Lexington-Richland 5 school district is considering adding an AI assistant to help teachers deal with lesson planning and tailoring instruction to individual student needs.
“I’ve always believed that the faculty needs a faculty,” said Superintendent Akil Ross. But while he admitted, “It may be tough to give over 1,400 teachers an instructional assistant,” he pointed to a way teachers in the Chapin-Irmo area might get a similar kind of help.
Providing teacher with a personalized AI assistant could potentially help teachers in a variety of ways, Ross said.
It could aid with developing tests to state standards, providing feedback to students based on individual performance, generating worksheets for individual students and writing lesson plans and assessments, even producing texts in multiple languages and tailored to multiple reading levels, the superintendent detailed.
“Districts are now using generative AI to do this,” the superintendent told the school board on Monday. “We may not be able to give every faculty member a faculty member, but we can give them a powerful tool.”
The Chapin-Irmo area district already uses a free version of Magic School, an educational platform that can provide AI-assisted resources to some students and faculty, but fewer than the paid version of the program.
“A lot of the things that are being created can’t be saved or stored, and it doesn’t give us access to the full suite,” Ross said.
A team from Lexington-Richland 5 will be going to Horry County, which has been rolling out Magic School this year, to see how the program is being used there.
The idea is being raised now because the school board will need to find funding for the AI assistant in its 2025-26 budget, which will need to be ratified by the end of June. Ross said he estimates the initial cost at $90,000 a year.
“That’s an initial quote. We’d like to be able to go back and see if there are any additional plug-ins after visiting Horry,” he said, adding that “giving 1,400 teachers an instructional assistant would be a bit more than that.”
As a more specific example of how the AI tool might help, Ross pointed to a district study last year of one eighth-grade English and language arts class, with a student makeup at the district’s median poverty level. The study found a wide spread of reading levels among the students, ranging from a ninth-grade to a second-grade level among 21 students.
“This becomes very challenging” for a teacher, Ross said.
Magic School would be able to tailor lesson plans to each student’s needs and capabilities, while decreasing the overall burden on the teacher, the superintendent said.
District technology director Jenny Garris said her department has looked at the product to ensure students’ sensitive information will be protected if it is ultimately adopted district-wide.
“They do not collect any personally identifiable information,” she said. “This includes names, addresses, student IDs, any details that could identify a student.”
Even if that kind of information is added to the system, Garris added, “they will remove it immediately and delete it to maintain that privacy, which is not something we see very often from the projects we’re vetting.”
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