Learn how to foster thoughtful and empowering AI adoption, prioritize people over platforms, and engage skeptics transparently to navigate an AI-driven future in education.

Related resources

Signaling Change full research report

Through a survey and expert interviews, we investigate how AI is transforming school administration and communication as well as what this means for the field as a whole.

Generative AI in School PR

NSPRA's recent research on AI district policies

Example AI Resource Hub

Florida's Peninsula School District has put together a set of comprehensive resources and a great policy statement for AI use in their schools.

Transcript

Brittany Keil: All right, well welcome to AI in School Leadership and Communication. I'm so excited to get to chat with all of you all today, to get to share this research, and to start what I hope is the beginning of a fun conversation about how AI is shifting the roles that we're in.

If you're just joining, go ahead, go ahead and put your name, location, your favorite AI use case, or your favorite Thanksgiving side in the chat. Both of those are absolutely welcome. We're gonna be talking more about AI than Thanksgiving today, but it is, you know, it's exciting. I know that my family is very excited for a little break next week.

So to introduce myself, my name is Brittany, and I love research and education. I actually updated this slide this morning because my family's had some very fun updates in the last six months. If you've been to an Apptegy webinar before, you might recognize me. This is my first webinar after my maternity leave, though, so it's been a little bit.

So as you can see, I have my two wonderful daughters here. So the bigger girl that I'm holding in this bottom slide is my daughter, Rosemary. She's six, she's in first grade, her favorite Thanksgiving side is definitely mac and cheese, which she's making for the whole family.

And then my baby daughter, who is six months old, you can see in this little picture in her B costume, her name is Beatrice. So we made her, of course, baby B, and they both had a fantastic Thanksgiving. I know there's lots of school administrators in the chat who are very familiar with K pop demon hunters, so I couldn't resist putting my daughter's picture with the actual demon hunters at H Mart in the chat. It was so cute. We went to H Mart and there, which is like a Korean grocery store, and they had three different pictures. They had the derpy cat, they had the K pop demon hunters, and then they had the Sajaboys, which are like the boy band that are also demons, if you're not familiar with K pop demon hunter lore.

And Rosemary insisted on having pictures with all three of them.

So these are my girls, these are my why, but that's not all there is to me. So I am the senior manager of research and media for Apptegy and SchoolCEO, And what that means is that I spend a lot of time thinking about research and education.

Where did that come from for me? I was actually in the classroom for about a decade. So I taught special education for eight years, and my teaching career actually began in Malaysia.

Before that, though, I actually worked in marketing. So I worked in marketing for nonprofits and government agencies. My very first job was actually for the Peace Corps, which was pretty cool and very fun to look back on.

I, in my teaching career, got my master's from Johns Hopkins, discovered a deep love of education research. And during the pandemic, when I've heard that Apptegy was looking for somebody with an interest both in marketing and education research, I couldn't resist. I've been here for five years and I absolutely love it.

If you are somebody with a special education or a Malaysia background, please reach out to me. I love talking about both, especially as we're thinking about AI. Think that special education is undergoing a really cool renaissance, and I can't talk enough about it. It's just so exciting.

A little bit about SchoolCEO. So if you're in this webinar, I'm going to assume that you're a SchoolCO super fan. Welcome to the club, this is great. Here are a couple of our most recent issues. If you're not familiar with SchoolCEO, this is Apptegy's magazine that we publish quarterly. It is full of completely original research. We have an editorially independent writing team that is absolutely fantastic, and that we fill every single issue with stories about what's working in school communication and leadership for districts across the country.

Every single story, and I can't emphasize this enough, starts in a conversation with a school leader. Sometimes these conversations start after webinars, sometimes these conversations start at events, and sometimes they start in something we call an intro call.

So an intro call is where somebody from my team just chats with someone from your district about what you're doing that's innovative, what kind of support you need as a school communicator and a school leader, and what you're looking for, be it professional development, research, anything like that. If you are interested in getting an intro call for somebody on your team or for yourself, go ahead and just email me. I do have my email on the slide at the end, and I'm happy to set that up for you. Every single story starts with this, and it's probably my favorite part of my job, is just getting to talk with school leaders and communicators like you.

