On October 19 I set out to write one page that answered a simple question for a district: what are our options with AI, and what are we allowed to do? A fact check of my own work turned up 42 things to fix. The rules were not missing. They were spread across five documents, and two of those are not in force yet.
Field Note: One Name on the Plan
The 90-day plan I run with teams starts before day 1. There is a setup block at the top of the page with five fields: organization, team or department, plan owner, your role, and start date. One line sits under it: if you cannot fill in these five fields, you are not ready to start the clock.
Four of the five are easy. The one that gets skipped is the plan owner, and the form asks for one name.
Here is why that field is in the plan. In October I went looking for every rule that applies to staff AI use in an Illinois district, and I found five sources. The state's own guidance, released in July and advisory rather than required. A separate letter to administrators from the state's special education director, dated February, about AI and IEP rights. A notice on the state's dispute resolution page warning that it is seeing a jump in complaints that appear to be AI-written and are missing needed facts, with no date shown on the notice at all. A law signed in July that bans AI from scoring teacher evaluations, which does not take effect until January 1. And the board policy language most districts will follow, which is scheduled for an update this fall and has not been released yet.
Every one of those is findable if you already know it exists. None of them answers a teacher's question, which is usually some version of: am I allowed to use this, for this, today.
A named owner is what closes that gap. Not a committee, and not a title. One person whose name goes on the printed page, so there is somewhere to send the question.
How to pick:
Someone who will still be in the building in June. Ownership that changes mid-pilot is not ownership.
Close enough to classrooms to know what staff are already doing with AI, whether or not it is sanctioned.
Enough authority to approve a 30-day trial in one department without a board vote.
The limit, and it matters: a named owner does not make the guidance correct, and it does not make the state's five documents agree with each other. It makes them reachable. One person who can say "that one's advisory, this one isn't, and the answer for you today is yes" is worth more to a teacher in November than a better policy in March.
If you want the plan itself, it is one of the templates on the site.
Worth Your Time
NYC barred 38 AI tools in schools. Some companies say their products shouldn't be on the list. by Alex Zimmerman and Michael Elsen-Rooney
Chalkbeat had to ask for more than a month before the city handed over the list of products whose AI features were switched off. Two vendors now say their flagged products have no student-facing AI in them, and the city has not explained how it decided what counted. If you want one example of what this issue is about, it is this: the rule existed, the list existed, and the staff who had to follow it could not read it.
New ETHS guidelines to allow AI use in class under teachers' discretion by Glennis Woosley
An Illinois high school took two years to finish its AI guidelines, and the result is clean: the teacher decides for their own class, and a student who uses AI with permission attaches a short statement saying how they used it. That disclosure line is the part I would copy this week. Worth noting that the article never says where the document itself is posted, which is the whole problem from the other side.
Your customGPT and GEM are about to be deleted by Doan Winkel
If anyone on your staff built a shareable classroom assistant in ChatGPT or Gemini, read this before December. Custom GPTs retire around December 11 and Gemini Gems are folding into something called Skills, with Workspace for Education accounts getting until June 2027. Put the date on a calendar now, because the link in a syllabus or a Canvas page will quietly stop working and nobody is going to send you a notice.
Try This
Put your district's AI rules on one page. Twenty minutes, and you need nobody's permission.
Open a blank document. Title it with your district's name, the words "AI rules for staff," and today's date. Date it in the title, not the footer, because this page goes stale.
Give it four headings and nothing else:
What we are allowed to use
What we are not allowed to use
Who decides
Who to ask
Now fill in only what you can point to a source for. Where you cannot, write the question instead. "Who signs off when a tool touches student data" beats a guess, and it is the line that gets your page read by someone who can answer it.
For the gaps, give AI fifteen minutes. Free ChatGPT, Gemini in your district's Google account, or Copilot all work. The job is finding the documents, not summarizing them. Paste this in:
I work in a K-12 school district in [your state]. I am building a one-page summary of the AI rules that apply to staff. List every document that might contain those rules: state education agency guidance, state law, school board policy templates, and our own acceptable use policy. For each one give the document name, who publishes it, the date of the most recent version, and whether it is required or advisory. If you are not certain a document exists, or cannot confirm its date, say exactly that instead of guessing. I want the list and where to find each item, not a summary.
Take that list into your district's own files and check it. Some of it will be wrong. Some of it will be a document your district has had posted for a year.
Then the step that makes it count: send the page to one person who has to follow these rules and ask which line is still unclear. Not a cabinet, not a committee. One teacher, one secretary, one case manager. Whatever they circle is your gap, and now you have the name of the person who was carrying it.
Know someone drowning in the invisible work? Forward this and share your link below. One referral gets you my Email Triage Recipe. Three gets you the Systems Pack. Five gets a 30-minute working session where we map one process together.
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That's it for this one. If something here was useful, share it with someone who'd get something out of it. If it wasn't, that's part of the deal too. You can find more of what I'm working on at evalveconsulting.com, or book a call if you want to talk through what you're dealing with.
Talk soon,
Chris