When Bob Whittenberg’s school district had to cancel a whitewater rafting field trip because of rising liability concerns and lack of insurance coverage, he knew the decision would disappoint students, staff and families.

The district needed to move quickly. It also needed to communicate with care.

So he turned to ChatGPT — not to help make the decision, but to help explain it. He asked the tool to draft a message that balanced compassion for students’ disappointment with a clear explanation of the district’s responsibility to manage risk and protect student safety.

“The draft was not perfect,” says Whittenberg, assistant superintendent of business services for El Dorado Union High School District. “But it gave me a strong starting point and helped me communicate a difficult decision more effectively.”

For school business officials, that may be one of the clearest examples of where artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to fit into district operations. While most agree it cannot replace professional judgment, some say it can help leaders handle the heavy cognitive work that surrounds their decisions: drafting, summarizing, organizing, translating complexity and preparing communications that still require a human voice.

Joe Ayala, director of technology for Santa Clara Unified School District, says his AI initiative began with a familiar technology leader’s instinct: How can repetitive work be automated so people can focus on the work only people can do?

“The decision wasn’t ‘let’s adopt AI,’” Ayala says. “The decision was ‘how can I save people time?’”

Time savings aren’t the only benefit. AI can expand capacities within existing teams that weren’t previously possible. For example, Ayala says AI helped him build an iOS app in a single day — not because coding suddenly became his primary job, but because AI expanded what he could attempt.

Staff members who previously would not have tried to build a workflow tool, structure a spreadsheet process or draft a complex memo can now begin with an AI-assisted first version. The output still needs review, but the barrier to starting is lower.

“Our goal is to build capacity thoughtfully,” Whittenberg says. “We want AI to be a tool that supports people, improves service, and strengthens learning, while keeping ethics, privacy, equity, and human judgment at the center.”

Starting Small with AI

Introducing AI into school business operations doesn’t require an expensive purchase or districtwide rollout.

In fact, Ayala urges school leaders to start small, using free or readily available tools to tackle low-stakes, everyday tasks — the type of time-consuming tasks he calls “cognitive prep work,” such as drafting communications, summarizing long documents or preparing meeting agendas.

“The point isn’t ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude,” he says. “The point is learning to work with AI.”

That starts with building a solid understanding of what AI does best.

In his day-to-day work at Lindsay Unified School District, Grant Schimelpfening has used AI to analyze data, review legal contracts and other complex documents, improve written communication, support plan development, summarize information and draft leadership materials. He describes AI as an efficiency and “thought-partnership” tool embedded in ordinary operations.

“Our use of AI has been focused on practical operational applications rather than a single standalone initiative,” says the assistant superintendent of administrative services. “It fits into daily operations as a support tool. It helps speed up first drafts, identify key points in documents, organize ideas, and make large amounts of information more manageable.”

Rather than forcing AI onto reluctant adopters, his district began by focusing on the people who were genuinely interested in using it. This approach relieves districts of the pressure to build buy-in among those who are resistant to using AI tools.

“Find a few AI champions in your district and give them room to explore, experiment and produce real work with it,” he says. “Then have them share — not just what they created, but how using AI has made their jobs better and what they are now able to do with that additional time to better serve students, staff, and the community.”

Understanding the limitations

While AI use can result in significant time savings, school business leaders emphasize that it is not a finished-answer machine.

Schimelpfening learned that lesson the hard way. Early in his AI use, he uploaded board policies into ChatGPT so the tool could help answer questions and produce related communications. One response came back polished, detailed and convincing. He was impressed enough to use it in an email to a large employee group.

Then he checked the response against the actual board policies. Some of the policies the tool referenced did not exist.

“Embarrassingly, I had to retract the email,” he recalls. “That experience taught me a lesson I have not forgotten: AI can sound confident, polished and convincing, while still being wrong. Successful use of AI is not just about the technology itself; it is also about learning how to engage with it thoughtfully, critically and responsibly.”

The same caution applies across school business operations. An AI-generated summary of a contract is not legal review. An AI-drafted communication is not automatically appropriate for a district’s community. A fiscal analysis still needs a human expert who understands the data, the assumptions and the consequences.