I have a couple of our beautiful recent issues here. So our newest one is Control Shift, which is Leading in a Digital Landscape, all about how to transform the magic that happens in your public schools to your online digital spaces. Why is that important? You want to be able to translate this magic to the broader community, and we know how important that is.

It's a beautiful issue, it's got a nice, I don't want it to get blurred. It has a nice starry cover.

Before that, we did a deep dive into brand with this very cool origami cover, and then in the spring before I went on maternity leave, or I guess in the winter, we dove into what parents want with school communication. The important thing to know about School CO is that you can have your own physical copy. We're happy to get you on the mailing list. If you're not already receiving a copy, please just see Barrett posted a link in the chat. You can also reach out to us and we'll make sure that you get this. We do publish SchoolCEO quarterly. Occasionally, we have special editions, so it's always good to stay tuned for what we've got coming out.

We also have a newsletter. So every two weeks or so, somebody from our team, it's usually me, Barrett, and a couple of other of us put together a newsletter on what we really think is like making and shaking school communication leadership in the moment. This is our time when we talk about what's going on with current events, things that are pivoting rapidly, and sometimes ideas that we're just kind of testing out. So if you're interested in staying really up to date with what's going on in School CO, please subscribe to our newsletter. Every single one of them is handwritten and bandied about and thought about by our team, and so we're always looking to push our ideas even further. And every single newsletter has a question for you. And what I love to tell people is that every time we get a response to a question, we share it amongst our entire team.

These, yeah, so Barrett posted the link is the same as the newsletter, so please sign up. This is a great extension of our community. And at this point in the presentation, I often feel like I'm selling something on QSC, but we also have a podcast. So our podcast has been through four amazing seasons.

Me and Tyler, if you've met him, headed off the first three seasons, and then my colleague Eileen, who has an incredible podcast voice and also an incredible brain to match, took off took season four, and we're kind of looking at where we want to take our podcast next year. So please subscribe if you're a podcast person. I think that the best recommendation I got for our podcast was somebody told us that our podcasts were exactly the length of time that they needed to mow their front yard. So, you know, here for you while you're mowing, you're leading all the time, feel free to check it out.

So now without further ado, let's talk AI.

So we're gonna go through a couple different phases of this presentation, and we're gonna have a couple of moments that are going to be chat worthy, where you can kind of chat and give your opinion. We definitely encourage that. Also feel free to reach out to us after if you have questions, we love answering questions.

So first, how did we get here? How did we get to this pressure cooker of school leadership in which AI has become so applicable? Second, what does our new research say about AI in school administration? And then third, how can you, the leaders, the communicators lead well in the age of AI? So these are the three questions that we're seeking to answer.

A quick note, we are going to be digging really deeply into these in our newest edition of School CO, which is all about AI. So if you leave today wanting more, don't worry, it's coming.

So first, how did we get here? And this is a question for the crowd that I'd love to see you answer in the chat. In the past five years, what new or increased stressors have impacted your goals?

Cybersecurity, social media influence, digital accessibility, ADA compliance, district Instagram, the Ole of a Cog, enrollment, keyboard warriors, ADA compliance, Being the team of one, absolutely.

School choice.

Twenty four seven school leadership rules.

Social media overload? Absolutely.

Decreasing budgets? Absolutely.

I was interested to see cybersecurity. Impress is not the right word. I'm overwhelmed with just how expensive cybersecurity insurance is and how much more complicated it gets every year.

Social media? Staffing shortages?

Absolutely. So when we set out to do this research, we wanted to understand how AI was impacting two major segments of our readership, school communicators and school administrators. And the reason for that is this, both of these roles, and often sometimes people have shares of both of these roles in their own jobs, Impact a community's ability to trust their schools. When we talk about trust, we talk about, we're thinking about not only the trusted families, externally, teachers, internally, students internally, but also the community as a whole. So you know that you need support from your community to continue doing what you do, not only to pass levies, but also to have that sort of role in your community that you can continue being supported.

