TCEA 2026: Practical Guidance for AI Preparedness in K–12 Education

Data Privacy and Security Can Never Be Assumed

JaDorian Richardson, Instructional Technology Coordinator at Duncanville Independent School District in Texas, narrated her district's multistep approval workflow for bringing AI tools into the classroom. 

The request usually starts with a teacher submitting a ticket to a systems engineer to evaluate technical compatibility. Once cleared, curriculum and instruction ensures curriculum alignment. Finance then reviews the budget. Finally, a data privacy agreement must be secured with the vendor to verify that the tool complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and state regulations around student data. 

Richardson acknowledged that it’s time-consuming and imperfect.

"That is a lot more than just, ‘I like this tool,’" she said. “If you want a new tool, you start early.” But the steps help protect students’ personally identifiable information, which is highly valuable to hackers because it can be exploited for years before anyone notices.

During a separate session featuring Little Rock School District, an audience member recounted his conversation with a vendor who offered varying levels of data protection at different price points.

“They’re gambling with kids’ PII,” he said. “It can’t happen like that.” 

Arkansas, for its part, requires vendors to sign agreements specifying how they'll handle student data, which helps make the vetting process of tools simpler. 

But this isn’t the case for every district across the country, and among even the smallest districts, attitudes toward data security and AI were clear: Data privacy and compliance must be verified and enforced with every new AI tool.

Policy for AI Use Must Be a Moving Target

In 2022, Santa Margarita Catholic High School patched together a policy about how teachers and students should use AI. The policy required citation but gave no guidance on what that meant. It didn't explain AI's limitations, biases or how the technology worked, and it was largely restrictive.

In 2023, the high school began experimenting more deeply with teacher use cases. It launched a monthly newsletter about AI developments and began providing basic literacy resources to students, teachers and parents. Despite progress, the school soon encountered a new obstacle.

"We drank the AI tool Kool-Aid," said Jorge Ledezma, director of educational technology. “We thought AI was going to take care of grading and other things." When these tools underdelivered, trust eroded. Simultaneously, the school began using AI checkers to “monitor rather than mentor” students using AI. These checkers often contradicted one another, leading to contentious conversations.

WATCH: Industry experts discuss AI’s 2026 trajectory. 

2024 and 2025 marked a turning point. Santa Margarita created an AI task force that met monthly and included faculty, staff, students and parents. The body developed a system that doesn’t strictly prohibit AI use among students; the work must be their own, but they may use AI for assistance as long as they disclose it.

For teachers, it became clear that AI use cases varied by department. For example, Gordon Minton, a math teacher at Santa Margarita, noted that AI underperforms at creating math problems. Instead, Minton said, he focuses on using AI to digitize content stored as PDFs.

Ledezma said he also realized that AI can explain its own capabilities and limitations and provide important teaching moments for students. For example, he used Google Gemini to explain tokens. AI does not have infinite memory, which means it starts to lose context in longer conversations, leading to diminishing returns over the course of the interaction.

“Schools should use this moment to get clear on fundamental questions.” Ledezma said. “What, really, is education? What, really, is plagiarism? What does it mean to have authentic human relationships, versus interactions with bots?"

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Exercise Critical Thinking, Restraint in AI Tool Selection

"It’s just like a pencil, a colored pencil, a crayon, a pen,” said Bruce Ellis, director of professional development at TCEA. “It’s just a tool. So, how do you use it?" 

At its worst, Ellis says, a tool is a distraction. Somewhere in the middle, it’s just digitizing something physical or augmenting an existing learning strategy. At its best, a tool actually accelerates learning.

Ellis shared a framework, pioneered by education researcher John Hattie, to measure that acceleration. Hattie’s research identified strategies that are known to accelerate learning — for example, self-grading. Demonstrating an AI tool’s ability to facilitate one of those accelerants efficiently makes a strong pedagogical case for that tool.

"We want to give you a filter that helps you say no to digital busy work and yes to what moves the needle forward," Ellis said. 

Al Thomas, Founder of Educopilot, echoed this sentiment about thoughtful tool selection during a CDW session: 

“Focus on the objectives before you buy a new shiny tool. What is it we’re really trying to do at a school with education?” he said. "Start small and specific. The clearer you are, the better it will be for your students, and also for you."

Ledezma warned that some tools that claim to be specialized for education are really just injecting prompts into ChatGPT or Gemini, and said it’s worth asking whether an existing tool can already do the same job. 

“Question the wrapper," he said. “And if your district already uses Google or Microsoft, start with those foundational models — Gemini or Copilot — that are secure and compliant.”

AI Isn’t Always the Best Tool for the Job

Laura Horn, an instructional technology specialist at Longview Independent School District in Texas, presented a session about how to automate lesson plans for substitute teachers.

Some of this involved using AI. For example, her district uses some Magic School AI features:

• Text levelers: Automatically adjust reading materials to different grade levels
• Rubric generator: Creates standards-aligned rubrics
• IEP goal generator: Drafts measurable goals based on observational data

She also demonstrated how Canva can help draft email templates that can then be filled in with specific details.

But other tools don’t rely on AI.

For instance, she used Google Forms to create “digital escape rooms” where form logic redirects students to new questions based on their responses. These activities keep students engaged and motivated with minimal guidance requirements.

In other cases, automating substitute lesson plans is a matter of planning ahead.

“Have three days of evergreen lessons that you could teach on day one or day 180,” she said. Keeping this content at the ready and then posting it to an online portal the evening before taking a sick day can make sharing substitute teacher plans as simple as sharing a single link. 

“Substitutes only manage the environment, the safety and the behavior of the kids,” she said. “The technology is going to manage the instruction, your content, your pacing and the assessment at the end."

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