Using ChatGPT for Education, a generative AI tool specifically designed for students and school professionals, districts are adopting new workflows, teacher supports and governance frameworks that treat AI as a routine part of instruction and operations rather than an isolated experiment.
In a webinar on Tuesday facilitated by OpenAI Academy, the educational initiative of the company behind ChatGPT, school leaders from three U.S. districts shared lessons on governance, professional learning and organizational change. According to the speakers, AI adoption is no longer an isolated, experimental effort; rather, districts are now progressing beyond the question of if AI should be used, and are instead focusing on how to deploy it responsibly, equitably and at scale.
BUILDING A SYSTEM-LEVEL APPROACH
Leaders from all three districts said AI adoption should be understood as a long-term instructional and organizational shift, not a temporary tech initiative.
Township High School District 211, located in Chicago and serving about 12,000 students, has spent the past two years developing one of the most structured AI implementation models featured in the session.
The district’s Chair of Technology and Library Scott Weidig said his staff drew lessons from their earlier 1:1 device rollout, which he described as a “Wild West” period that led to inconsistent student and teacher experiences. Wanting to avoid a repeat during AI adoption, the district began researching and comparing large language models in late 2022 and early 2023.
However, speakers stressed that leadership alignment and decisive direction were essential to moving past fragmented experimentation of their chosen tool.
Alex Larson, who supports AI professional learning at Township, described how staff self-assessed their AI progress across five steps: aware, informed, engaged, enhanced and integrated. Between May 2024 and May 2025, after more than 35 professional development sessions, the percentage of staff in the “aware” category fell from 43 percent to 11 percent, he said. Usage also surged: Monthly prompt volume rose from the early rollout to “over 100,000 prompts per month,” Larson said.
The district responded to this data by creating an AI skills matrix and role-specific professional development, allowing staff to progress along a structured continuum of upskilling in AI.
“Everyone is having common language, common goals, common skills that they are working towards, to move them along this journey,” said Christina Ordonez, technology chair at Hoffman Estates High School. “So we’re speaking the same language, and we’re moving as an organization.”
SUPPORTING EFFICIENCY AND CURRICULUM USE
Lindsey Hopkins, assistant superintendent of technology and accountability at Hurst-Euless-Bedford Independent School District (HEBISD) in Texas, described her district as the newest of the three to adopt ChatGPT for Education. Serving approximately 23,000 students across 29 schools, she said the district began its rollout in July 2024.
She said the decision to partner with ChatGPT grew out of teacher feedback regarding intense workloads and a need for greater efficiency.
“We needed a dream to dream for our teachers,” Hopkins said, explaining that many educators were unsure how AI could support them beyond, perhaps, drafting emails.
District leaders began by trying to understand what practical value AI could offer already stretched-thin educators, noting that early professional development sessions revealed a need to demonstrate more specific, job-embedded use cases rather than abstract possibilities.
Hopkins said HEBISD has since focused on helping teachers use ChatGPT to be more efficient, generate instructional materials, summarize documents, and sift and search through curriculum resources. She reported early successes of teachers using the tool for multilingual learner support, including analyzing student writing samples to determine next instructional steps, adding that the district’s special education teams have also begun using ChatGPT to support Individualized Education Program writing and data analysis.
The rollout came with challenges, though. Hopkins said the district initially struggled with Google Workspace integration and later realized the need for governance structures for custom GPTs, including naming conventions, approval workflows and alignment with district policy.
“There needs to be some governance over those so that you can make sure … the work that [teachers] are creating does still continue to align with your district’s strategic plan,” she said.
SECURITY AND HUMAN-CENTERED USE
Agua Fria Union High School District (AFUHSD) in Arizona, serving approximately 10,000 students, framed its AI strategy around security, human-centered use and districtwide innovation. Director of AI and Instructional Technology Drew Olson said the district’s work began nearly two years ago, when it piloted ChatGPT and later formalized the partnership in fall 2024.
Olson said security was a core requirement, particularly ensuring prompts were not used for model training. Those protections, combined with the ability to build and share custom GPTs, were “revolutionary” for the district, he said, adding that staff quickly began creating GPTs for rubric generation, project-based learning design, data analysis and communications — tools the district wanted to “showcase for our staff and also have them be builders of for themselves.”
AFUHSD built its approach through broad stakeholder input from administrators, instructional coaches, librarians, teachers and staff “from all over our district … to figure out what was needed first.” The district now has an AI professional learning community, an implementer group and a paid AI ambassador at each campus responsible for site-level use.
One of the district’s earliest deliverables was clear guidance for student use, built around a stoplight model: red for no AI use, yellow for limited assistance like brainstorming or editing, and green for assignments where AI is part of the task. Olson said the clarity was essential so teachers could be “explicit with students from the get-go.”
To build literacy, the district created an AI framework grounded in the idea that “you can only become AI literate by utilizing it and evaluating it critically,” and used CARE criteria (clarity, accuracy, relevance, ethics) to guide training for staff and students. An AI integration continuum with five stages, starting with awareness and progressing through innovation and leadership, helps staff understand their progress. About half currently place themselves at the third stage, “routine integration,” and the district aims to get that figure to 75 percent this year.
According to Olson, these structures have supported widespread adoption: roughly 80,000 messages per month, more than 900 custom GPTs and around 70 percent of staff using AI weekly. Olson said the district’s goal goes beyond time savings.
“We want to think about, what’s the kind of school that we want 10 years from now? And what are we doing today to start to build towards that?” he said. “But making sure that we’re also focused on the short term in, how are we aligned to our goals? What are the metrics that shows us we’re either on course or off course?”