And trust is what sort of makes this happen.

So school administrators and communicators wear a lot of hats, and when this comes out in the magazine I'm really excited because our designer went with a hat theme and it is he impresses me. So he's an incredibly dedicated designer. We have a single designer for School CEO Magazine, and every time he comes up with an idea, think, like, oh, I don't know, and every single time he knocks it out of the park, so I'm excited for you to see this. But school communicators wear and administrators wear a lot of hats. You are the decision maker. You make decisions every single moment of your job and often after you've gone home too, and many of these decisions are on the fly.

Anybody who hasn't worked in schools often, I think, has a hard time understanding just how much can happen in a school day, just how many little fires can happen in a single lunch period. My husband is an IT professional. He's always worked from home. He's always worked in an office setting, and he used to remark whenever I would come home.

He'd be like, How was your day at school? And I would kind of take a deep breath, start with, you know, my morning office hours before school started, and have so many things that happen, many of them very notable. I'd ask him, What happened for you? And he'd be like, I don't think my job is as interesting as yours.

And I think that's true for a lot of school professionals in general. So not only are you the decision maker, but you're also the decision communicator. It's your job to take these decisions and communicate them both externally and internally. Sometimes this means sending out a newsletter to families.

Sometimes this means working internally to build buy in, but in any case, you have to communicate the decisions and often face criticism for how the decisions are made and communicated, which is a very tall order. And for folks who communicate externally, especially a significant pressure in your job.

You get to be the operations pro. So you get the incredible honor of facilitating moving parts all the time, even when it's weekends or holidays. I think one of the major stressors that I hear over and over again from school communicators and school leaders is that there's just very little time to turn off.

You don't necessarily get, you know, holiday breaks in the way that I think people who aren't involved in schools think that school leaders do. You're always on to some degree and that's absolutely exhausting.

And then finally, but not least at all, is you are the paperwork magnate. So with work comes paperwork and in education, we love paperwork. And often it is actually on paper as well. I was telling somebody that my daughter's school district still uses paper permission slips, and it's challenging because she consistently loses them. She's only in first grade, so we'll work on it, But I think for many people, they think that the world has moved on from paper, but school systems definitely have not.

I think that, you know, I mentioned that I was a special educator, the one app I was most excited for in my entire career was a fax app so that I didn't have to fax in IEPs to the State Department because the fax machines are so slow. So if you haven't worked directly with that, then yeah, that's a fun little glimpse.

Unfortunately though, leading and communicating in schools has only gotten harder. So I saw a lot of these difficulties in the chat, but increased school choice means that teachers and families have more options than ever before. That means that your district competes for every single student and staff member in a way that would have previously been unthinkable. This is a challenge that we talk about a lot at SchoolCO because it is really hitting everywhere. And this challenge has changed in the last couple years as well.

About ten years ago, we saw the advent of charter schools in the element of school choice, but now open enrollment laws and vouchers are really changing the game for a lot of districts. Budget cuts mean that every tool and position is under scrutiny, that you may have fewer hands than ever to do the same amount of work or even more work. Higher levels of politicization means that no decision goes unexamined, and often, people start from a negative assumption point when it comes to decision making.

All of this is happening at the same time that AI is here, AI is here to stay, and AI is deftly changing the world we are living in. But our question is how is this going to factor into the equation of what it means to be a school administrator and school leader?

So I like to think of this as a convergence zone, and I know that sounds very dramatic, but I think maybe warrants it. So on one hand we have the increase of competition, school funding, and politicization, which results in turn for lots of burnout in the school administrative and school communicator roles. We're going dig into that a little more later. On the other hand, we have AI that is rapidly shifting and changing almost every aspect of work life and personal life too. I was just reading a study about how many adolescents are engaging with AI chatbots, and honestly, it's scary.

It's something that's changing quickly and at a rate that I think is unprecedented with a lot of technologies.

So how is this going to converge? How is this going to meet together? I think there are a lot of options. And as we work through what I saw in my research today, I'm going to lean a little bit positive, but I want to acknowledge there are plenty of concerns as well.

