of school board members, too.

Some school boards have specified in policy that copying language generated by artificial intelligence constitutes plagiarism. The Wake school board's draft policy would require students to cite its use in, for example, essays.

"It's not about citation," Heagarty said. "It's about, did they actually learn how to solve the problem? And that's what I worry about the most, with AI use coming in and replacing academic work."

Rice was less concerned than Heagarty, arguing that in many cases students need to have enough knowledge about a subject to put in a prompt that would generate an answer.

But schools need to teach positive use of AI if they want it to be used in a positive way, she said.

"It's not about having a policy," she said, "but it's about implementation of policy."