Boise Schools Plan AI Rollout

Boise School District will partner with OpenAI to grant teachers and staff access to ChatGPT for Teachers, with a full rollout scheduled for spring 2027. The district aims to use the artificial intelligence tools to reduce administrative burdens and streamline lesson planning.

Ryan Gravett, the district’s chief technology officer, noted that the tools could help manage heavy workloads. He cited a common scenario where a teacher becomes ill and must quickly prepare instructions for a substitute.

“All the work that you’ve done to prepare, you now have to prepare someone else to teach it,” Gravett said. “And so one of the great uses that I heard of is that they can dictate, just talk through what a day would look like.”

Despite the efficiency gains, Gravett stated that human review is required for all AI-generated materials before students see them. The district prioritized data privacy in its agreement with OpenAI, distinguishing between generating practice quizzes and processing sensitive student records.

“Who owns that data, what is done with that data? Where is that data stored at?” Gravett asked, listing key questions addressed during negotiations. OpenAI confirmed that information entered into the district’s workspace will not be used to train its AI models.

Gravett said parents and students place high trust in the tools the district provides. “Parents and students put a lot of trust in the district in terms of the tools that we use and provide and empower our teachers with,” he said.

While the new workspace is initially for staff, students are already using AI independently. This has prompted teachers to consider how to verify student authorship. Gravett explained that the platform allows educators to review how a document developed over time.

“So if they are writing in a document, we can actually almost do a rewind and then a time lapse on how that document was created,” he said. This feature lets teachers examine the creation process rather than only the final product. The district is leaving judgments about potential AI misuse to individual teachers and is asking parents to share their views via a survey on the district website.