The members of the Saugerties Central School District’s (SCSD) Board of Education agree there should be a district policy covering artificial intelligence (AI), but they’re divided on whether they’ve done enough to establish any ground rules.
The district’s new policy, approved by a slim 4-3 vote during a school board meeting held on Tuesday, January 14, seeks to “proactively address the implications of AI usage to ensure it enhances educational outcomes without compromising academic integrity or equity.”
The policy, which is intended to apply to students, staff, volunteers and contractors, covers the use of AI in text, images, audio and more, “often mimicking human creativity and adaptability.”
Many of the concerns cited in the policy are shared by AI critics globally, including the potential for generative AI (GenAI) to create “plausible, but false or inaccurate, information, a phenomenon known as hallucination/confabulation” due to the technology’s use of human-generated data, which can include biases, prejudices and stereotypes, including those centered around race and gender. The policy also discusses GenAI’s potential for “response bias,” tailoring responses to what it predicts the user wants to hear based on its training data or specific tuning.
Trustees agreed on the need for an AI policy, and there was little said during the discussion to indicate anyone objected to specific passages in the text. But for some, the policy as written, was too ill-defined, lacked a roadmap for implementation, and put the onus on overburdened educators without a clear understanding of how they’ll be supported.
“I do think AI is going to be a huge step,” said Michael Meyer. “It’s going to be revolutionary.”
Buy Meyer said the policy, on its second reading last week, was too vague.
“I think looking at what other school districts are doing and hearing from faculty about what their needs are for having students use AI, I guess I’d be more comfortable if we had a little more time to maybe put some additional guidance or guardrails in,” Meyer said. “I guess my concern is that rather than moving forward with it fully and then trying to close it later on, that we maybe consider a little bit more of a narrow start using AI in the classroom and then grow the use of AI as new creation and resources available.”
Trustee Christine Bellarosa said that since the advent of internet searches, some form of AI has been in the district for decades.
“It’s been growing and growing, and it is only going to continue to grow,” she said. “And we want to make sure that it’s communicated that AI can have biases and things of that nature.”
Bellarosa said the owner of the company she works for is 70 years old and has begun to embrace the use of ChatGPT for meeting summaries, and other forms of AI to help produces newsletters.
“I do think that it’s important that we do have some sort of introduction to AI in the classroom and some of the faculty and staff,” she said. “I hope that this policy is not stagnant and that we are constantly looking at it. This technology is very fluid and moving and (we should) continue to revisit it and make sure that we do have guardrails in place.Because there are a lot of good things about this, but there can be a lot of negative. And I think that we need to be open minded about that and really move with, you know, what’s going on.”
Board vice-president Katie Emerson-Hoss also recently used ChatGPT to perform “some very, very tiresome work that would have taken me many hours to do otherwise.” But she did not feel the policy was ready yet, in part because it was too vague and focused too little on the district’s limited resources to provide training and support to teachers.
“I think we can have a better policy,” she said. “I think it could be more limited and I think we can have a language around, you know, these are our concerns and these are our values.”
Others said that it was understood that the policy would evolve as the technology grew, and as the district addressed those challenges. Trustee William Ball said that AI has been here for some time, and the district shouldn’t wait any longer to do something about it.
“What this policy does is this policy acknowledges that first and foremost, that artificial intelligence is here and we acknowledge that artificial intelligence is here,” he said. “It acknowledges the circumstance that exists. It acknowledges that there’s room for the growth, the training and the opportunity. But what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t kick the can down the road.”
Ball added that without a policy establishing guardrails for the use of AI, the SCSD is in the “wild west.”
“If we’ve got 200 different teachers using AI (without a policy), it’s happening 200 different ways,” he said. “So you have to have a starting point. A thousand mile journey starts with one step. So my feeling is that this is a needed policy. It’s like any other policy. It is going to evolve as our information grows. It’s going to evolve as we engage with our instructors.”
Ball, Bellarosa, Carole Kelder, and Board President Jeffrey Riozzi all voted in favor of the policy. Emerson-Hoss, Irizarry, and Meyer voted against. Timothy Wells was not in attendance at the meeting.
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