Moderating a Jan. 16 session on K-12 tech priorities for 2025 and beyond, Michael Martirano, a former local and state superintendent and a senior fellow for the Center for Digital Education, first advised attendees to think ahead — far ahead. He said kindergarteners entering school this fall will graduate high school in 2038, and pointing out how much has changed in the past 13 years, he paraphrased a quote from author Daniel Pink.
“We are preparing young people today in our schools to solve problems in the future that we don’t even know what they’re going to be,” he said.
DATA SHOULD INFORM PRIORITIES
To do that, especially amid budget challenges exacerbated by the sunsetting of COVID-era federal funding, school districts will need good data. Greg Bagby, a former principal and coordinator of instructional technology at Hamilton County Schools in Tennessee, stressed this point and lamented that many districts are data-rich but don’t know what to do with it. He said his district used data from benchmark testing and other sources to inform where next year’s resources should go.
“We’re using the data and we’re trying to show the teachers the data where they’re lacking, where they need more support,” he said. “We built out dashboards so the teachers could see, ‘Our students are here, our students need to be there,’ and then we have our academic coaches to fill in the gaps. But we’re using the technology to tell us where these gaps are so that we can figure out what the pedagogical needs are and how we’re … making sure teachers are teaching what students need.”
THE OPPORTUNITY OF AI
When the conversation inevitably turned to artificial intelligence, Superintendent Jeff Horton of SouthWest Metro District 288 in Minnesota said he believes U.S. schools are fundamentally failing students, but AI shows potential as a change agent. For example, in his district, the business office has been exploring how to create bots for administrators to do coding to help with budgeting, and administrators are studying how AI might create efficiencies that give teachers more time with students.
Another part of accomplishing this, Horton said, is making sure teachers are up to speed. In his district, 37 percent of teachers don’t have degrees from a four-year school, and 65 percent are in their first three years of teaching. To compensate for this training deficit, the district has given teachers a second prep period during which they work with “AI integrationists” and receive further professional development.
Speaking for Greenville County Schools in South Carolina, Associate Superintendent for Academics Jeff McCoy said his colleagues embraced AI with surprising speed.
“From senior leadership down, we have put position statements out … and now we’re in the process of training teachers, getting them comfortable with AI before we really roll heavily to students probably next year,” he said. “When AI came out, it’s one of those things where [teachers] are chomping at the bit. They are looking for tools. Somebody told them that it would save them time, and because of that, teachers are really into it.”
Horton said his district has also had conversations about how AI might take work off the plates of school counselors so they could focus on supporting students with mental health issues, and McCoy echoed that idea. McCoy said during the pandemic, Greenville schools used a monitoring system that flagged students in crisis and contacted emergency services if deemed necessary.
“We’ve all heard the quote, ‘If you don’t deal with your trauma, you end up bleeding on those who didn’t cut you.’ That is what a lot of our kids are going through. A lot of that behavior and acting out is because they’ve got unresolved trauma in their lives,” he said. “What we’re trying to do through the systems that we have in place is really identify that trauma and get to the root cause of that trauma, and AI and that technology is really what’s helping us identify that in our 8,000 kids, how to do that.”
MAKING EVERY DOLLAR COUNT
On the subject of budgeting, specifically, panelists offered different tips. McCoy said his district focuses on staff and teacher pay raises first. Bagby said one of the big projects at Hamilton County Schools this past semester was a technology audit, not just of devices but of programs being used by teachers across the district, and it proved useful.
“We found that several schools are paying for things that the district is already using,” he said. “We do have a process — before you do this, you have to go through this process — and some of my principals decided not to, but they’re paying for things that we could get a better bargain [on] if we group these together.”
Whatever challenges they need to guide their districts through, Horton said, administrators need to bring teachers, staff, students and families along as much as possible. And to do that, they need to build systems for communication and outreach.
“It comes down to how you change and shift the minds of adults and communities and lead them through that process,” he said. “When you think about changing budgets, you’re going to create some friction there, so you have to do the groundwork, and then as you get into these processes, if you’re continually doing this, revisiting those processes … it doesn’t become your idea, it’s your system’s idea. But if you’re not doing that work … it doesn’t matter.”
