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    • Sioux Falls committees investigate AI and phone use in schools
    Michigan

    Sioux Falls committees investigate AI and phone use in schools

    Caradoc Wyn Posted on

    The Sioux Falls School District plans to assemble a 25- to 30-member committee to discuss the issue of cell phone use in schools, Deputy Superintendent Jamie Nold said Monday at a school board retreat.

    “There is no doubt that cell phones can be a problem in school, especially for some students who just can’t handle them,” Nold said, noting that it is a problem in high schools, middle schools and even elementary schools.

    That committee, Nold said, could include parents, community members, teachers, middle and high school students, school administrators and district leaders and could meet starting in October to develop a variety of ideas.

    Nold said the committee will look at the district’s current policies on cellphone use in schools. The current policies for elementary, middle and high school students who use cellphones in school when they are not authorized to do so include warnings and confiscations, detention in middle and high school, and possible suspension in high school.

    “At some point it becomes a dysfunction,” Nold added later in the meeting, saying that some students would rather face suspension than give up their cell phones.

    He pointed out that high school students are allowed to use their phones during lunch and breaks between classes, but must put them away after class begins unless the teacher asks them to use their phone for something like a class activity or research.

    Other school districts in South Dakota, such as Gettysburg, have already gone without devices and/or purchased high-tech magnetic pockets that students can use to keep their phones throughout the school day. But in the Sioux Falls school district, the purchase could cost several thousand dollars per individual student, Nold says.

    More: Sioux Falls School District does not adopt Gettysburg School District’s “device-free” policy

    Nold said he has also heard from other districts and local teachers that they have hung cloth or clear plastic bags on classroom doors for students to keep their phones in during the school day, but some have experienced phones “disappearing” or getting lost from those bags.

    Superintendent Jane Stavem said she knows a “phone-free environment” is a hot topic right now and that a legislative group will meet soon on the issue. Stavem also said the district has provided feedback on the issue to lawmakers on the committee and to South Dakota Secretary of Education Joe Graves.

    The district had already planned to bring together a group of people during the school year to talk about the issue together, Stavem added. This is consistent with the district’s original statement in late July that it would not review or consider changing its policy on cell phones in classrooms before the start of the school year.

    The Committee on Artificial Intelligence will also meet

    Deputy Superintendent Kirk Zeeck said another working group will also meet once a month from September to December to discuss artificial intelligence (AI) and its use in schools.

    “We’re just going to work out a general, rough outline of what we want to do, and the main theme that we’re going to be looking at AI is, ‘Start with a human, insert AI, and end with a human,’ rather than someone just typing something into ChatGPT or going to one of the many, many, many resources that are out there now,” Zeeck said.

    Zeeck said this group will also look at AI, look at ethical uses of AI, how students interact with AI, what students and teachers can do with AI, and review previous district guidance on AI. There are AI tools that teachers can use to do things like create lesson plans more quickly, Zeeck said.

    More: Sioux Falls School District encourages community to be there for its students

    Board Chair Carly Reiter said it would be useful to hear from the committee in a board report on how AI is being used in schools, saying she and many other people don’t know much about it, while there are other people who seem to know everything about it.

    “I think it would be nice if people understood, even just from a public perspective, that we are aware of this, we are talking about it, we are talking about it with our staff and we are looking at anything we need to implement or change to support it, but at the same time we don’t want to take away educational experiences from our students,” Reiter said.

    According to Stavem, AI is so ubiquitous that while she wants students to learn how to use AI in applications like spell checking, she doesn’t want ChatGPT to type all of their work.

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    Caradoc Wyn
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