Pearl Public School District harnesses the power of AI

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – The superintendent of the Pearl Public School District has offered more than a hundred AI classes to various groups in the past year and is participating in national conversations on the topic.

Meanwhile, he finds ways to harness the power of technology to his district’s advantage.

Pearl Superintendent Chris Chism says AI advances are coming like a freight train.

“So for us, we just have to change with the times,” Chism said. “It’s here. Why not embrace it and run with it?”

Some of the people in the district hesitated at first.

“To be honest, my initial reaction was to ask if he was going to replace me,” noted Erin Jostes, Pearl’s behavior specialist for grades 9-12 and transition coordinator.

However, they quickly learned how they could help.

“Honestly, I look at him as my best friend to bounce ideas off of,” Jostes said. “So when you have that really difficult behavior that you feel like you’ve done everything you can do, I can go to that AI and input that information. And there will be all these different interventions and things like that. And then I can go… yes, I did that. I did that. Hey, I didn’t do that. Maybe this is something we should try.”

They used platforms like ChatGPT to complete tasks more efficiently.

“I’m in seconds,” added Pearl Ann High School Assistant Principal Renee Bentley. “Build something that’s almost a rough draft that might have taken you days to build. You get a rough draft and you can put it on the table and then we can make changes there as a team.”

“Even though I have that training, I have that behavioral knowledge, I’m able to go through and check to remove human error or even remove emotion from something that I’m doing so that what we do for those kids is based on facts and science and not based on my opinion,” Jostes added.

But there are limitations.

“We have privacy concerns because these are public entities,” Chism explained of platforms like ChatGPT. “So, in other words, if I uploaded an Excel file that contained our students’ names or identifying information, I couldn’t use that because it would break the law.”

They solved this by scrubbing any reference to personal student or teacher data before inserting questions into what they built.

“You can build a GPT that’s almost like a little specialized mini brain that has specific instructions and then you can give it to other people to use,” he described.

But now they’re taking it a step further by putting together their own AI server. It’s something they don’t know any other district has done.

“We don’t have those limitations now,” Chism added. “It’s not connected to the internet. So we can train it on our own data.”

And they’ll be able to use that to do things like find potential savings or more efficient bus routes.

As they embrace AI, they’ve also rethought how to manage the classroom and homework. The district focuses more on classroom instruction rather than sending home things like writing assignments. They know that students would likely use AI to do this. Instead, they train older students how to use AI ethically, understanding that it will likely be an integral part of their future jobs.

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