So as we do at SchoolCEO, when we have a question, we decided to conduct a study. So this was my first ever mixed methods qualitative and quantitative study, which was really fun to conduct. So we had a small scale survey, which was meant to be more like a pulse poll, so one hundred and thirty responses nationwide among different school leaders and communicators, and then we paired this for sort of breadth and depth with hours of in-depth influencer interviews, and we identified school communicators and superintendents, and assistant superintendents who had already distinguished themselves in the field of AI and school communication and leadership. And then we really sort of spent some time figuring out what they were doing differently than the average school leader and where they thought the field was headed.

This is a QR code so you can read the full report.

So what we wanted to know is how school leaders and communicators are currently using AI, which tools and use cases are most useful in the office and not the classroom, and this is an important distinction that I think is unique to our research. So there's been a lot of research about how AI is impacting schools, especially in the concerns around homework and cheating, but I actually think the most interesting use cases for AI in education happen in the office, and that's why we wanted to study it. And then third, how is AI changing the roles of school communication and administration? Because those changes, as we mentioned earlier, are here to stay and likely to impact the field as a whole forever.

So now let's dig into our findings. First, AI is popular in gaining steam quickly, and this is something that I hope seems a little bit obvious at this point, but it doesn't have to be. Two years ago, our team did our first study of AI in education. We collaborated with INSPRA to conduct a study about how school communicators specifically are using AI.

And at the time, AI was very buzzworthy, it was very popular, it was something that came up a lot, but our study actually found that only a small segment of communicators were actually using AI on the day to day. This is no longer the case. So ninety seven percent of respondents use AI for professional duties, and over half of them, or sorry, nearly half of them consider themselves very familiar with AI, and with very familiar, we actually equate this to daily use. So there are folks, so by and large, if you have a school district, if you have, you know, let's say four or five different staff members who are working in school communications, about half of them are using AI for their work. And this is a change that has happened very, very quickly.

To kind of compare this to something that I think is a little bit funny, ninety seven percent of respondents across various roles, and this isn't just school communicators are using AI, about an equal amount of car drivers right now in the United States drive in automatic transmission, but whereas three years ago, AI was basically unheard of on the individual scale, it took five decades for the automatic transmission to become this widespread in the US, And I knew that whenever I cited this statistic that I'd probably have some folks in the chat who would be like, I am a proud manual transmission driver. My husband's one of those. His Mini Cooper is a manual transmission, and he likes to joke that nobody will, you know, like that he'll never be able to sell it, but it also is very special to him. But I can see, like, this widespread use is something that's happened incredibly quickly.

I also think that this is shaping our worlds in the physical way in a way that maybe is not totally that wasn't fully expected. I was talking with a group out of Nebraska who I know are today, everybody's tuning in from NEPS for a hello, thank you for hiding away and listening to my webinar. And we were talking about whether we thought AI was going to continually to rapidly change the field of school communication and leadership, or if it would slow down.

And I was of the opinion that I thought things were going to slow down, and I had a colleague in that, Deanne from Sioux Falls, say that she actually disagreed, that she now drove by multiple data centers on her commute and didn't think that anything was slowing down. She's like, This is not my idea of slow change. And I think in the end that she's absolutely right.

Something I think that is really fun, and this is a good little water cooler moment, is that participants of all ages believe AI is important to the future of school communication. And I'll admit, when I set out on this study, I did anticipate that we would see possibly some, you know, correlations were older or people who had been in the field longer were less excited about AI, but that is absolutely not the case. And for me, that's something that's exciting. And in my conversations with superintendents especially, many of them said, I've spent thirty years in school administration.

The last five years have been the years where I've learned the most. And I think that AI has been a huge, you know, accelerator for this. So if you are working with other leaders who think that they're too old to learn about AI, or may say that like, Oh, no, I'm too close to retirement, understand this is not the case. Like AI is being embraced at every age and every level.

This is also true of school districts of different size, so I expected to see larger or more urban school districts be more comfortable with AI, and although this was true, this wasn't true to the degree that I thought it would be. AI really is, you know, like popular across all districts of sizes and regionality.

