The promise and perils of AI were thrust into the statewide spotlight earlier this week. Gov. Josh Shapiro, during the budget address he delivered Feb. 3, said Pennsylvania could play a “leading role in winning” what he called the “battle for AI supremacy.”
He particularly highlighted the role of AI in education, hailing it as a new technology that allows students to “build worlds and explore their own power….”
Shapiro nevertheless warned how AI programs presented a “host of new risks” with AI being a source of potential harmful misinformation.
“This space is evolving rapidly,” Shapiro said. “We need to act quickly to protect our kids.”
School districts in Northeastern Pennsylvania are trying to meet that challenge.
In recent months and years, schools throughout Northeastern Pennsylvania have begun to implement generative artificial intelligence into their classrooms. As its use becomes increasingly widespread, teachers and administrators have worked to navigate the technology’s immense implications for the future of education.
Wilkes-Barre Area officials said they were designing policies and practices to make AI available to students without rendering them overly reliant on it, creating new opportunities without stunting academic growth.
“This is probably one of the most powerful tools we’ve seen really emerge in education,” Wilkes-Barre Area Superintendent Brian Costello said. “I think our job is to be proactive, to lead with it, but not necessarily be so reactive.”
Bob Makaravage, the Wilkes-Barre Area assistant to the superintendent for instruction, compared AI to its technological predecessors, such as the calculator or computer. Spurning new technologies, he warned, would mean students falling behind as they progress their education and as they enter the workforce.
“If we’re not teaching them at the cutting edge, we’re probably not doing what we’re supposed to do at the end of the day,” Makaravage said.
Wilkes-Barre Area officials said the AI has already proved useful on the administrative side. When designing school curriculum, administrators have used AI to navigate Byzantine state standards, allowing more time to gather teacher input.
“What maybe would have taken us a month, we brought it down to less than a week,” Costello said. “So now, we have time that we’ve been able to gain where now we can work with our teachers….”
At Scranton School District, officials are similarly starting to find a place for AI in the classroom.
“I think we’re at the beginning of our journey,” Scranton Superintendent Erin Keating said.
Keating likened the advent of AI to the invention of the internet. She recalled working as a teacher in the 1990s when students began using the internet as a resource and how that occasioned new fears about using the technology to plagiarize.
“And we adapted,” Keating said of schools’ approach to the internet. “We’re going to have to do the same thing with AI.”
Scranton district officials have worked to emphasize teacher development in its approach to AI. Several of Scranton’s “Teaching Tuesdays,” in which the administration shares tips teachers suggest throughout the district, have focused on how to use AI for help to design lesson plans. The district is also working to designate certain faculty and staff members “tech genies,” who can guide their coworkers on AI implementation.
Wilkes-Barre Area has also been making time to work with teachers on AI lessons. Todd Jones, an instructional technology coach, has held in-service sessions about AI at every Wilkes-Barre Area school. He said teachers have been open minded towards AI use in his experience, seeking advice on how to use it in their lesson planning and during instruction.
“Most teachers in those trainings are pretty amazed at the capabilities and they’re excited to dive into them,” said Tom Zelinka, the Wilkes-Barre Area K-12 curriculum supervisor.
Both districts have made use of AI-centric lessons. In Scranton, officials said, one class used AI to simulate historical figures for students to interview in advance of Veterans Day.
With Presidents Day just a few weeks away, students at Solomon-Plains Middle School spent time Friday doing interviews with AI simulations of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
Wilkes-Barre Area has also staged a pilot run of an AI-powered robot teaching aid, the M2 Swivl. Stationed in the classrooms of teachers who volunteered, the M2 Swivl monitored the class and flashed real-time recommendations for classroom discussion on its screen.
Costello said such AI lessons are not meant to be a substitute for traditional learning, but are instead designed as a complementary tool to stoke student engagement.
“So, for us, it was important to understand that AI and human decision making must coexist,” Costello said.
Teachers at Wyoming Valley West, meanwhile, have had mixed approaches to AI in their classrooms.
Robert Stelma, an Earth science and astronomy teacher at Wyoming Valley West High School, said AI programs have helped him distill dense information into detailed summaries or to help design activities and worksheets. He said AI can help spark increase he advises his students to be cautious if they use AI, telling them to be wary of wrong answers.
“It’s a resource that’s available to you and you should always use your resources wisely and double check that it is correct, because there is a lot of fake information out there too,” Stelma said.
Thomas Cunningham, a Wyoming Valley West High School geometry teacher, said he seldom makes use of generative AI in class, but he does use adaptive questioning on assignments, in which students will be asked more questions about a topic they are struggling to grasp.
Even still, academic integrity remains a concern. Cunningham said he has noticed that students have “incredibly advanced ways to cheat.” He said he was also concerned that AI may undermine the development of a student’s “resolve to see a problem through without quitting.”
“Critical thinking can very much be crippled by too much assistance,” Cunningham said. “I am already seeing that…some of them, they want answers so fast and they get very frustrated when they don’t get them quickly.”
