Most districts start their AI conversation in the riskiest possible place: student-facing tools. This issue makes the case for the opposite move. Your first AI wins should live in the work adults do every day, where the privacy stakes are low and the time savings are obvious.
Field Note: Start With the Adults
The question I hear on almost every discovery call: where should we start? The honest answer is not a tutoring tool or a student chatbot. It is the invisible adult work that eats your team's week: meeting notes, form letters, schedule drafts, report summaries. Those workflows never touch student data, so your privacy review is simple. They save time you can measure. And they build the staff trust you will need before anything student-facing has a chance.
This is exactly where the Foundation phase of my 30/60/90 AI Implementation Plan lives: days 1 to 30, one focused use case in the work adults already do, with a baseline number written down so day 90 has something honest to compare against.
Microsoft's New AI in Education Report highlights widespread adoption and increasing demand for support by Microsoft Education. The headline number: 58 percent of education leaders say their schools are implementing or scaling AI. The number underneath it matters more. Educators keep saying they need support, not more tools. If you lead a team, that gap is your job now. Read it to see where your district sits against the adoption curve.
Teachers Say Lack of AI Guidance Is a Major Problem by Education Week. The survey behind this piece found 82 percent of teachers have received no formal guidance on using AI in their work. Teachers are not waiting, they are improvising. That is a risk you can remove with one plain-language memo. This article is useful ammunition if you need to convince leadership that silence is the riskiest policy.
How AI Tools Can Support Special Education Students and Teachers by EdTech Magazine. A grounded look at where AI helps in special education without pretending it replaces professional judgment. The through line matches what I saw leading special education programs: the win is giving teachers their time back, not automating the student relationship. Worth sharing with any special education director on your team.
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I have said it before in this newsletter: start with the time, not the tool. This week is the how, an invisible work audit you can run in 30 minutes.
The invisible work in a school department is the manual, repetitive stuff nobody sees but everybody pays for. Before you pick any AI tool, find out where it hides. Here is the three-step version.
Step one, list. Set a timer for ten minutes. Write down every recurring task your team does in a normal week that follows a pattern: status emails, IEP progress summaries, sub plans, data pulled from one system and retyped into another. No judging, just listing.
Step two, estimate. Take ten more minutes. Next to each task, write two numbers: minutes per occurrence and occurrences per month. Multiply. Rough is fine. You are looking for the tasks that quietly cost hours, not a perfect time study.
Step three, pick one. Spend the last ten minutes choosing a single candidate. The best first pick meets three tests: it never touches student data, it follows the same pattern every time, and one named person owns it.
That one task is your first AI use case. Write down the baseline number you estimated, because in 90 days you will want something honest to compare against. You are not committing to a tool yet. You are committing to knowing where your team's time goes, which is the foundation every good AI decision sits on.
Two shortcuts if you want them: my free Invisible Work Audit tool runs this exercise interactively, and the fillable 30/60/90 workbook is where the winning use case becomes a real plan.
That's it for this one. If something here landed, share it with someone who'd get something out of it. If it didn'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