In our study, we talked to a couple of we had a pretty good nationally representative study. So as you can see, we had thirty percent of our districts were rural, The bulk of our districts had under ten thousand students. And in general, most of our respondents were communicators, which tracks with previous studies that we've done. School communicators, you are just awesome at taking surveys.

And I am so lucky that you are one of my primary targets for my research because you are great at it.

Finding number two is that school communicators are leading the way when it comes to AI adoption.

So among our respondents, communications professionals were the most frequent users among AI, as were professionals at larger districts, as I mentioned earlier.

So this is something that is also validated by private sector studies. So marketing teams, which I think of as the equivalent of a school communicator, and communications teams are some of the earliest adopters of AI and are the people who have, I think, made use of it as quickly as anybody could.

Which is interesting because when we talk about school communicators, we also need to talk about research that my team has previously done about school communication.

In February twenty twenty four, our team collaborated with EnSPRA to launch a national survey to explore the relationship between communications professionals and superintendents. And something that came out of this study was actually just how frequent burnout was happening the field. Many communicators are dissatisfied with how they spend their time. So you can see that nearly half are dissatisfied with how they're spending their time and that they responded negatively to the statement. You spend the majority of your time focusing on what you consider to be the most important elements of your role.

To dig deeper into this dissatisfaction, we asked respondents to rank common tasks associated with their jobs, and thanks to Inspir for coming up with these buckets.

First, we asked them to rank tasks which took up the most time, and then to rank tasks that they believed were the most important to their role. And while I've definitely looked at this chart before, and I've definitely had webinars about this chart, I now want you to look at this through a new lens. How does AI change the way that you view this?

How many things on the blue list, which of the following tasks can you take up in the most time in your typical day list could AI be a big help with?

Social media management, website management, external and internal communications, long term strategy? Absolutely.

I mentioned earlier, school communicators are dealing with a lot of burnout, something that is true of superintendents as well. More than seventy five percent of school communicators said that they were at least sometimes burned out. And I do think that there is an opportunity here when you look at this chart and when you look at burnout, to think about how can help be a part of this moment, how it can help us meet this moment of burnout in school leadership and communication.

Now finding number three, and this is something that I expected, but it was still exciting. In general, respondents preferred general AI tools, such as Claude and ChatGBT, but also frequently used AI when it was integrated into familiar tools that they already love, such as Canva and Gmail.

Something that I, you know, was curious about is whether there would be an issue of access for school administrators. This was a question that I carried into the conversations, like, do you feel like you have access to the enterprise models of different GPT tools? And by and large, most people did.

Especially since Gemini has rolled out to Google Suite users, I feel like there are a lot of opportunities for people to use AI that maybe wouldn't have been true a year or two ago.

As you can see, there's also room for AI meeting note takers and other specialized tools such as image generation and manipulation tools.

Something that came up a lot too, which may be part of your interest as school communicators and leaders is Heijen, which is video manipulation. That one is absolutely taking off like wildfire. If we have any folks who consider themselves, hey, gen experts, please post yourself in the chat, so that the rest of us can help catch up, or can catch up with you.

Beyond this, professionals are most likely to use AI features integrated into tools that they already love, such as Gmail and Canva. And I think that this suggests that some professionals don't even realize that AI has potential as a standalone tool. They just view it as a part of the tools that they're already comfortable with. And if you are a school, you know, leader or communicator, to, oh, Lucy says synesthesia is also good as a HeyGen competitor.

Sorry.

If you're worried that an AI tool rolling out as part of an existing suite, such as Canva, or even some of our Actigy tools, know that by and large folks were pretty comfortable with this.

Finding number four: Communication was the most frequently cited challenge that AI was used to address. Although our survey respondents were majority communications professionals, leaders in other roles in our interviews also agreed that AI had an immense amount of potential for communication purposes, including its helpfulness for personalizing communication, translation, and drafting messages. So here we have a nice chart desegregated by age, which is an interesting way to look at just for some of the top AI use cases within communication. Generating outlines and drafts from presentations, creating content for the district's website or social media, if you think back on that chart on what tasks took up the most time, social media was right at the top, language accessibility such as translations and closed captioning, drafting responses to community concerns or media inquiries, and then personalizing communications for different stakeholders, which is a huge opportunity that AI has that is difficult to do honestly without it.

