How Local Schools are Navigating AI Adoption This Year

This story originally appeared in The River Reporter By Liam Mayo

NEW YORK STATE & PENNSYLVANIA — This fall, as parents, students and educators prepare for the start of a new school year, they’ve got a new item to consider for their back-to-school preparations.

#2 pencils? Check. Three-ring binders? Check. (And we all agree the red one’s for math, right?) But how about guidance on the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom?

Educators and policy makers across the nation, over the past few years, have been grappling with how to govern generative AI. It’s a fast-developing technology, and, in many cases, laws and policies are still struggling to catch up with its potential uses.

Superintendents from local school districts, speaking with the River Reporter, said they’re treading warily into the use of this new technology—not dismissing it outright, but aware of the need to place guardrails on its use. At the same time, educators at the state level in both New York and Pennsylvania have urged legislators to consider issuing some level of state-wide guidance around the use of the new technology.

Not that new?

The advent of AI represents a major change in the technology available in the classroom. However, it’s not a level of change without precedent.

Local educators compared the arrival of AI to a range of existing educational advances. Timothy Morgan, superintendent of the Wayne Highlands School District, PA, compared it to the arrival of the internet; when he was going through his undergraduate work, he had to navigate the shift on research tools from the Dewey Decimal System and the card catalogue to software systems and the internet. Traci Ferreira, superintendent of the Eldred Central School District, NY, compared AI’s impact on education to the movement in the 1970s to bring calculators into math classrooms.

“AI has been a part of our school for a long time,” said Keith Gunuskey, superintendent of the Wallenpaupack Area School District, PA. “You know, you can’t type anything without spellcheck coming on.”

Too, though, educators acknowledged that it’s important to establish guardrails around the use of AI in classrooms.

Gunuskey said he’s heard concerns about whether kids are still thinking critically as they’re using AI. “It’s important to fact check it—just because ChatGPT says this, doesn’t always mean that that’s right.” he said. “It might be pulling information from unreliable sources.”

“I think we’re on the cusp of another significant change [in education], and for me to predict exactly where that will go—far brighter people than me can’t do that,” said Morgan. “So I think it’s our responsibility to establish those guardrails and make sure that there’s some ethic involved in how that gets used.”

The how and the why

The districts surveyed vary in their current adoption of AI. Wayne Highlands still is working to get a formal policy in place: Morgan says it has some “general ideas,” but doesn’t have anything formalized. Gunuskey said Wallenpaupack has recently started discussions with parents and faculty about AI use.

Both at Eldred and at Sullivan West Central School District, NY, some level of AI programing has been implemented or trialed for the classroom.

At Eldred, said Ferreira, staff can use Google Gemini for their work. Students, however, are only permitted to use Magic School AI, a platform built specifically for school districts. They also have to cite their usage of AI, she said.

Kathleen Bressler, superintendent of Sullivan West, said that the district has implemented one AI program, specifically for higher-level math support: Thinkverse.

“We find that in high school math, as you get up to algebra one and geometry, the number of faculty and staff in the building that can really assist with that level of math is few and far between, unfortunately,” Bressler said. With Thinkverse, “Not only can students generate questions where they can kind of help themselves, but the AI aspect is where you kind of have a tutor that, when they’re trying to figure out a problem, helps them answer it step by step.”

Staff provided more details about the utilization of Thinkverse during a Thursday, August 20 strategic planning meeting for the district. Thinkverse was piloted during the 2025-26 school year in the seventh grade math class, and is planned for expansion into eighth grade in 2026-27, they said.

Dr. Kevin McGowan, superintendent of the Brighton Central School District, NY, and a consultant on Sullivan West’s strategic planning process, spoke on AI during that meeting. When people think about students using AI for class, they think first of a student using AI to write their essays for them, he said.

“That sounds horrible—like, ‘How could we let AI do that’? But instructionally, what we’re learning and what we know—particularly the more we as educators, as adults, as human beings use AI more and more—that there’s actually this infinite world of possibility to teach a young person how to use AI to go way deeper,” he said.

A Sullivan West staff member agreed, saying that’s how Thinkverse works. “My daughter has used it at home. It does not give answers—it actually takes her longer to do homework sometimes, because it does look at the thinking you’re doing and it says, ‘Well, why don’t you try this?’ It’s almost diagnosing it as you’re going to say, ‘Why don’t we focus on this area and check out this?’ It becomes a process of refining her questions,” he said.

Sherri Meyer, the district’s technology leader and data privacy officer, said she has demoed Magic School AI. She tried to jailbreak it, acting as a student trying to get it to write a paper for her. “It wouldn’t do it,” she said. “It kept pushing back.”

The state of the states

As of yet, neither New York State nor Pennsylvania has enacted sweeping, state-level policy guidance for the use of AI in schools, leaving it up to individual districts to develop their thinking on the issue. However, legislators and teachers’ organizations in both states have begun examining the issue and formulating their thoughts on what that guidance might look like.

The board of directors for New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), federation of over 1,200 local educational unions, passed a resolution in May calling for developmentally appropriate limits on screen time and AI in New York schools. The suggested guidelines in that resolution included:

No one-to-one screen or device use for students in prekindergarten through second grade, except to support students with special needs

No student-facing AI for pre-K through second grade students, and no non-educationally based AI for third through eighth grade students

That for all grades, the use of AI must be supervised, educator led and designed to promote critical thinking, digital literacy and civic readiness, rather than replace human instruction, creativity or judgement

No computer programs that simulate human relationships for children under 16

Several months later, when news broke that a school district in upstate New York planned to bring a humanoid robot into classrooms, NYSUT released a statement in opposition to the plan.

“Our students don’t need robots,” said NYSUT President Melinda Person. “They need real relationships with caring adults. Educators notice when students are struggling, celebrate when they succeed and help them discover who they can become. No robot can do that, no matter how lifelike its skin or specific its regional accent.”

In Pennsylvania, the state house education committee held a hearing on April 21 regarding AI and K-12 education. Melissa Constantino-Poruben, a sixth grade math teacher with the Avonworth School District, spoke at that hearing as a representative of the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA), a union of 178,000 education professionals; PSEA has its own taskforce to evaluate the role of AI in education.

“If I could leave you with two messages today, it is that schools need to take an active role in creating a generation of responsible AI users, and all of us—elected officials, policymakers and educators—need to work together to ensure that our state and its schools take a human-centered approach to generative AI,” she said.

She urged legislators at the state and local level to consider a set of policies as guidelines around AI usage, which comprised:

Prohibit educators from being replaced by AI to provide instruction or student services

Prohibit the use of AI in making decisions about employee evaluations, including hirings and firings

Prohibit the use of AI in making final determination on student evaluations

Prohibit consideration of charter schools that rely on AI to provide instruction to students

Constantino-Poruben also said that AI provides opportunities for students and educators alike, and encouraged school districts to provide training on the use of AI tools to their educators.

“We should proceed with haste to prepare educators to teach students how to responsibly use the technology, all the while maintaining a healthy lens of caution for the potential long-term effects of an unregulated and profit-motivated system,” she said.

Sonia Ahmed and Patrick Kelly contributed reporting for this article.

Image by pch.vector on Magnific