At this time, we will call the board workshop to order.

Item number one is roundtable discussion among board members and staff addressing the following topic for discussion only.

There will be no action.

This is a presentation and discussion regarding the use of artificial intelligence AI in the Carson City School District.

This will be presented to us by Mr.

Bringhurst.

Welcome.

Good evening, superintendent and board of trustees.

So for the workshop portion of the meeting today, we're going to highlight one AI tool in particular.

It's an AI tool called Write On.

As the name would imply, the focus of write on is helping students improve their writing skills.

Improving student writing is one of the things in education that has proven to be very challenging.

Students get better at writing by writing and getting feedback on that writing.

And that's just a very labor-intensive process for teachers to do.

If you can imagine, for instance, our secondary teachers who may have over a hundred students, and you ask each one of them to write a page, that's a hundred pages that you need to read and provide feedback on.

And that takes a lot of time to do that.

And so we earlier on in this in this last school year, we met with Perry, who uh will will be leading this presentation about this pro program that he was developing called Ride On, which really targeted that need of helping students improve their writing.

We started using it with a few teachers, and it's one of those things that a few teachers started using, and then their neighbors started seeing what they were doing and saying, that's really cool.

How do I get to use that?

And it started growing and growing from there, as opposed to sometimes we bring something to the district and we roll it out to the whole district.

This one we started very small, and it has naturally grown and continues to grow.

So we're excited about that because it demonstrates to us that those using it in the classroom are finding it to be an effective tool for our students.

And as a bonus, Perry is local here in the area, so we have a great partnership with him and opportunity to communicate and continue to develop the program and meet the needs of our students.

So I'll bring Perry up to take us through this.

For letting me come here to speak.

Thoughts about that as well.

So hopefully kind of talk about both write-on specifically and sort of thoughts about AI and education generally.

Um education, when you talk about it, begs like lots of questions, right?

Um, some of which go like what are the jobs of tomorrow?

Should we be teaching different skills?

Should we be teaching AI literacy?

Can AI help teachers lesson plan?

Right?

Like that's another thing that AI can potentially do.

How do we prevent cheating with AI?

Go talk to a high school English teacher.

Uh, this is really a top of mind.

Um, but for the purposes of today, because this is what I'm focused on with write-on, it's how might AI help kids learn.

I don't think any of these are more important than any of the others, but this is just what we're doing with write-on.

This has been my focus with write-on in the power over the past year.

I do want to just be candid about my honest truth about, and this is also why I started the company, is like when you, you know, I think there's a lot of folks that say like AI is gonna revolutionize education for the better, and we should rush to adopt these tools.

I do want to be candid, generally speaking, like AI has had mixed results, I would say when it's come to helping students learn, but I don't think that is, I think that's less to do with AI as a technology.

That's AI is a tool.

Um I think it has to do with how it's been rolled out and the choices that some, not this district are making around AI, and especially just throwing chatbots at kids.

Um, this is something I'm really this is what I think right on is addressing.

Um you give just a chat bot to a fourth grade kid, or you could expect it to ask the right questions, become a better thinker, and you give it to a high schooler.

Are they going to use it as a tool for learning, or are they gonna use it as a tool to bypass learning, right?

So these are these are the like just kind of the honest truth, but also I think this is what motivates me uh to to build something better.

And the question that I've been fixated on from I'd say a year before I even started this company in this business is you know, how do we integrate AI thoughtfully with emphasis on you know thoughtfully in order to help kids actually learn?

And over the course of my sort of journey figuring out what I was gonna build, I was talking with this principal in Reno that a bunch of people told me to talk with.

And he, you know, somebody who thinks a lot about AI education as well.

Um he's been going to you know certain conferences, and you know, something something rang the bell for me, which uh was like, oh, this is this is it, which is that the potential of AI can best be summed up in one word, which is feedback, right?

You could have the best teacher in the world if they have 25 kids in their class.

They can't give every student one-on-one feedback, sit with each kid and help them think through whatever subject is, whether it is with math, writer.

We can't, you can't they can't be a tutor to every single kid.

You can give a coach to every kid.

So when I think about what is the potential of AI if we do it really, really well, um, we roll really well for student learning, it's this.

And that's I was like, this is what I this is what I want to do.

Now I think the story, how this connects back.

Um, that wise principal is Brandon, who said Mars and Hurst at the time.