Stephen Kelly knew something wasn’t right before he could explain it. The science homework that was turned in was so well done and thorough that it was almost scary. One student turned in a paper about brain-eating amoebas that looked like it was written by a doctoral student. Kelly is a teacher in the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado. He had trouble following some of it. The student couldn’t show him how to do the work when asked to. “It was clear that it wasn’t student-generated and that the students weren’t getting anything out of it,” Kelly said. In that moment, more than any policy memo or tech summit, he was moved to act.
His answer wasn’t to ban AI. It was used to build. Kelly used MagicSchool, an AI platform that the school district already uses, to make chatbot tutors that were meant to act like a patient and persistent teacher. That’s not what the bots do. It’s because they ask. They fight back. They make students explain what they say. One student spent a whole class period going back and forth with the bot to fix the ending of a lab report. “By the end, she’s got this really solidly written conclusion that I would never have expected to see in years prior,” he said.
Kelly now has the most MagicSchool prompts of anyone in the district. That detail almost seems like a metaphor for how one teacher is always ahead of the school, the rules, and anything that looks like a formal plan. And a lot of people are worried about that.
AI has become a bigger topic of conversation in schools across the country. More than 1,100 parents in Bend, Oregon, signed a petition asking the school district to take generative AI off of their kids’ devices. A parent in Brooklyn named Kelly Clancy started a group called Parents for AI Caution in Educational Spaces. They are trying to get New York City to stop using AI in public schools for two years. In April, a national group that fights for children’s rights asked for a five-year break on AI tools that students from preschool through 12th grade would use.
It’s not an abstract worry. “Cognitive off-loading” is the act of letting something else do the thinking so your own brain doesn’t have to. This is being looked at more closely by neuroscientists and education researchers. A study released in 2025 discovered that teens and young adults (17–25) relied on AI more and could not think critically as well as older adults. In March, researchers at Stanford said that there is still not a lot of evidence about how AI affects K–12 classrooms. They said it’s still not clear if the tools are really helping students learn or just getting their work done.
Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath has found a link between more screen time and lower test scores. He says, “The tool an expert uses to make his or her life easier is not the tool a novice could use to learn how to become an expert.” They don’t learn anything when they use the same tool. He says that AI has only been used in schools for a short time. Any ed tech hack that worked before AI still works now. He says that the early signs aren’t good, and it’s still not clear if AI has made any of it better.
Kelly’s coworkers are getting to very different places back in Colorado. Chris Hespe is a history teacher at Broomfield’s Aspen Creek Middle School. He has used AI to help his students write songs and learn about Greek mythology for a card game. “I was able to do this much faster than we could when we used to go down to the library,” he said. Katie Miles, a Language Arts teacher at Boulder’s Fairview High School, says that her department is dispersed, with some teachers fully on board and others firmly against it. There is no clear direction that holds the department together. “It’s so cart before the horse, a little bit, right now,” she said.
There is no policy in Boulder Valley or any other district in the country. In BVSD, teachers are not required to get training in AI. There are no set rules for how to use technology in the classroom. MagicSchool is used by more than 10,000 students and teachers in the district. Since 2024, when the first rule was written, usage has grown by 250 percent. A school district official named Lynn Gershman said she has never seen a tool spread so quickly with so little structure around it.
As I watch this all happen, I can’t help but feel that technology came along faster than anyone was ready for it. Businesses are on the move. The federal government wants people to adopt. The teachers are making do. Adults are being asked to trust a process that no one has quite figured out yet while they watch it all.
Kelly’s chatbot teachers might really be making her students think more deeply. That’s possible. If there aren’t any clear guidelines, the same tools might be used in ways that make it easier for students to turn in work they don’t understand and never will.
Pew Research says that half of American teens already use chatbots for schoolwork. They don’t want to wait for adults to agree on anything. It’s not really a question of whether AI will be taught in schools. It’s already true. The question is whether or not those responsible for kids’ education will really think about what that means, before yet another group of kids turns in a paper they can’t explain.
