Starting with the spring 2026 semester, Broken Arrow High School and Broken Arrow Virtual Academy will offer a class solely about artificial intelligence, including incorporating coding and storytelling through data.
“We’re here to prepare students for the future,” said Brandon Chitty, Broken Arrow Public Schools’ executive director of institutional technology and virtual programs. “And to do that, we have to look at the future. The sad thing is, though, is that AI is now. It’s not even the future. If you polled our students, I would say that a high percentage of them are using it consistently. Our students are using it a higher rate than adults because they’re not afraid of technology. They just jump right in, and they’ve quickly seen how fast it can help them accomplish tasks.”
Despite the course not being originally listed in the 2025-26 course catalog, about 200 students are already signed up for the class between Broken Arrow High School’s brick-and-mortar campus and the Broken Arrow Virtual Academy.
Starting in 2026-27, students will be able to take AI Foundations for a full year.
A computer science teacher at Broken Arrow High School, Kori Philliber is among the educators who will teach the new course next semester. All but one of her class periods next semester will now be for AI Foundations, which means she will be participating in professional development courses this month to prepare.
“I’m actually getting started on that this weekend,” she said. “We will be well prepared before we hit the ground running in January.”
The new course comes as BAPS and other districts continue to try to figure out the role of AI in the classroom, both for students and teachers.
“We’re educators,” Chitty said. “We should be super excited about a tool that allows people to learn better and faster than ever, right? ... It’s about change. We have to find a way where we can empower our learners to use these tools to actually change the starting line. If we can change the starting line, then we can change the finish line and they can actually get even further.”
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