Ohio's largest school district voted unanimously Tuesday to adopt a new AI policy. The core of it: individual teachers decide whether and how students can use AI on any given assignment. Chief IT Officer Christopher Lockhart described the range of decisions that now sit with teachers: whether students can use AI for brainstorming, for reviewing a completed draft, or whether to give students a task and let them choose which approved tools to use. The district is providing professional development so skeptics and advocates alike have what they need to make their own call. The obvious objection is consistency: two students in the same building can have completely different AI experiences depending on their teacher. That's a real trade-off. But the models are improving monthly, research is evolving constantly, and new applications keep popping up. The last thing you want is a top-down mandate from someone who isn’t actually in the classroom. Good AI governance in schools should follow the teacher, not precede them.

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The EdSource piece out yesterday from California reads as a direct companion to the Columbus story. At South Lake Middle School in Irvine, eighth-grade math teacher Gregory Dharman sends his students' monthly exit tickets to Snorkl, an AI tool that grades responses and gives instant personalized feedback. He uses it specifically because it pushes students to explain their thinking, not just get the right answer. Nearby at Marina Middle School in San Francisco, social studies teacher Matthew Helmenstine takes a different approach. He keeps AI blocked for most of the year and only lets students experiment with it toward the end. Both approaches are deliberate. That's teacher discretion working the way it should. The most useful thing in the piece comes from Jennie Dougherty of KIPP Public Schools Northern California, who runs new AI tools through a micro-pilot before committing: "Are students more confused than before? Is the teacher spending more time managing the tech than teaching? Are the kids who were already struggling falling further behind?" If yes to any of those, she stops. It's a simple framework, but the right one. Start small, define what success looks like, and as Dougherty puts it, the goal isn't to introduce AI early. It's to introduce agency early.

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Rudrojas Kunvar, a 16-year-old junior at Poolesville High School in Maryland, built an AI startup last summer that now reaches more than 2,000 farmers across three continents. The idea came from a community festival where he asked a farmer how they detect crop disease. The farmer said he was guessing. Kunvar talked to a few others and found the same answer every time. So he built Evion, a free AI tool that uses images from basic camera drones to generate color-coded crop health maps. Green means healthy, orange is moderate, red means stressed. The technology it replaces normally requires sensors costing thousands of dollars. Small and mid-sized farms account for 36% of total US farm production, according to the USDA, and most can't afford that. His co-founder Jacob Lee, now a freshman at Stanford, said farmers told him it would cut their costs significantly. A venture capitalist even ended up offering them $300K to drop out and go full-time. They turned it down.

Overall, I love this story. They identified a real problem in their community, built a real solution with AI, and got it into the hands of farmers across three continents. This is what I hope the future with AI looks like.

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Thanks for reading! If you come across a story worth sharing, reply and let me know.

- Matt

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