“Put the papers face down.”
Ms. Ortiz stood at the front of the room with one hand on a stack of blue folders.
No one moved.
Then Jay turned his folder over. The rest of the class did the same.
The school had a new question on the table. Kids were using AI at home. Some used it to make a plan. Some used it to fix a sentence. Some copied whole parts of a paper and hoped no one would know.
Ms. Ortiz didn’t want to spend every night trying to guess what came from a student and what came from a tool.
The school could let kids use AI in a small way. They could use it to make a list of ideas or ask for a rough plan. But they’d have to say what they used it for.
That could help kids get unstuck. It could also make it harder to know where their own work ended.
Or the school could ban it from writing work.
Kids would use their notes, their books, and their own first drafts. Teachers would see what each student could do without help from a tool.
But some kids said that rule would shut out a kind of help they’d use later in real life.
Jay raised his hand.
“What if I use it to help me start?” he asked. “I still write the paper.”
Mia looked over from the next desk. “How would she know that?”
Ms. Ortiz held up one blue folder.
“That’s the hard part,” she said.
A parent meeting had filled the library that night. Some parents wanted clear rules. Some wanted kids to learn how to use new tools without letting the tools do the work.
On the whiteboard, Ms. Ortiz wrote two lines.
Use it and say how.
Or don’t use it at all.
Then she set down the marker.
The school board would vote before the next paper was due.