In Flagler County schools, artificial intelligence is the new Google. All but 2 percent of faculty and staff use it at some point, almost half of them daily.
Students from grades 6 and up’s use of AI at teachers’ direction is at 71 percent, either in classrooms or independently, through such tools as MagicSchool, Khanmigo, Canva and the student version of Gemini.
“It’s very limited, student-focused tools,” the district’s Theresa Phillips, a digital classroom specialist, said. “It’s not like wide open, any type of AI use. It’s done in a very responsible way, paying attention, obviously, to safety and security.”
“That’s driven a lot by our teachers being more comfortable and understanding with it,” IT Director Ryan Diesing said, as teachers have been better trained in using the tools, “and then what rails and things can be put up to make sure that our elementary students have some exposure and understanding of what it is.”
Diesing, in an AI discussion with the School Board at a Tuesday workshop, likened the current AI learning curve to the early days of Google and Yahoo and Netscape, when adults and students were learning the ropes of the internet, a word that was capitalized back then. “You see a lot of parallels to this,” Diesing said.
He continued: “The joke today still is, oh, it’s on the internet. It must be true. It’s in AI, it must be true. So I think those are a parallel thing to keep in mind. And where I keep going with this is, I was on the younger side of that, and now I’m on the older side looking at it.” But with the same open-minded approach. In the early days of the internet, there were impulses to think: “Can’t deal with this. We’re just going to block it all.” The district didn’t go that route, Diesing said. “What did we do? We worked through it from an education standpoint. It became a very, very valuable tool.”
So it’s been with AI, from the district’s standpoint.
Teachers have been getting more comfortable with AI–and more suspicious of it: the proportion of teachers who don’t think students should be exposed to AI has more than doubled in 2026, to over 13 percent. The district’s survey does not ask why, though Board member Janie Ruddy, who is on the AI committee for the Florida School Board Association, says it could be a combination of factors–mistrust of tech companies owning personal data and excessive screen time among them.
“It would be appropriate for us to have some town halls with parents,” Ruddy said, “because we would need to help educate them along this journey and inform them on what is AI in the classroom, which may be different from at home.” Ruddy also wants more purposeful clarity on the district’s philosophy in using AI, to what specific ends–operational efficiency? Academic achievement? Data analysis, with student identities removed? “Is that something we’re willing to go to?” Ruddy said.
The more teachers who like AI are getting trained on it, the more they are using it with students, especially as they learn to interact with NotebookLM.
NotebookLM is Google’s online research and note-taking tool focused on the specific document the user uploads. It is document-specific AI. It does not draw on the entirety of the internet to analyze and spit out results about a document, thus reducing the tendency of AI tools to “hallucinate”–the actual term for a serious and common problem with AI tools, which routinely fabricate information. “It controls the source,” Superintendent LaShakia Moore said.
“I have mixed emotions,” Board Chair Christy Chong said. “AI, you can use it for big things, and we’re kind of at the place. It’s like, we can’t fall behind in technology. But you also want to make sure that we add the human aspect. And like you said, it can be wrong at times. I use it in healthcare now, and I have to make sure that what it says, that it heard me correctly. Sometimes it’s wrong.”
Teachers use the tools to create lesson plans, to find study resources, to create quizzes or flash cards or study guides.
While parents may request that their child be opted out of AI use, all students at all levels have access to MagicSchool, but teachers have to open that access first. Students in grades 6-12 have access to Brisk Teaching, Khanmigo and Gemini, and high school students have tools built into their individual, school-issued Macbooks.
The district has a so-called “Lightspeed” product built into its AI systems that immediately alerts human staffers if a student inputs something of concern in an AI chatbox.
“We’ve done a lot with AI literacy for both teachers and students at the same time,” Phillips said. “It’s more than just how to use it. It’s really like understanding what AI is and how it works, and then also how to use it, and then, really importantly, how to evaluate output. That’s an important skill. Actually, our students are probably better than our teachers in looking at images and material and being able to tell you if it was AI-generated or not. They tend to get tricked a lot less than our teachers necessarily do.”
Which implies that teachers may not yet be generally trained enough to detect AI-generated essays. But teachers also have tools that analyze how their students put their work together. The tools are intended to minimize cheating. They do not eliminate cheating, especially by more clever students.
AI training at Phillips’s administrative level and among faculty has been intensive, through conferences, state-level training sessions. “This year, so far, we’ve had 2,275 hours of professional learning targeted towards AI,” Phillips said. (There are around 800 teachers in the district.)
The district is also mindful of student privacy. The data that students and faculty generate stays “in house,” so that the AI tools don’t use it to train its machines. “We essentially have our own enterprise ChatGPT licensing,” Diesing said. “So anything entered into that, if you’re using Flagler schools, is still separated from the larger element.”
The IT department is developing an AI guidebook applicable to all things AI in the district. But school board members had questions about the method of evaluating AI’s impact in the schools.
Ruddy, who is clearly and by far the most AI-literate member of the board, is interested in more rigorous ways of measuring educators’ and students’ AI literacy. “I could say I’m awesome at AI, but if I’m only asking it recipes–I have got ketchup and noodles in my pantry, what can you make for me?–is that really AI literacy?” she asked.
The workshop discussion was not intended to introduce a new policy or direction, but to update the board on the state of AI in Flagler schools today, though the board’s existing AI policy will be updated soon. “It’s important that you as a board continue to have this conversation,” Moore told the board.
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