The Campbell Union High School District Board of Trustees approved the purchase of a SchoolAI license and two training sessions for $47,950 on May 1.
SchoolAI provides artificial intelligence tools specifically designed for education, allowing students to interact with personalized AI tutors and providing teachers with insights and summaries about individual students’ activity and potential learning gaps.
Although free generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are easily accessible to students, students may share identifiable personal information while using these public AI tools. Concerns about the security of students’ data led the district to look into safer alternatives, according to Director of Technology John Keating.
“If you log in [to OpenAI] and start dumping your data in [ChatGPT], they have access to your data,” Keating said during the board meeting. “With our agreement with SchoolAI, we’re restricting the use of our students’ data to build models and potentially be sold for other purposes.”
While SchoolAI is built on ChatGPT, it includes additional guardrails built to guide students rather than provide immediate answers.
“With ChatGPT, you go in and say, ‘I want this essay, and I want it completed.’ SchoolAI is like, ‘I’ll help you along the way, but I’m not going to do the whole thing for you,’” Keating said. “It makes it a little bit more of an educational process than just giving you the end result.”
During the meeting, Student Trustee Lois Woo raised concerns about the feasibility of limiting students to only using SchoolAI.
“Adults often underestimate the lengths, or not-lengths, people go to avoid school surveillance,” Woo said, adding that students would likely use personal devices to access websites blocked on school devices. “Knowing how innovative students can be, this is a bit of a false sense of security.”
However, Keating pointed out that students won’t have any secure AI productivity tools available to them without SchoolAI or an equivalent tool even though district policy permits generative AI use.
“It is really a missing component in that guidance if we don’t end up selecting something,” Keating said.
Reporting by Elliott Yau
Branham Bear Witness 
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