Now, five years into the role and applying the instincts of a veteran educator, she has helped the New York school district not just react to AI but proactively incorporate it into everyday teaching.
“When we first learned about ChatGPT — I’ve been in education over 20 years, I knew it was going to be significant,” she said. “I related it back to when Google first really became popular, and you had the ideas and the tools that you could really use in a different way.”
Haug said her experience in the classroom helped her realize the impact AI would have and quickly move beyond the idea of resisting it. In 2023, the district formed a committee with teachers, parents, administrators and instructional coaches, and this year they’ve added five students to the group. The committee is tasked with creating guidelines, which will be published this summer, to inform professional development on new technologies, determine which AI tools to use and keep an eye on tech trends.
Their guidelines start with the words “students will explore,” because students are already using AI tools.
Haug said Pearl River surveyed its students and found half were already using AI for schoolwork, and 40 percent for social media. Students said they found AI engaging and helpful, and it was their preferred research tool.
“We started with ‘students will explore’ because we knew this was going to be something that they would have the rest of their lives, and it would just keep growing,” Haug said.
The survey found that students appreciated this attitude from school leaders. They wanted teachers to understand the impact AI would have on their post-high school lives and recognize it as more than a tool for cheating. Three quarters of the student body said they needed a deeper knowledge of how to properly use it.
In the 2023-24 school year, the district started working with the ed-tech platform SchoolAI to incorporate AI across grade levels and subjects. After third-grade students used chatbots to interact with fairytales, they said it felt more real than having the story read aloud to them. High school-level math classes also used the platform as a personalized tutor.
“I brought something to a third-grade classroom here that my 12th graders are also using to help tutor them in AP calculus,” Haug said. “You don't often find tools that do both of those.”
Haug described her search for AI tools as curriculum-first, and she was impressed by SchoolAI’s standards-aligned features. While some teachers were skeptical of AI, this alignment with curriculum requirements helped show them some of the potential benefits — mainly personalized help for students available at all hours of the day, and translation capabilities for English learners.
New York has strict data privacy regulations that help ensure these benefits don’t come at the cost of students’ personal data, Haug said. But cheating is still a top-of-mind issue, as is updating statewide standards to better include technology changes.
To address cheating, Haug is working with the superintendent to create a rubric for AI use. The rubric places assignments on a scale from zero to five, zero meaning students must attest that they haven’t used AI at all and five meaning students expressly use AI to explore a topic. While some teachers have started to create assignments that incorporate AI, she said longer-term changes to institutional standards that reflect changing technology will help schools incorporate it more meaningfully.
“It's hard to make that kind of drastic change when, at the end of the day, you're still determining success and your standards still align to a much more outdated system,” she said.
