SOUTH BOISE, Idaho — Boise School District teachers could soon use ChatGPT to draft practice quizzes, prepare assignments or turn spoken instructions into lesson plans for substitutes.
The district is partnering with OpenAI to give teachers and staff access to ChatGPT for Teachers, with a rollout planned for spring 2027.
WATCH | From saving teachers time to protecting student data, Boise schools weigh AI
Ryan Gravett, the district’s chief technology officer, said the tools could help reduce teachers’ workloads. One example: A teacher wakes up sick and needs to prepare instructions for a substitute.
“All the work that you’ve done to prepare, you now have to prepare someone else to teach it,” Gravett said. “And so one of the great uses that I heard of is that they can dictate, just talk through what a day would look like.”
But AI-generated materials still need a human review before reaching students, he said.
Drafting a practice quiz also presents different privacy considerations than entering sensitive student information. Gravett said data privacy was a major part of the district’s agreement with OpenAI.
“Who owns that data, what is done with that data? Where is that data stored at?” Gravett said, describing the questions considered.
OpenAI says information entered into the district’s workspace will not be used to train its AI models.
“Parents and students put a lot of trust in the district in terms of the tools that we use and provide and empower our teachers with,” Gravett said.
The new ChatGPT workspace is for staff, but students are already using AI. That raises another question for teachers: How can they determine whether students did the work themselves?
Gravett said teachers can review how a document developed over time.
“So if they are writing in a document, we can actually almost do a rewind and then a time lapse on how that document was created,” he said.
That allows teachers to examine how an essay took shape rather than evaluate only the finished product. Gravett said the district is leaving judgments about potential AI misuse to individual teachers.
The district is also asking parents to share their views on AI in schools through a survey on its website.