Something that I have been hearing in my conversations that I find especially exciting is the potential in AI for AI plus communication to allow for personalization at levels that have never been seen before.

So, you know, getting to use AI to actually have maybe six different newsletters for different stakeholders that appeal their different needs. I actually talked to a superintendent yesterday who's using NotebookLM to have a specialized podcast just for his board members, something he definitely wouldn't have had the time for without the use of AI.

One thing that I was curious about AI use, but haven't seen is AI and FOIA requests. In that survey in twenty twenty four, a lot of communicators cited FOIA requests as a rising challenge for them, something that was becoming more and more unwieldy. And so I'm kind of like, my ear to the ground to see if there's a really good AI tool that's helping with FOIA requests. So if you have one, feel free to post it in the chat.

Other than communications, there were some really interesting use cases as well. So first, administrative tasks. So respondents highlighted AI's potential for improving efficiency, automating routine tasks and streamlining clerical work. A big one here, and this is something that I'm starting to see as being very consistent, is using AI for RFP processes. So not only drafting your own RFP requests, but also reading through and scoring all of the RFPs. I talked to a superintendent who said that he went from having to spend weeks reading every single RFP to score it for their committee, to being able to do this with AI in a matter of minutes.

And when you have to do an RFP for almost any major expense, this is a huge time saver and something that has a lot of potential.

So student support and instruction, so applications related to supporting student learning, and again, we did try to keep our survey responses limited to the office use, but of course, educator in chief is a major role of school leaders.

Something that was exciting for me to see as an educator and as, you know, an AI user was, and as a special educator, was just the potential for leveling text with AI. So before, this was really challenging. This was something that's really challenging for school, special educators like myself, being able to actually level a text across an entire classroom. But now that's something that's very doable with the help of AI.

Of course, data analysis is a natural strength of AI. This includes generating reports from data, gaining insights and identifying trends. If you know Jake Potter out of Kansas, this is something that he's been doing for years. He's actually upped the amount of internal external feedback opportunities and polls with his district because he is able to use AI so effectively to shorten that cycle of feedback and action.

And I think that that's something that has a lot of potential. And then finally, accessibility. So getting to use AI for translations and closed captioning, there's a lot of opportunity there. I've seen some really strong AI alt text image generation lately, that's actually really, really good.

And I was hesitant at first, especially as a disabilities advocate.

But how does AI change the work of school administration?

So AI creates the potential for personal connection. And you know, whenever I was interviewing about this study with somebody, they're like, well, what you know, what do school leaders and communicators want to do with this extra time that AI saves? And it was hard for me to, you know, express just how much potential there is. You know, you have the opportunity to get to do so much more face to face work when you're not spending hours reading RFPs.

So multiple leaders mentioned the usefulness of using AI for tedious or time consuming tasks, like standardizing handbooks across districts across the district, using it to harness data as I talked before, and then helping them fight burnout. When you're able to replace, tedious, time consuming work with face to face work because of the use of AI, this is actually very good for you as professionals in that you have less burnout because you're not head down working on small tasks that don't have the same necessarily quick impact that getting to work with students on, you know, a student committee, or if you're a school communicator, getting to write a feel good story about something happening and the FFA does.

Here's a quote from a superintendent AI has really streamlined my work and honestly, it's done wonders for my well-being. In a small district where we all wear a lot of hats and I don't have a lot of extra help, the AI has been a total game changer.

So, as with any SchoolCO presentation, we want to talk about the problem, but also what you should do next. So where do you start or start over? And I wanted to include this caveat about starting over, because I think that some districts got off on the wrong foot when it came to AI. When AI first rolled out, when we were so excited getting to watch all kinds of demos, some schools and states themselves were pretty reactionary in banning AI or drastically limiting AI, and I think that that created a cultural moment that might need a reset. So how do you accomplish this with your staff?

