QUINCY — The Quincy School District will add the use of artificial intelligence to the list of online uses subject to district policy, beginning with the 2024-25 school year. The rise of AI presents challenges for schools that QSD officials said needed addressing, and school districts across the Columbia Basin are reviewing policies and determining how they want to address it.  

Quincy Director of Technology Shawn Fuller said the new policy governs use by staff and students and is designed to make use of the lessons learned by the district from the rise of social media. 

“When we’re talking about social media we’re really talking about the education piece where, when we had social media starting to crop up, we really didn’t think it was the place of the school district, necessarily, to be educating students on proper use,” Fuller said. “Now we do address that, but initially we did not. It’s a time to learn from past mistakes and be able to have a new technology introduced to our students — and to society in general — and a chance for us to get ahead of it and educate (students) and let them know about the safety ramifications. Let them know about the biases that are built into it, and so forth.” 

Quincy is one of the first schools in the Columbia Basin to adopt a policy, although other districts in the region are preparing polices, or researching them. 

Jessica Schenck, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning for the Othello School District, said a policy is in preparation. 

“We should have something to the (Othello School Board) for approval by the end of the summer,” Schenck wrote. 

Soap Lake School District Superintendent Angela Rolfe said the district doesn’t have a policy, at least not yet.  

“It is something we’ll be looking into,” Rolfe said.  

Claren McLaughlin, communications and public information officer for the Moses Lake School District, said that although MLSD has policies governing the use of digital platforms, there’s nothing that addresses the use of AI specifically.  

Wilson Creek does not have an AI policy, according to district officials.  

The AI section has been added to the Quincy School District’s digital learning policy, but, said district Digitial Education Director Camille Jones, AI is both similar to and very different from social media. 

“It’s not a challenge that we’ve never faced before, but we face it in a different way,” she said. 

Amy Marlow, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning in the Wahluke School District, said the district doesn’t have a specific AI policy, but that district officials recognize it’s a distinct challenge. 

“Currently we treat AI tools under our broader technology use polices. That said, (Wahluke School District) is aware of the unique challenges and opportunities presented by AI, and we are exploring how best to address these in a dedicated policy,” Marlow wrote. “Our approach to AI likely will take into account lessons learned from our experiences with social media.” 

People have long subjected printed sources of information to scrutiny, Jones said, and they’ve learned about evaluating online information in the same way. 

“But now with AI, it’s also this video, this thing that I can see with my eyes. Is this audio file I can hear with my ears — is that real? We can’t trust what we read, we can’t trust what we see, we can’t trust what we hear in a way we’ve never had to deal with before,” she said. 

Fuller said AI requires people to make a deeper evaluation of what they’re seeing and hearing. 

“Being able to, at times, triangulate where that information is coming from and really vet the sources,” Fuller said. “Really having to do more legwork, I guess, than we ever have.” 

Developing Quincy’s policy took most of the 2023-24 school year, Fuller said. 

“We’ve been working to create guardrails so that it’s very clear to our students through the class syllabuses or through the handbook how artificial intelligence can be used, in what contexts, so that our students have a good chance of success in utilizing it,” Fuller said. “Because we think another big piece to this is learning how to use (AI) — any technology, really — responsibly.”  

The provisions governing AI have been added to the QSD student handbook so that students know what to expect. 

“It’ll be really clear to students what the expectations are,” Fuller said. 

Setting guidelines now helps Quincy students and staff, and not only while school’s in session, he said.  

“I think we’ve made a lot of headway this year by embracing the fact that (AI) isn’t going to go away, that our staff and students will benefit from that training and support, gaining that literacy around artificial intelligence,” Fuller said. “It’s actually giving a lot of hope, because when you educate somebody about a technology they can actually help shape it.”  

    Technology is central to a presentation by a Quincy Middle School student in the district’s AVID program in the spring. Quincy School District will implement a policy governing the use of artificial intelligence in district classrooms for the 2024-25 school year.