Artificial intelligence company Open AI is partnering with a growing number of school districts in Texas, including one here in San Antonio.
Northside Independent School District confirmed it will be using ChatGPT for Teachers, an artificial intelligence chatbot made by OpenAI specifically for school systems and educators.
“Teachers, whether at NISD or elsewhere, they’re busy and they spend an inordinate amount of time on lessons, grading, all the things that make their classrooms successful,” said Leann Kidd, executive director of technology services at NISD.
“We have an obligation to kind of focus on the tools that will enhance their efficiency and help them in their day to day lives.”
OpenAI first launched ChatGPT for Teachers last year, making the program free for verified U.S. K-12 educators and school employees and partnering with school districts who wanted to implement the technology systemwide.
Leah Belsky, vice president of education at OpenAI, said the goal is to help educators use artificial intelligence tools in a way that saves time and supports students.
“It is not a student product,” she said. “Districts get role-based access controls, administrative visibility, and privacy protections to help them implement AI in a way that fits both school and legal requirements.”
On Wednesday, Open AI announced it would expand their school partnerships to 55 new K-12 systems. Across the country, ChatGPT for Teachers is now in more than 100 K-12 school systems across the country.
In Texas, these now include NISD in San Antonio, Houston ISD, Fort Worth ISD, Dallas ISD, Frisco ISD, Killeen ISD, Abilene ISD and Humble ISD, which have all either implemented ChatGPT for Teachers districtwide or are in the process of doing so.
NISD is San Antonio’s largest school district, serving 97,600 students across 133 schools with 13,000 employees.
Unlike ChatGPT’s regular public accounts, data collected and used by ChatGPT for Teachers won’t be used to train other artificial intelligence models, said Belsky and school districts can mold the program to do what it wants it to do.
Teachers can use it to grade faster, create lesson plans and draft emails. Kidd said the technology can act as a sort of “thought partner” for teachers to fully realize their ideas.
Houston ISD, the state’s largest district, was one of the first districts to partner with ChatGPT, and have been using artificial intelligence to summarize lengthy special education documents and draft and edit curriculum.
Kidd says NISD is looking into using the technology similarly, while keeping student privacy in mind and keeping humans “in the loop.”
While the new partnership with OpenAI would implement a districtwide system access and guardrails, more than half of NISD staff have already been using artificial intelligence since ChatGPT first launched in 2022, said Kidd.
Several employees have individual ChatGPT for Teachers accounts, and others are using tools like Google’s Gemini Notebook and another tool called MagicSchool AI. NISD has also been providing staff training.
“Things like how to write a great prompt to get the output that they want, being aware of bias and what to look for, being cognizant of privacy, and just really focusing on overall ethics and etiquette,” Kidd said.
NISD also has an AI task force where employees from different departments and campuses discuss artificial intelligence and make policy recommendations.
The district is currently working on a staff awareness campaign for the new OpenAI partnership, and Kidd said a systemwide ChatGPT for Teachers would launch in October, making the tool accessible to all staff and manageable by NISD
“We have a Northside portal for all of our teachers, where anything that’s an approved application is kind of like on a landing page for them, and they just click it, and it automatically signs them in. So we’ll have that capability,” Kidd said.
ChatGPT for Teachers is only free for schools to use until June of 2028, and in the meantime OpenAI will be researching what impact the technology has on education.
While ChatGPT for Teachers is not for students, student accounts and student-facing features could come later, according to OpenAI.
At NISD, some high schoolers have access to artificial intelligence tools with the approval of teachers, but opening up the technology to all students would be a much slower process.
“Even if ChatGPT did have student access available, that wouldn’t be something that we would immediately allow,” Kidd said.
This story originally appeared in the San Antonio Report.