I have three tips, and we're going to dig into each of these. First, to start with a strategy, not tactics. Second, build policies that provide answers. And third is to make it fun and make it helpful.

So, and I can't, you know, emphasize this enough, and this is where I dig into some of the hesitancies that we saw come up in our research, but your staff needs to know what they're trying to accomplish with AI before they're asked to do it. There's a couple of reasons for this. So first, despite their enthusiasm about AI, most school leaders and communicators have a lot of concerns about this new technology. Sixty percent of our respondents cited data privacy and security as one of their biggest roadblocks and concerns. In an era where safeguarding student data is a major challenge for school districts already, there's no surprise that throwing AI only makes this feel even more overwhelming.

So many respondents also raised concerns about algorithmic biases and real world consequences that the district wasn't necessarily ready for.

And beyond the ethical concerns, there were also concerns about just keeping the district from adopting AI on a wide scale without knowing what they were trying to do. A phrase that I heard come up again and again in my research was that AI was solving a problem that hadn't been stated. And so when it comes to how you roll out AI with your own district, you need to be clear about what you're trying to do, why you're trying to do it, and how it can be done. For example, and I mentioned this earlier, leveling text is a challenge.

It's one that's tedious, it's one that's necessary, it's one that's not going away. How can you use AI to address this, and which AI are you going to use? These are the questions that teachers are going to ask or that staff are going to ask so that they know what they can do next. I think that, and this is rightfully so, honestly, there's a lot of anxiety around whether or not AI is going to cut jobs.

Whenever you come to the conversation with having AI as a tool to solve a broader goal, this is something that helps everybody understand how AI fits into their own personal workflow.

As a professional, we must think about how to use AI strategically and not just tactically. This is a quote from Doctor. Gustavo Bolderis, an incredible AI leader out of Beaverton School District in Oregon. When I asked him what he thought the single biggest roadblock was for school leaders in leading through the adoption of AI, he said that too many school leaders were thinking tactically, thinking day to day, using AI to write emails and for small one off tasks rather than using it strategically for how they can impact their district as a whole.

Second, staff need clear policies and guidelines, and only a fraction of districts are able to provide this.

So once again, I'm so proud to get to turn to Inspra and Melissa and her team about the wonderful research that they've done about AI adoption. So this is a chart from their most recent study on AI, and as you can see, very few school districts, so less than thirty percent actually have a policy around AI use.

Sixty nine percent of their districts have any formal policy for employee use at all.

An unclear or nonexistent policies only create unnecessary risk and also frustration among the skeptics, who may feel like you're not thinking about everything that you need to as you're rolling out AI. There are valid concerns around AI, and not having a policy is not a good first step to show your staff that you are addressing these concerns and that you're ready for whatever AI will bring. What does it mean, you know, what does it look like to have a good policy? Actually, I'm going to send an incredible one from Peninsula School District in Washington in my follow-up email, so keep an eye out for that.

Chris Hagel, who is the Chief Intelligence Officer for Peninsula School District, someone who I'm gonna quote in a minute, wrote this policy very early on in school districts' adoption of AI, and so many school districts he says have pulled parts of it, that a school district in New Jersey actually didn't even remove the name Peninsula School District, which he thought was funny. But it goes wild for a reason, and I'm happy to share it with you.

And third is to make it fun or make it helpful. And I'm really thinking about teachers especially, or student facing staff when I think about this.

So teachers and staff may not be resistant to using AI, they may just be intimidated and feel like they're already behind. And this is something that I heard from school leaders. You know, AI is in some ways decades old, but in other ways it's only three years old. But it's so easy to feel behind if you haven't been a part of, you know, adopting AI up to this point.

You might feel behind or, you know, you might feel like if you wait any longer, you're never going to be able to get caught up. And so when I talk to school leaders about how to build buy in for AI and actually get folks using it on a day to day basis, these are the three things that they felt made the biggest difference.

