Students at Smith Elementary School prepare to enter the building during their first week of school last week.
Jennifer Ruhe | Delaware City Schools
Conger Elementary School Principal Mary Krell and other staff greet students as they get off the bus last week.
Jennifer Ruhe | Delaware City Schools
The Delaware City Schools Board of Education discussed the start of the school year and new guidelines around artificial intelligence (AI) during its meeting Monday.
The board opened with a discussion about the start of the 2024-2025 school year, which began last week.
Superintendent Heidi Kegley said the district had an “amazing” start of the school year and praised the transportation department for ensuring all the buses were on time.
Director of Facilities and Transportation Jason Sherman said the district had had a “really good startup” so far this school year.
Student board member and Hayes High School senior Greta Walraven said the first days of the school year have “gone really well.”
“I’ve definitely had to help my fair share of freshman around,” Walraven joked.
Walraven said the cell phone ban has been an adjustment for students, but she personally found not having a phone during the day “very useful.”
Director of Technology Jennifer Fry and Aaron Cook, the director of secondary curriculum and assessment, then gave the board a presentation focused on the curriculum team’s work to create guidelines and policies for generative AI programs like Chat GPT and Microsoft Copilot.
Fry said the guidelines focus on five areas: agency, compliance, AI literacy, risks & benefits, and academic integrity.
“We believe it’s important to give our staff specific guardrails around AI,” Fry said. “(Our goal is to) help the school district to be able to take advantage of the potential benefits of incorporating AI into education, but we always want to make sure we mitigate the potential risks. By providing guidance we hope we can improve our learner outcomes, support our teachers instruction, prevent data privacy violations and prevent inconsistency disciplinary consequences.”
Cook said there’s “a lot of power” in generative AI, and the team believes AI tools can be used for efficiency and rough drafts but said teachers and principals should always have the final say.
“We have the ability to edit that and make it our voice and our language,” Cook said speaking on agency and AI. “For teachers, (AI) can provide creative lesson planning, a variety of assessment types for depth of knowledge so that we can really focus on the student relationship and meeting the needs of where students are at. We have to recognize that there’s bias built into this systems. (It) could lead to a loss of agency if we just always click submit and don’t review and carefully look at what the suggestions are that the AI is providing.
Fry said the team is working to ensure all staff is aware of the laws around data, especially protecting student data and AI.
Speaking on risks versus rewards, Cook said the team wants to strike a balance between the two and elaborated that AI can be used for one-on-one tutoring or for personalization of education but stressed the district doesn’t want students to become “overly reliant” on AI for everything because it can lead to cheating and academic dishonesty.
Cook said academic integrity is a priority, and the team wants to approach each situation where a student has used AI to cheat on an individual basis.
“We want to teach responsible use and when things do come about and students make a mistake, we want to teach and we want them to learn,” Cook said. “First and foremost our message has been, ‘Let’s seek understanding with the students and talk with the student about that.’ Typically, (the) best place on first type offense is the teacher and student having that conversation. We want to know what the students know and have them re-do that assignment. Based on intensity, frequency or duration of academic dishonesty with individual students, it may lead to some additional consequences but we want to start with seeking understanding and teaching appropriate use.”
Cook said the team will be working with the district’s principals to share information and talk about AI with them so they can share that information with their staff.
Board member Jayna McDaniel-Browning thanked the team for its presentation and said AI can be “a useful tool but can be misused.”
Kegley added the coversation around AI is “ever evolving.”
“This is, quite frankly, a topic of conversation no matter what else we’re talking about,” she said.
The board also approved several employments, including Vivian Anderson, a School-Aged-Child-Care (SACC) program assistant; Amanda Atanosian, an educational assistant at Woodward Elementary School; Skylar Brotman, a SACC program assistant; Sienna Kowalski, a SACC program assistant; Mia Levings, a SACC program assistant; and Elizabeth Millet, a SACC program assistant.
The board will meet next on Sept. 9.
Glenn Battishill can be reached at 740-413-0903.
