Students, parents, teachers want their voices heard on artificial intelligence in Santa Barbara schools

Students, teachers and parents are pressuring the Santa Barbara Unified School District to create a policy on artificial intelligence—and give them a seat at the table. 

Superintendent Hilda Maldonado’s Artificial Intelligence Task Force kicked off the policy-writing process Thursday night with their first meeting of the academic year. 

With the school board experiencing gridlock on AI, administrators formed an AI Task Force late spring. 

The meeting comes amidst parent debates on the role of AI in schools and ethical concerns raised about its use. At the same time, students have felt the district’s recent restrictions on tech counterproductive to their learning.

One of the task force’s main goals is to improve AI literacy, as the school board has acknowledged that the technology is here to stay.

“I have two jobs, so I know that AI is important in the workforce,” said San Marcos High School senior Mateo Gallegos. “It’s going to be used, and it’s not going to go away. So making sure that students are literate in AI is important to me.”

The group’s attitude still leaned weary though. Many were eager to establish what aspects of K-12 education should remain human driven. 

Rob Cooper, director of IT for the school board, led the task force. He said he was excited to see more students in the room this meeting. Eleven attended, adding input from schools throughout the district.

“Our conversations need to be student-focused,” Cooper said. “So who better to give insight than our students?”

Thursday night, members of the task force were organized into four focus groups: academic integrity, teacher guidelines and professional learning, data privacy and board policy. Groups were instructed to review the California Department of Education’s model AI in education policy, and decide what to include, slash or modify for an SB Unified policy.

By November, the task force hopes to have a finalized policy to present to the school board for adoption.

The academic integrity group discussed plagiarism, usage disclosure and citations. They decided teachers must have the right to control AI use in their classrooms and should create rubrics that prompt students to reflect on their AI use.

“AI-generated content should be treated as a source,” suggested student Lena Shneider.

Olivia Happel-Block, a teacher in the academic integrity group, said that directly submitting AI-generated content should be punished the same as plagiarism. But to be fair to students, the group wants clear, standardized rules on what level of AI usage must be disclosed.

When it comes to resources given to teachers, the academic integrity group said that the “AI detection software” language in the model policy should be changed to just “AI detection.”

“Software should not be used as the sole basis to detect,” Happel-Block said. “Maybe it’s just step one in a multi-step, human process to determine if students misuse AI.”

Across the room, another focus group discussed data procurement and privacy. Their biggest concern was that the model policy only mentions student data, but ignores teachers and staff. 

“The most important things are ensuring that we protect not only student data, but also teacher privacy and staff privacy, because all of us are very public figures,” said group member Michael Terebessy.

The teacher guidelines and professional learning group wanted to modify some language in the model policy to make it more human-centered. The group brought different ideas on how AI should be included in curriculums, but unanimously agreed that, whether or not they address AI, curriculums should be written by humans only.

Victoria Martinez Penaranda, SBUSD’s student board member, sat on the board policy focus group. She also worked over the summer with Gallegos to spread the word about the task force and encourage more student participation.

“I really hope that AI can be used in a positive way to support teachers with tedious tasks, so we can allow more time for social connection,” she said.

Also on the board policy focus group was San Marcos High School teacher Charles Clow, who  said AI plants mistrust in student-teacher relationships. He sees rifts in student’s relationships with each other as well, especially among seniors applying to competitive universities.

“It’s a vehicle for folks to treat each other worse,” Clow said. “With general academic integrity, I no longer know if a student’s words are their own.”

At the beginning of the meeting, Cooper said the district has been “on pause” with how to police AI tools. But Clow, like many other teachers, is eager for regulation. He and the rest of the board policy focus group will come to the next meeting, set for Oct. 29, with a first draft of a policy to review and revise.

“You wouldn’t bring a forklift to the gym,” Clow said. “Why would you bring a chatbot into a high school classroom?”

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