In school business, where decisions touch public funds, labor relations, student services, risk management and community trust, the final judgment cannot be outsourced.

Ayala describes the right balance as keeping humans at both the beginning and end of the process. People define the work, frame the problem and decide what a good outcome looks like. AI can help in the middle — drafting, summarizing, restructuring, surfacing patterns and generating options. Then people review the final product for accuracy, context and judgment.

That model is especially important when AI intersects with labor, governance and staff trust, he says.

Supporting Responsible Use

While AI use often starts with individual exploration, leaders say districts need to back up their efforts with clear guidance on how to use it responsibly.

Pretending it does not exist, or focusing only on restriction, does not prepare learners or staff for an AI-powered world. Instead, districts need clear parameters and support so people learn to use AI ethically and effectively.

At this stage, Whittenberg says, the work is less about deploying one product than building a responsible AI culture. That means developing shared expectations around accuracy, privacy, bias, academic integrity and appropriate use, while still encouraging staff to explore.

To that effect, his district has developed an AI Guiding Coalition to study best practices, examine responsible use and help shape how AI can support teaching, learning and operations.

At a most basic level, all district users need to understand the difference between using AI as a general productivity tool and using it with sensitive district data, he adds.

At Santa Clara Unified, Ayala kicked off his AI learning program with anonymization training. “We started by teaching people to never put real names or identifying data into a free tool,” he says.

From there, users learned how to craft effective prompts, a critical skill that can drastically affect the quality of the tool’s output. Now, he says, the district is beginning to explore staff-created tools — small custom apps for district workflows that would likely never justify a commercial software purchase.

His training efforts are backed by an AI Advisory Committee that includes students, teachers and classified staff. Students, he notes, “have surfaced concerns about AI use that no committee of administrators would have caught.”

Lindsay Unified has established a similar AI task force to assist with ongoing monitoring, guidance, and training related to AI use and district policies.

“That has been especially important because the AI landscape is evolving so quickly,” Schimelpfening says. “In the end, policies and technical safeguards are only part of the solution. It also requires continuous staff education, clear communication and regular reinforcement about the importance of handling confidential information appropriately and using sound professional judgment with any AI tool.”

Purchasing AI Tools

While a big purchase isn’t required to start using AI, Schimelpfening recommends establishing a business account for frequently used tools such as ChatGPT, rather than allowing staff to rely on individual accounts.

“That gives us the ability to apply global security settings and maintain stronger oversight,” he says.

Santa Clara Unified has adopted licensed versions of Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude that include contractual data protection, no-training-on-our-data clauses and enterprise data handling.

”That removed the largest risk vector from daily use,” Ayala says.

The district also has a formal vendor review process. Every AI tool is carefully vetted on how it handles data and privacy — including data residency, FERPA and COPPA compliance, training data policies and incident response.

“We require contractual assurance that district data is not used to train models,” he says. “If a vendor can’t answer those questions clearly, they don’t move forward.”

He notes that equity also plays a role in shaping the district’s decisions about vendor selection, deployment sequence, training, licensing and access. If a tool is given to one department or site in a way that creates a capability gap, the district has to slow down and rethink the rollout.

Whittenberg sees equity in similar terms. AI should not become an advantage only for early adopters, people with stronger technical skills or staff who happen to work in departments with more training time. Districts need examples, guidance and professional learning so teachers, classified staff and administrators can all understand practical uses.

“The goal is to support innovation, while maintaining trust and protecting student, staff and financial information,” he says.

Learning from Others

The most effective way to encourage AI use within a district is to foster an environment where people are encouraged to share and learn from each other.

That’s true at the district level as well as the individual level.

“One of the great things about the school business world is that people are willing to share,” Schimelpfening says. “There are districts that already have thoughtful systems, guidelines and policies in place. Ask questions, learn from what others have built and adapt those ideas to fit your own context.”

Ultimately, there’s no perfect way to roll out AI. It’s alright if it looks a little messy — as long as it’s done thoughtfully, with input from the appropriate stakeholders.

“AI is moving quickly, but public education still has to move thoughtfully,” Whittenberg says. “Starting small, learning together and scaling responsibly is better than waiting for the perfect plan or rushing into a tool before the district is ready.”