Andrew Adams, the executive director of business services for the Eden Prairie school district in Minnesota, needed some guidance from his state department of education on whether he could use a particular funding source for a particular expense. But all the documents he could find were in PDF files of dozens or even hundreds of pages.
He found the file that seemed to contain the information he needed, pasted the entire document into ChatGPT, and asked the generative artificial intelligence tool to tell him which categories of expenses were allowed.
It generated a list of five items. The first three were accurate. But the last two made Adams pause immediately. It wasn’t just that the examples were not on target. ChatGPT had pulled out two examples that were specifically not allowed, as spelled out in the document.
“I could have made some really poor decisions had I not classically known [what was accurate] as a human who’s been doing this work for a long time,” Adams said.
Hearing Adams tell this story, one might assume it turned him into an AI skeptic. But that’s far from the case.
He strongly supports what AI can do to improve and streamline the messy behind-the-scenes business of keeping schools running. He’s even helped launch an “AI for Dummies” class for his fellow members of the Minnesota Association of School Business Officials.
“I want to be the champion of ‘Let’s make mistakes and learn from them,’” he said.
The last couple years have marked a period of rapid technological advancement and popularity growth for generative artificial intelligence tools such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and others.
Classroom educators are using these tools to help them save time on administrative tasks and improve instruction, and students are exploring them on their own time. In response, school district leaders and policymakers nationwide are scrambling to develop concrete guidelines and best practices to ensure those evolving uses of AI don’t harm learning or social experiences in schools.
But less attention has been paid to the opportunities and challenges that generative AI tools afford to the field of school operations—crafting and reworking budgets; managing and adjusting school bus routes; pooling and analyzing reams of academic and behavioral data; recruiting and retaining qualified employees; and even developing rezoning schemes for district boundaries.
A growing number of district leaders are now beginning to organize training and professional development to help their peers grapple with the effects these tools inevitably will have on school operations and their daily job duties. Others are dabbling in generative AI tools of their own volition.
“We’re looking for efficiency to make our lives simpler so we can get more done or be more strategic in our roles,” Adams said.
AI tools are converting skeptics by giving them unprecedented feedback from their communities
It’s not just the tech-savviest district leaders who are getting interested in AI.
Madeline Negrón, the superintendent of the New Haven school district in Connecticut, attended lots of meetings where her district- and school-level colleagues talked at length about potential AI uses in their jobs.
But she had never tried the technology until earlier this year, when members of her team pitched her on using a tool called ThoughtExchange to solicit community input as the district prepared to craft its five-year strategic plan. SurveyMonkey and Jotforms are competitors to ThoughtExchange that offer similar tools.
Since then, she’s gotten tens of thousands of responses from community members weighing in on whether they like how the district is evolving and what they see as the biggest priorities for improvement.
The tool automatically translates the district’s queries into each of the 76 languages spoken by at least some residents in the racially and culturally diverse district of 19,000 students. Users can post their own responses, comment on other people’s responses, and even give ratings to boost responses they want to endorse.
Once the feedback-collection process is done, Negrón can tap the tool’s functions to sort and analyze the anonymized responses in a variety of ways, including by demographic group.
A large share of K-12 educators are similarly excited about the prospect of using AI to help them generate more meaningful feedback from their communities. Seven in 10 educators said in response to a recent EdWeek Research Center survey that they partly or fully support using AI for creating and tracking public reactions to communications from schools and districts. Only 17 percent said they fully oppose using AI for this purpose.
Negrón’s biggest takeaway from the process was that the question that got the most engagement by far was about improvements the district could make. That reinforced for her that the strategic plan needed to be ambitious and wide-ranging.
“Without the tool, I don’t know if I would have been able to have the outreach that I was able to do and collect as many thoughts and responses from the people that I got,” Negrón said.
She now plans to use a similar process with her colleagues to craft a “portrait of a graduate” that will serve as a road map for the skills students are expected to acquire before they graduate.
Not every task is suited to an AI assist
District leaders are now tasked with balancing enthusiasm for new tools with caution against uncritically embracing them.
Howie Barber, the assistant superintendent of finance and operations for the 1,050-student Old Rochester district in rural Massachusetts, has begun presenting about AI at conference gatherings of fellow school business professionals. One of his main points of emphasis: “I don’t find AI to be your source of developing something. AI is to help extend or expand what your capabilities are.”
Easy access to contextual information that can support the details in, say, his grant proposals, has been a big help.
For instance, when Barber is writing a grant proposal that would bring in more instructional resources for the district, he can input data on the district’s teachers and then ask generative AI tools to tell him how those numbers compare with teachers in surrounding districts.
He’s also used generative AI to tweak the wording in presentations and proposals so it’s more tailored to the knowledge base of the audience—like putting complex accounting jargon in layman’s terms when he’s speaking to district leaders who lack his finance expertise.
But Barber said he’s wary of asking the tool to do too much of the information-gathering legwork for him.
“If you’re utilizing AI for something other than truly learning and excelling at what you do, then you’ve already skipped a beat and missed the purpose of what you should be using it for,” Barber said.
Teacher and student uses of AI are prompting district leaders’ interest in the technology
District leaders don’t just look to each other for inspiration on how to use AI.
Adams from the Eden Prairie district first got excited about generative AI after attending a school board meeting where four students shared their experiences using AI tools in the classroom to help them write a script, develop images, craft a musical score, and then use all those pieces to assemble a short explainer video about the basics of AI.
“I was just blown away with the work these kids have done,” Adams said. “I was like, ‘Man, I need to dig in and play a little bit here.’”
Weeks later, Adams began applying AI tools to an increasingly common problem in his line of work: Job descriptions for open positions haven’t been updated in at least a decade, which means they’re leaving out all the important ways education jobs have changed, especially in recent years.
Adams asks generative AI to add something special to the existing job descriptions, then combs through them himself to correct inaccuracies and include anything that’s missing.
Without AI, “that could have taken me hours,” Adams said. “Instead, it spits out a template for me in seconds, and I was able to review it in 15 minutes and go, ‘This is what I want.’” He uses a similar process to craft questions for recruiters to ask job candidates.
Small districts like Eden Prairie often struggle to hire enough people to handle the heavy administrative burden of running a school system of any size. AI tools can fill gaps, like digitizing invoices for the accounting office much faster than anyone could manually key them.
Adams echoed other district leaders who say they are very intentional about using AI to help them work faster, not to replace the need for actual expertise and critical thinking.
When Adams uses generative AI to help him beef up a PowerPoint presentation he’s started on his own, he also makes sure to turn on “track changes” so he can see everything the tool does with his work and approve or tweak accordingly.
Many other departments could begin using generative AI tools, he said, to communicate with families and fill out burdensome paperwork that distracts from their core responsibilities.
“Instead of being like, ‘AI’s going to take our jobs,’ how about you come at it from the perspective of ‘People who know how to use it are going to be ahead in the future,’” Adams said.
Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.
