Nearly every district in America is dealing with two competing tensions. On the one hand, you’re serving students and families with more diverse needs than ever before—but on the other, your budgets and headcount are shrinking. You can’t afford to let anyone slip through the cracks, but you can’t ask teachers and communicators to do the work of ten people, either.

While there may be no perfect answer to this dilemma, more and more districts are adopting AI tools that help them center equity in their work, especially when resources are stretched thin. Here, we’ll examine how two districts are using AI for equity—one in the classroom, one in communication—and how you can follow their lead.

Special Education

Perhaps no other department feels the strain of those competing tensions as acutely as special education. Legally required services, intensive staffing needs and specialized supports often make it one of the most expensive areas of a district’s budget. That’s one reason Evan Abramson, director of innovation and technology at New Jersey’s Morris-Union Jointure Commission (MUJC), started exploring ways AI could help his district do more with less.

For Abramson, this work is personal. His mother taught special education, and his son—who experienced significant hearing loss from a very young age—had an IEP for several years. That personal connection eventually led Abramson to the MUJC, a regional collaborative that not only provides programs and services to its 30 member school districts, but also operates two developmental learning centers specifically for students with autism. 

With roughly 250 students across these two buildings, the MUJC is able to provide a much higher level of support than a typical public school district. But Abramson—a 2025 EdWeek Leader to Learn From—is always looking for ways that technology can help them do even more. So it’s no surprise that even back in 2022, the possibilities of artificial intelligence sparked his interest. At a conference, “I sat in a session with the heads of medicine from Harvard, Yale and Columbia, talking about how they had already made major breakthroughs using AI in the past 15 years,” he says. “I was like, Wait a second—if they’ve been doing this for 15 years, why have we not really explored it in schools?” 

In the time since, Abramson has spearheaded the adoption of several AI tools to better care for students and help enhance learning at the MUJC. “We’re using AI to help nonverbal students create digital voices that sound like them, not generic robots,” he explains. “We’re using it to translate emotions into communication, to help staff identify patterns in student behavior before a crisis occurs, and to create individualized learning supports that evolve with each student’s progress.” 

Across all these different use cases, a theme emerges: the power of AI to personalize the school experience to a previously unimaginable level. “It’s helping teachers personalize instruction for students with autism and other special needs in ways that simply weren’t possible before,” says Abramson. “Really, every child needs an individualized educational plan, whether they're in special education or not. And now, with AI, you can create 25 individualized lesson plans in seconds.” 

Take, for instance, a choice board: a visual tool that presents a set of options so that students can choose activities or rewards. For example, a student may be able to choose between listening to music (signified by an image of headphones) or playing outside (signified by an image of a playground). By giving them structured options, choice boards can help students build independence and communication skills. 

Creating an individualized choice board for each child would have been an incredible time sink for MUJC teachers in the past. But now, with the help of an AI tool called Glint, it’s nearly instantaneous. And the difference to kids is real. “I remember a student who was struggling in class—the teachers weren’t really connecting,” Abramson says. “But as soon as we started making the choice boards with options that he liked as opposed to something generic, all of a sudden, it connected.” And when teachers see those kinds of breakthroughs, he says, “they’re begging for more.”

However, Abramson clarifies, only an engaged teacher can determine what kind of differentiation each student needs. AI tools simply make it easier for educators to carry out their vision. “AI will never replace great teaching practices. We need great teachers,” he says. “In our district, AI isn’t replacing people; it’s amplifying them. It’s how we take the extraordinary skills of our staff and multiply them so every student, especially those with autism, can access the world in a way that feels personal, dignified and empowering.” 

Multilingual Communication

Like many districts across the country, Maryland’s Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) is seeing significant demographic shifts in its school community. “We’re a pretty diverse school district and getting more diverse by the day,” says Bob Mosier, AACPS’ chief communications officer. “Our English language learners are one of the fastest-growing segments of our population—and with that rapid growth comes more parents whose first language is not English.” That change demands that AACPS work to provide every family with equitable access to school communication—in the languages they speak and on the channels they prefer. 

“We have a tool that can translate emails—but if that population of parents doesn't read emails, then you're wasting your time,” Mosier says. “So we always try to find creative, innovative ways to reach our families.” He came across one such innovative avenue a few years ago at the NSPRA National Seminar, where he saw Santa Ana Unified School District’s presentation on an AI video generator called HeyGen. 

By using artificial intelligence to clone voices and redraw lip movements, HeyGen does more than just translate videos—it creates the illusion that the subjects are actually speaking a different language. Mosier was instantly intrigued. “If we could use this to reach more families without the need to hire more people—which is always the problem for districts—then it could be a win-win,” he recalls thinking. And after plenty of independent research and much discussion with the team at Santa Ana, AACPS decided to adopt the tool.

To start, AACPS began using HeyGen for just one series—Superintendent Dr. Mark Bedell’s “Thursday Thoughts” videos. “That’s the most frequently recurring feature that we have, and it always includes timely messages we'd like more and more families to know about,” says Mosier. And they’re only focusing on Spanish for the time being. “Spanish is our most common language outside of English, so it made sense to do it there,” he says. “We wanted to go slow to go fast. I wanted to make sure we got Spanish right first, rather than launch it in five languages and have four of them be wrong.”

And that slower, more deliberate pace is crucial—because HeyGen, like any other AI tool, rarely turns out a perfect result on the first try. “I’m very concerned that we pay great attention to the authenticity of the language that we're putting out there,” Mosier says. Luckily, AACPS has a team perfectly qualified to help vet the translations: the district’s bilingual family and community outreach facilitators. This team tested out the translations before they went public. “We had them watch the Spanish version first, then the English version— because I didn’t want them to have a preconceived notion of what it said,” Mosier explains. If any meaning is getting lost in translation, the bilingual facilitators can help set it right.

But is it inauthentic for Bedell to appear to speak a language he doesn’t speak in real life? Mosier doesn’t think so. For one thing, every video comes with a disclaimer about the AI translation. But even more importantly, “I think we laid the groundwork for this authenticity long before we ever heard about HeyGen,” he says. Spanish speakers in the AACPS community are perfectly aware that Bedell doesn’t speak the language—because they’ve interacted with him at Spanish-specific listening events throughout the district. 

Overall, the translated Thursday Thoughts videos have been “very well received,” says Mosier. His advice to other communicators about adopting new AI tools? “You can't fly the plane scared. If worry keeps you from doing anything, you're going to become stagnant and ineffective,” he says. “But you can't fly the plane reckless, either. Somewhere between scared and reckless, you can find the happy medium and meet the needs of your community.”  

There’s no doubt that AI tools—and the changes they bring—can be intimidating. But as Mosier puts it, “you do yourself and your communities a disservice if you don't explore all of the tools available to you to reach out, connect and create those relationships.” At both AACPS and the MUJC, that exploration has created more equitable access to learning and communication. So if your district is grappling with similar challenges, it may be time to ask how AI could help you solve them—and what new possibilities might emerge when you do.