RALEIGH — The the use of artificial intelligence in K-12 schools is evolving as rapidly as the technology itself.
Just last month, the use of AI in K-12 has gone national through initiatives launched by the White House.
In late August, first lady Melania Trump announced the Presidential Artificial Intelligence (AI) Challenge and encouraged K-12 student and educator participation nationwide. The challenge is part of President Donald Trump’s April 2025 executive order on AI to “establish American global dominance” in the field.
“The Presidential AI Challenge will be the first step in preparing our next generation with a base understanding of this important new technology,” said Trump in a press statement.
According to a map created by the website AI for Education, at least 26 states plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have issued some type of guidance on AI. That map includes North Carolina, specifically referring to the guidebook created in January 2024 under the leadership of former State Superintendent Catherine Truitt.
North Carolina’s AI guidebook was created to “ensure age-appropriate, safe, and meaningful integration” of the technology in K-12 classrooms. The announcement of the guidebook noted that the state’s Department of Public Instruction was “the fourth state education department in the nation to issue guidance to its schools on the use of this cutting-edge technology.”
The state’s largest district, the Wake County Public Schools System (WCPSS), had previously prohibited the use of AI, and its school board has been working this year on developing AI policies and a strategy for its use. While WCPSS has currently blocked the use of the popular AI application ChatGPT, it does allow for the use of Google’s AI engine, Gemini.
Wake County Public Schools Superintendent Robert Taylor said the district is taking a measured approach to using AI.
“AI is just one of the newest and latest technologies,” said Taylor. “It’s not very different than what we’ve seen in the past, but it is what I would call an exponential type of product. … We don’t want policies that restrict; we want policies that help govern.
“Our job as a society is to know and understand that there are things that AI does well and there are things that humans do well. And those things that it can do, let’s use it for that purpose.”
WCPSS is currently using Gemini to catalog books in classrooms to share that inventory with parents as required by transparency laws passed by the legislature. WCPSS Communications Director Lisa Luten explained that teachers are photographing the books and feeding the images to Gemini, which creates Excel sheets in Google that serve as a catalog.
Luten noted the process is saving hours of manual work while also teaching AI use.
“That’s the perfect example of how you use AI to say that this is something that AI does well and better than humans,” Taylor said of the book cataloging project. “Snap a picture, boom. And 90% of the work is done in 10 minutes.”
Taylor also addressed critics of using AI in the classroom who aren’t convinced it will improve education.
“I always take people back to the calculators in the 1970s. … There was this idea that calculators are going to ruin education,” said Taylor. “But what we determined is it was just a tool. We still needed to teach kids how to do calculations, but that calculator was a way for them to simply quickly do a calculation that they knew how to do manually.”
Taylor said WCPSS has a responsibility to prepare students for a world with AI, but he sees it as a tool for enhancement of education and not a replacement for traditional teaching. He gave an example of a third grader using AI to find a way to better phrase a sentence, but Taylor also underscored that students need to be taught to maintain academic integrity by not relying on AI or using it to cheat.
Data privacy is also a concern WCPSS is looking at with their policies.
Shashi Buddula, WCPSS’s chief information officer, said board and staff work sessions on AI would focus on educating the board about the technology.
“The goal for this series of conversations with our board is to make sure they have a fundamental understanding about what is happening in the AI world,” said Buddula, who added that the district has an agreement with Google on data privacy.
“We want to be careful to make sure that the policies, what we put in place, we have the right guardrails,” Buddula said. “We are kind of taking those calculated steps as we move forward.
“Last year, our students had access to ChatGPT, but it was the Wild West. But now it’s much more defined boundaries.”
AI isn’t just being discussed for classroom use; it’s also being looked at for school safety.
The North Carolina legislature provided funding for an AI School Safety Pilot Program in Senate Bill 382, which became law last year. The pilot gave $3.2 million to New Hanover County Schools and $2 million to Davidson County Schools for implementing an AI-integrated school safety program into existing “cameras, video management systems, and alerting protocols.”