First, multiple administrators recommended helping staff find personal AI use cases, such as planning a birthday party or generating a list of questions for a realtor, to help them build interest in the tools and also see what wonderful potential the tools have. If they're not using it in their professional life, they're not using it in their personal life, and this is a great opportunity to show the value without having the intimidation of thinking like, how am I using this for my job? The second is that sandbox time is a must, and this is something that I've seen recently even in my own role. My team has recently rolled out some new AI tools, and I find that if I don't book myself time just to play with the tools, then I'm not going to get to do them. It's just gonna stay on my to do list, and I'm just gonna feel more and more anxious about it.

So the best kind of sandbox time I heard from my participants are time when administrators and teachers can just sit together and play with a new tool.

This is where the moments happen. This is where the magic happens. This is where people realize the potential that AI can have for them. And if you're actually in person, in a group, in the school library, doing this together, then you can share the moments as they happen.

I think it's important, especially to think that this is how you push beyond your initial AI savvy cohort. Almost every district I talked to had a couple of, you know, early adopters who were quickly getting into AI, quickly building things that other teachers didn't even dream of, but how do you move it beyond this cohort? This is a great way to use them sort of as your model students and have them help the rest of the teachers. I actually read some really interesting private sector research recently that peers are actually more influential than leaders when it comes to AI adoption, and so you want to make sure that you're using your peer leaders, know, your teachers, your staff members at the building level, to show just how AI can be, you know, what kind of potential it can have for the district.

And then finally, you want to celebrate wins and misses. So I talked to superintendents who have an AI tip that's generated from a staff member every single week, and these are celebrations of things that are working well. But also sometimes tools fall short, and a really good thing to keep in mind and something to communicate to your staff is that the AI tool that they're using is very likely the worst that they'll ever use. And this is an idea that comes from the book Cointelligence by Ethan Mollick. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. If you're in a state where Apptegy does book clubs, we might be reading it, so please join and read it with us, it'd be really fun.

But this is also a great book that you can read with your leadership team or staff in general. I often complain that when it comes to AI resources and professional development, everything is built either for babies or engineers, and it's really hard to find anything in between. Like, I'm a smart professional, but my coding is terrible. I took two classes in it in college and I don't use it often. But co intelligence is just that. It meets the moment of getting you know, really dig into the weeds without being so inaccessible that it feels like you'll never be able to use these tools.

The question that I found that was most moving when it comes to teachers is actually this though, to ask your staff what parts of their jobs they dread the most and then how AI can help them dread them less. This is an idea again that comes from Chris Hagel in Peninsula School District in Washington. I have a quote from him because I think he just says it so well: Across the country, conversations are happening about teacher retention and wellness. When I think about AI, I wonder what it would be like to get thirty five teachers in the room and hear about the tedious or most annoying parts of their job.

For example, I had a veteran teacher reach out after I showed her how to use AI to write data informed report card comments. She told me that they were the best ones she had written in twenty five years, in a fraction of the time it usually took her. This is what I want to do with I want to help educators get back to what they enjoy. And I think this relationship between burnout toward the potential of education in AI is really where we should put our energy.

There is vast potential right now for school districts to use AI to help them do education better, and that they can focus on the parts of their jobs that need that person to person contact.

Teaching is one of those things that I don't believe will ever be replaced by AI, and I think there's a good reason for that. I think that it's deeply human work, and yet we can use AI to help unburden some of the heavy tasks that come along with the job.

So this is the end of the research today, but as usual, I hope this is the beginning of a great conversation. And the really cool thing about our research today is we are actually launching a new issue about this that is all about AI. There's an opportunity for you to be a part of this, especially if you're one of those AI savvy folks, or maybe someone who's just getting into it. We're building an AI mini prompt library for school communicators and leaders, and if you have a prompt that you think is useful, go ahead and send it. We're outlining a couple of really great prompts. I'm excited to share these and you'll get to see the impact that these make across industry, and I think it's gonna be good. So in general, thank you.

Thank you so much. Feel free to reach out to me. My email is right here, brittney@schoolceo.com. And yeah, let's go see what impacts we can make for education.