My Child’s School Is Promoting AI Use: What I’ve Learned As A Parent
Last month, I leaned against my dented 2016 minivan outside the high school, sipping lukewarm coffee I’d brewed that morning, waiting for my 10th grader to get out of cross country practice. She came bounding over holding a neon pink flyer, waving it in my face before I even rolled the window all the way down. “Mom, they’re starting an AI club after school! And Ms. Lopez said she lets us use ChatGPT for our history project outlines.” I stared at her, my coffee halfway to my mouth. For the past two years, all I’d read was how schools were banning AI, how kids were using it to cheat their way through high school. Why was my school actively pushing it?
I made a point to bring it up at parent-teacher conferences a week later, stopping first at the desk of my daughter’s 10th grade English teacher, Ms. Henderson. The room smelled like dry erase marker and the lemon drops she keeps in a jar by the door, and a half-eaten peanut butter granola bar sat next to a stack of personal essays, all marked up with blue ink. She didn’t get defensive when I asked about the school’s AI policy. She just pulled up a student’s essay on her laptop, showing me two versions: the first, a generic AI draft about growing up moving to a new town, then the student’s revision, where they added lines about helping their dad fix up the old house they bought, the smell of sawdust in the evenings, the way their little sister drew rainbows on the bare drywall. “That kid used to turn in half a page for every essay, because he hated getting started,” Ms. Henderson said. “AI knocked down the blank page barrier for him. He still did all the hard work of adding his own story. That’s the part we grade.”
A week later, I watched my daughter work on her invasive biology group project to see for myself. She pulled up ChatGPT, asked it to sort 15 recent studies on garlic mustard growth in our state park by soil type, and had a neat organized list in 10 seconds. Without AI, she would have spent three evenings scrolling through unformatted pdfs, probably given up halfway through and turned in a sloppy project. Instead, she and her group spent the weekend at the park pulling samples, interviewing the park ranger about their local eradication program, and took their own photos for the presentation. Her final presentation had way more original field work than any project she did in 8th grade, when she spent all her time just compiling research just to meet the page count.
I used to be one of those parents who thought any AI use in school was just cheating. I’d even signed the parent petition last year asking the school board to ban AI on all school devices. But after talking to teachers and watching my daughter work, I’m starting to see what the school is doing. It’s not promoting cheating. It’s acknowledging that AI is here, that kids are going to use it whether we like it or not, so we might as well teach them how to use it well.
There are concrete things other confused parents can do to adapt, even if your school hasn’t formalized a policy yet. First, instead of banning AI on your kid’s personal devices at home, write down clear specific rules for what it can and can’t do. We keep ours on the kitchen whiteboard: AI can brainstorm ideas, proofread for grammar, sort research, and make flashcards. It can’t write full paragraphs or answers that you turn in as your own. That’s way easier than trying to police every single thing they do online, and it sets clear expectations from the start. Second, ask them to walk you through how they’re using it. Once a week, I ask my daughter to show me one assignment where she used AI, and what she changed after. It takes 5 minutes, and it takes away the secrecy that makes AI feel like a sketchy thing kids are hiding. Third, if you don’t know what your school’s policy is, just send a short email to your kid’s teacher: “I’m trying to support my kid’s work at home, can you tell me what AI uses are allowed in your class?” Most teachers I’ve talked to are happy to explain, because they’re figuring this out too.
That doesn’t mean I don’t still worry. I worry that when my daughter takes the SAT next year, she’ll struggle to write an essay without AI to help her brainstorm. I worry that she’ll get lazy and let AI do all the work for a big assignment one day. The principal addressed that at the last PTA meeting, actually. She said they still do all closed-book, no-AI quizzes for core skills, and they gradually increase the amount of original work kids have to do as they move up grades. Freshmen can use AI for outlines, juniors have to write a full draft first before using AI to edit. It’s not perfect, but it makes more sense than pretending AI doesn’t exist.
Last night, we sat at the kitchen table working on her early college admission essay draft. She’d stared at a blank Google doc for two days, stuck on the opening paragraph. She asked AI to generate three bad opening lines, just to get something on the page. We crossed all three out, and then she wrote her own, about getting up at 5 a.m. to walk the rescue dogs at the shelter where she volunteers. We spent an hour tweaking the middle, adding the part about the scared little beagle that finally let her pet him after three weeks. The essay’s good. It’s hers. I still don’t know if this whole AI in school thing is going to work out long term. There are still a lot of unknowns. But right now, it feels less like the school is setting my kid up to fail, and more like they’re teaching her to use the same tools she’ll be using in college, in her job, and in everyday life for the rest of her life. That’s enough for me, for now.
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