BRUNSWICK COUNTY — An unavoidable conversation about artificial intelligence was debated at a recent Brunswick County school board meeting as the county works out a roadmap to implement the technology in schools.
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Brunswick County school staff proposed new generative AI guidelines to a hesitant board during last Tuesday’s curriculum and policy committee meeting, as North Carolina pushes to integrate AI into education statewide. Teaching AI literacy includes ethics, internet safety, and critical thinking. The goal is for students to use it as a learning partner and brainstorming tool rather than a way to cheat.
“We are really focusing on, for students, using these as tools to help them get started, not as an end-all-be-all for their actual work,” director of BCS digital learning Jeannie Timken said at the Nov. 19 meeting.
The proposed guidelines will not be shared with staff or the public until approved by the board, but encompasses both ethical uses and dangers of generative AI and how it can be infused throughout all courses to enhance education, Timken told Port City Daily in an email Monday.
“Our goal is to harness AI’s potential educational benefits while prioritizing teacher-led instruction,” she wrote.
The proposal was received with apprehension right off the bat, with board of education Chairman Steven Barger immediately pushing for all generative AI websites to be blocked on school-administered Chromebooks.
Barger fears sites like ChatGPT, Grammerly, and Photomath are being used by students to write their papers and solve their math problems, ultimately making it easy to cheat and hindering their education.
“It should scare everybody,” Barger said.
“How are they learning to write if they’re going to type a prompt into ChatGPT and write their paper?” he asked.
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction warns teachers away from these fears, though, saying scenarios like these should be “viewed as a teachable moment” for students rather than “a ‘gotcha’ moment.” It indicates teachers will need to rethink what plagiarism and cheating means.
Safeguards against heavy AI use are in the proposed guidelines, which also addressed plagiarism, Timken said. The guidelines will approve specific tools tailored to education, like Khanmingo from Khan Academy — a math and writing AI tutoring tool.
“At the end when the student turns their work in, the teacher is given an entire transcript of the conversations they’ve been having with their tutor at Khanmingo,” Timken said.
Barger still took issue with the technology.
“But what is stopping a student from taking their Chromebook, taking a picture of a math sheet, and Photomath giving them the answers on our devices?” he asked.
“I’m not the only one naïve enough to think that our kids aren’t cheating,” he continued.
While BCS can and does block many websites on the student Chromebooks, Timken was hesitant to lock down all AI sites outright, as students would still have access to the sites on personal devices outside of school. New AI sites are constantly popping up, making site-blocking a moving target.
“We don’t control all of their access to the internet unless they’re on our devices and our network,” Superintendent Dale Cole said. “There always has to be an educational component of this because we want them to understand how it works when they’re away from us.”
Port City Daily asked the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction how they tackle the concern that AI is a hindrance to learning rather than a tool. Vera Cubero, NCDPI technology consultant and an author of the statewide AI guidebook, wrote in an email that students will be using AI for the rest of their lives, so schools need to take on the “incredible opportunity” of teaching them how best to do that.
“Education must adapt to the reality that generative AI is here to stay, and it is in fact harder NOT to use AI now than it is to use it because it is so ubiquitous in all our productivity apps, devices, search engines, etc.,” she wrote. “We simply cannot avoid it and learning to work with it is a necessary job skill.”
Robin Mottiff, BOE vice-chair and committee chair, pointed out there are certain AI functions that can detect and identify AI-generated content. But Timken was clear that the district discourages them as they often make mistakes, like wrongly labeling human writing as AI writing. Rather than fighting AI with AI, the goal is for teachers to be educated in identifying AI-generated content and adjust their teaching styles with more AI-resistant assignments — a stance the state also backed up.
“There is not an ‘easy button’ to determine if an assignment is written by AI, and in fact we recommend against AI detectors because they are fraught with issues including bias, false positives, and false negatives,” Cubero said. “Therefore, instruction has to change instead.”
The NCDPI released an AI guidebook in January stating all schools must begin implementing guidelines for generative AI. This made North Carolina the fourth state in the nation to provide AI guidance for its education department. This came after a 2023 report from the World Economic Forum said that AI will continue to be at the forefront of the future workplace.
The urgency was taken up a notch after Microsoft and Linkedin released a study in May that found employers now favor applicants with little job experience but impressive AI skills more than those with more experience and no AI skills.
“With the rapid advancement of generative AI technology and the effects it is already having on the job market, our secondary schools need to be positioned to fully implement AI Literacy training into all curriculum areas in the 2025-2026 school year so that all of our high school students have the opportunities to learn to work with the technology before graduation,” Cubero said.
Per state recommendation, the county is using a four-step roadmap to introduce the guidelines into the school system, which was presented to the board in June:
- Draft guidelines and begin developing an AI-literate staff;
- Recruit members for an AI Steering Committee and work alongside the state and teachers to continue developing guidelines;
- Continue educating the steering committee and teachers and present state-advised guidelines to the board;
- Make the guidelines public and begin implementing them.
The guidelines will be revisited and evaluated each semester to fit the rapid growth of AI, assess their effectiveness, and stay in line with regular state guideline updates.
Brunswick County is currently around step three, per this meeting, while the majority of other North Carolina counties are somewhere in the first two steps, according to Cubero.
“Right now, in our roadmap, we are at the place where we’re really focusing on the education and the use of these tools by teachers and working on towards our guidelines,” Timken told the committee.
The committee will take it up at its next meeting on Jan. 21, 2025 at 35 Referendum Drive in the Brunswick County Board of Education room.
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