What the NYC AI Ban Means For My Middle Schooler (And How We’re Adjusting At Home)
I’m leaning against a cinder block wall outside my daughter Lila’s 7th grade math classroom at PS 295 in Brooklyn, sipping a lukewarm oat latte that cost $5.25 and spilled a little on my notebook on the walk over. It’s parent teacher conference day, three weeks after the Department of Education rolled out its full ban on generative AI use for students in all NYC public schools. The principal sent an email over the weekend saying the ban applies to everything from in-class work to homework done on school devices, and any confirmed use counts as academic misconduct, same as cheating off a neighbor’s test.
Ms. Henderson, Lila’s math teacher who’s been here 18 years, calls my name and waves me in. She starts with the good stuff: Lila participates every day, helps the other kids at her table with word problems, turns in all her assignments on time. Then she pulls up Lila’s last homework set and points to a red note in the margin: 10% deduction for unauthorized AI use. I blink and ask what happened. Ms. Henderson leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. “Lila told me she used it to check her slope answers after she solved all of them on her own. She even showed me her scratch work. But the rule says any use is any use. I can’t make exceptions right now, or I have to make exceptions for everyone, and that’s more than I can fight right now. I’ve got three kids of my own. If this was 10 years ago, I’d let them use a calculator to check their work, no one would bat an eye. This is the same thing, but the district calls it cheating now.”
After the conference, I meet Lila at afterschool art club. She’s holding a half-finished clay mug covered in blue glaze, and she’s already moping before I ask how her week went. Her social studies group project got marked down 10% too, she says. One kid used AI to sort their bibliography alphabetically when the school library citation tool crashed, and the whole group got penalized per district rules. “It’s stupid,” she says, kicking a loose piece of gravel on the sidewalk. We stop at the pretzel cart on 5th Avenue, she gets a salted pretzel, and gets a heap of salt all over her favorite gray hoodie before we walk to the F train.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this ban not as some abstract national debate, but as a daily thing we have to work around in our house. Before the ban, Lila used AI all the time for small things that made school easier for her. She’s dyslexic, so spelling and grammar take twice as much energy for her as they do for other kids. She’d write her essay, run it through AI to catch typos she missed when she was typing, then go over the changes herself, so she could learn the right spelling. It was like having a better spellcheck than the clunky one built into Google Docs, and it let her spend more time focusing on what she was writing instead of hunting for misspelled words. Now, if she turns in an essay that has any AI edits, she can get penalized, so we’ve had to build new routines to work around the rule.
The first thing we did was make a one-page agreement that’s taped to the back of her desk, with three specific rules that are easy to follow, no fine print. First: always solve any math problem or write any full paragraph on your own first, before you open AI. Write your answer down on scratch paper before you check it. That way, you’re still doing the learning, you’re just using AI to catch mistakes, same as checking your work in the back of the textbook. Second: if you use AI to fix typos or brainstorm topics, you have to rewrite any changes by hand before you type up the final version to turn in. That way, there’s no AI trail on the document you submit to the school, and you still get practice spelling the words right. Third: any time you use it for school work, even if it’s done entirely at home, you have to tell your teacher upfront. Most teachers are okay with responsible use even with the ban, as long as you’re honest about it.
It’s not a perfect system, but it’s worked for us so far. I talked to a high school teacher friend of mine last week who teaches in Queens, and she said the ban pushed her to start informal afterschool sessions to teach kids how to use AI responsibly, because she can’t cover it during class time. She says kids are going to use AI no matter what the rules say, so it’s better to show them how to use it right than pretend it doesn’t exist. I see that now. The ban didn’t make AI go away for our kids, it just moved all that decision-making home, and left parents to figure out the rules on our own. The district only sent a one-paragraph email announcing the ban, no guidance for parents, no resources for kids who use it as an accessibility tool. So we’ve had to build it from scratch.
We spend 10 minutes every Sunday night going over what AI Lila used that week, what it was for, and whether she stuck to our rules. It doesn’t take much time, and it’s actually made me more aware of how she uses tech, which isn’t the worst side effect of the whole thing. But it’s still extra work no one asked us to take on, and there are still awkward missteps. Last week, Lila didn’t tell her teacher she used AI to make vocab flashcards for a test, because she was scared she’d get another deduction, even though it was just for studying. We talked about it after school, and she said it’s easier just not to mention it at all, which isn’t the habit I want her to build.
Right now, the school board says they’re going to revisit the ban after spring break, after hundreds of teachers and parents submitted feedback asking for more nuanced rules. Our little system works most of the time, but there’s still a lot that’s up in the air. I don’t know what the policy will look like next semester, or how it will change as Lila gets to high school and starts working on college applications. For now, we’re just taking it week by week, tweaking our rules when we need to, and waiting for the people who make these rules to catch up to how kids actually use technology right now.
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