“Using the tools to assist in certain environments, it’s wonderful,” he added. “Caution is my best advice.”
As districts make more use of the new technology, they have adopted new policies to take that more cautious approach.
Chris Summa, the Scranton district director of information technology, described the policy as a logical extension of the district’s acceptable-use policies, prioritizing “academic integrity and ethical considerations.”
“We’re trying to make sure that we educate our kids the right way and our staff about the right way of using these tools to integrate them in the classroom,” Summa said.
The Wilkes-Barre Area AI policy is in large part drawn from a draft policy circulated by the Pennsylvania School Board Association, but it does have its unique features. Under the district’s policy, each teacher is afforded individual control over how much AI is used in their class on each individual assignment. Parents and guardians at Wilkes-Barre Area also get a veto. Students must obtain a parental permission slip before they can use AI in their classes. When they are allowed to use AI, students must always credit it as a source if it is used or else face discipline for plagiarism.
“These tools are there, they’re not going away,” Zelinka said. “So, we wanted to make sure they were using them responsibly, appropriately.”
How AI will affect education equity has been a question of statewide and national interest. In December 2024, the Pennsylvania Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights published a report, “The Rising Use of Artificial Intelligence in K-12 Education.” Relying on testimony from experts in education and AI, the committee’s report analyzed how the use of AI in the classroom may deepen education inequality and compromise students’ civil rights, particularly with respect to federally protected classes, such as race and gender.
University of Pittsburgh Law School Professor Jessie Allen, who served on the advisory committee, spoke to The Citizens’ Voice about the report on Jan. 30. Reflecting on the report’s findings, Allen said teaching students how to use AI has become “absolutely crucial in the world that we live in.”
Allen drew a distinction, however, between teaching students how to use AI and the actual implementation of AI to teach other curriculum items. She warned the latter bore weighty, pedagogical and civil-rights implications.
“Using (AI) to teach, using it to evaluate, using it to surveil students, that’s something that has to be approached with great caution and with some suspicion,” Allen said.
Allen said the use of AI in the classroom, particularly to grade assignments or design lesson plans, threatened to amplify various, preexisting biases in education in ways that are “very destructive.” While she stressed she did not have expertise in AI, Allen said the experts who testified before the committee made clear that such bias was inherent in AI programs and fundamentally inextricable from them.
“Basically, anybody who seems to really understand AI, and that’s not me, will tell you it is impossible to debias AI,” Allen said. “It’s not possible, because we have a biased society and because AI is created and developed and continually changed from inputs from that society.”
The report advised schools to consider whether AI use is being motivated by their own academic needs – or being artificially planted by corporate interests vested in the success of AI products. It said that AI companies were propagating the narrative that AI was the necessary next step in education.
Schools are sort of subject to all kinds of marketing initiatives and info and threats, frankly, that if they don’t get on the bus fast, they’re going to get behind,” Allen said.
Concerns about biased evaluation and corporate were accompanied with concerns about how AI may encroach upon student privacy. Allen noted a 2023 study from the Center for Democracy and Technology, cited in the report that compiled what she said were alarming statistics on student surveillance. The study indicated that 38% of teachers say their school shares sensitive student information with law enforcement and 36% say their school uses “predictive analytics” to brand students as being at-risk of engaging in future criminal behavior. The use of AI, Allen warned, could feed more sensitive student information into these invasive school algorithms or transfer more information to technology companies.
“This kind of exposure to surveillance, and especially when law enforcement gets involved, raises students’ concerns about safety,” Allen said. “It adds lots of heightened emotional distress.”
If AI does prove beneficial to districts, it raises new concerns about the “digital divide.” Richer schools may have better access to the latest AI programs than their poorer counterparts, leaving a class of students behind.
To address concerns about equity and privacy, the report calls on school districts and governments to work to regulate AI implementation.
“School districts and ultimately public officials have to get control of the situation and regulate in ways that prevent the overuse, and in some cases probably the illegal use, of AI,” Allen said.
Summa, of Scranton School District, said the district does not put students’ personal information into AI, in accordance with federal privacy law, as articulated in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA. He said Scranton shares information with outside entities only on the condition that those entities be held to the same privacy standards.
Wilkes-Barre Area officials said the AI program it uses, which is a version of Gemini, an AI program from Google, was not open source. They said all student, teacher, and administrator inputs into their AI systems were kept confined within the district. These additional guardrails, they said, help ensure the district adheres to state and federal privacy law. The M2 Swivl robot, they noted, were also on the same closed network.
“There are no other human eyes (on AI data) but ours and there’s no other AI that sees our data,” said Jones, the Wilkes-Barre Area technological instruction coach. “It stays within the district.”
The prospect of forgoing the use of AI entirely, Keating said, was out of the question. She said AI literacy will become inexorably linked with students’ ability to succeed in high school and life.
“It’s our duty and responsibility to teach the safe and responsible use of AI,” Keating said. “But we also can’t ignore it….AI is something that we have to accept as part of the world we live in.”
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