_{DNCOE’s director of information network services showed the Board of Trustees this clip of a Morgan Freeman deepfake during a discussion last year about artificial intelligence in the classroom. Thumbnail courtesy of the Del Norte County Office of Education}

A year after he showed trustees a YouTube clip featuring a Morgan Freeman deepfake, Ryan Bahten says Del Norte Unified School District will seek public input as it continues to draft policies around artificial intelligence.

The district will deploy a community survey starting next week, said Bahten, the Del Norte County Office of Education’s director of information network services. The input provided will guide him and other district and DNCOE employees as they differentiate between AI as a tool in the classroom and AI as a potential risk to student privacy.

Bahten said he is aiming to get a policy before the Board of Trustees in time for teachers to begin learning how to use AI next school year.

“We want to get a policy in place so we can reference it and use it to make sure we’re providing the right development for teachers in the 2025-26 school year,” he told Redwood Voice Community News on Thursday. “It’s a priority to get a draft policy to the point where it’s ready to present in the next few months.”

Artificial intelligence was a hot topic when Bahten introduced the Board to ChatGPT in January 2024. With AI still in the public eye — Bahten cited the recent news that OpenAI is accusing China-based DeepSeek of improperly harvesting its data — local officials are making sure the district goes carefully into this arena.

Bahten is one of four DNUSD and DNCOE employees heading a task force figuring out how to safely use the technology. At a meeting on Monday, task force members answered a questionnaire similar to the one the public will see next week, he said.

“‘What are your concerns around safety?’” Bahten said, providing a sample of the questions. “‘How can we make sure our policy addresses those questions? What are you excited about? How can we make sure we are flexible?”

When asked about professional development and a teacher’s comfort level with AI, Bahten said those that are part of the task force are already using the technology in their classroom. It’s likely that DNUSD will be leaning on those instructors as it begins to further integrate AI into the classroom.

Bahten said the district has always relied on its “early adopters” to train their coworkers.

“It’s in our mission statement to prepare students for the future,” he said. “It’s not whether we like it or hate it, we do have a responsibility to make sure students know how to be ready for the world, and this is part of the world at this point.”

The district’s survey comes after California Governor Gavin Newsom approved Assembly Bill 2876 on Sept. 29. That law requires the Instructional Quality Commission, an advisory body to the State Board of Education, to consider incorporating AI literacy into curricula and instructional materials for math, science and social science.

At Monday’s meeting, DNUSD Coordinator for Professional Learning and Support Aaron Lovejoy, one of the four task force leaders, said the new law is part of a realization from state education officials that “AI is coming.” He pointed out that the California Education Code also addresses artificial intelligence.

“It’s the future,” he said. “It’s already integrated in lots of businesses and it’s moving at the speed of light. It’s this balancing act of making sure students are prepared for the future and also making sure students are learning and they’re safe.”

The other two leaders on the AI task force include software engineer Damien Richcreek, who developed analytics dashboards to track student progress, and Instructional Media Center Coordinator Jeremy Goff.

In addition to distributing a similar questionnaire to the one that will be released to the public, Lovejoy said he and Richcreek have also begun reaching out to Del Norte High School students.

“They had their own ideas and tricks and things they do that sound pretty valid,” Lovejoy said. “And then we also talked about morals and the basics of that and why, and the big picture of it.”

Lovejoy said some of the programs he’s seen teachers use in their classroom are personalized chatbots that can act as a tutor for students. Other chatbots allow a teacher to input a prompt to assess a student’s learning level and to ask them questions to “push their thinking.”

AI can also support personalized learning, he said, and allow teachers to meet the needs of multiple students at once.

Artificial intelligence can also offer support to students when they don’t have access to a teacher, Lovejoy said, including when they’re at home.

“Sometimes parents are able to support their children with homework, sometimes they’re not,” he said. “And having tools like this really creates equity where students might have the ability now to get the support that they need when they’re at home and they don’t have a teacher.”

According to Bahten, once DNUSD does have a formal AI policy, any platform or program teachers use will be protected by its firewalls and other security layers. When new programs, such as DeepSeek,  become available, the district will block them until they determine that they are safe to incorporate into its network.

One platform DNUSD might use is Google Gemini. According to Bahten, Del Norte Unified is a Google school district, relying on the company’s suite of tools. Since Gemini is under the Google umbrella, any data DNUSD puts into it will stay within the school district’s account, Bahten said.

“Since we have an education work space, our data never gets used to train Google’s model,” he said. “There’s a wall there. That’s really attractive to me.”

Though it couldn’t touch ChatGPT when it was first released, Google Gemini is as good or even better, according to Bahten.

He said he’s also a fan of another Google tool, Notebook LM.

“The cool thing about that is you create the model,” he said, explaining that the user provides the data the AI tool would glean from. “I can upload documents to it and then ask questions to this model. I like it from the perspective that I know it will only give me answers from the data I gave it to use.”