As A.I. grows in power and spreads throughout the world, classrooms attempt to integrate it. FCPS recently hosted a roundtable discussion about this topic featuring Superintendent Dr. Reid, FCPS Chief Information Technology Officer Gautam Sethi, and student journalist delegates sent from every high school within Fairfax County Public Schools.
Starting off the roundtable discussion, Reid and Sethi voiced some of their own views on AI and its inclusion in FCPS and student learning.
“I sometimes think that the technology is moving faster than the policies to address it are… “How we’ve decided to approach A.I. is we have the partnership agreement with open air for our educators to learn more about it,” Reid said.
Sethi offered a more administrative take on A.I. in FCPS, highlighting its efficiency in the FCPS workforce. “If you think about Fairfax beyond the classroom, we are a 4 billion dollar company we have 40,000 employees and A.I. has promises in providing efficiencies at various levels of an organization so the faster, cheaper, and more efficient we can be in operations, that also allows us then to better support classrooms because that could be resources diverted back into the classroom programming. There is the instructional side of it which we are discussing and there’s the operational side of it,” Sethi said.
Each student delegate had the opportunity to ask at least one question regarding education in the age of A.I. Many great questions were asked by each student delegate, but all questions revolved around three central topics.
The first and most pressing topic was how FCPS would tackle the issue of students using A.I. to complete assignments and not learning necessary subject-area skills themselves, while still trying to support the integration of A.I. into school curriculums in a rapidly changing technical world.
Reid believes that education with A.I. should be done such that students are not reliant on A.I., and instead are able to utilize A.I. to better develop their own education. “We need to understand the tools so that the tools can make us better at doing human tasks. I think our creative thinking, our problem solving, we need to learn how to use A.I. to improve our ability to be human, we don’t want to cognitively offload to A.I. We want to learn to manage it, shape it, and use it so that humans stay at the center and are the architects of that work,” Reid said.
“Teach students how to use those tools and stay human-centered in our use,” Reid said.
The second topic discussed was how FCPS would train teachers and enable them to be successful in an age where A.I. becomes more and more important in the classroom.
Reid has stated that all teachers will undergo training on how to best utilize A.I. in their classrooms and how best to identify and correct unethical uses of A.I.
Aside from unethical student use of A.I., Reid has stated that all FCPS personnel will have signed an “Acceptable use agreement,” setting clear boundaries and expectations for teacher use of A.I. in the classroom.
The third, and final, main topic was the construction of data centers in Fairfax County and its effects on the environment.
Northern Virginia is currently the largest data center market in the world, hosting over 600 operational data centers. These numbers are projected to grow in the future to satisfy the growing development of A.I. technologies.
Currently, A.I. data centers are reported to consume massive amounts of energy and water for operations.
Sethi states that A.I. data centers energy and water consumption is not yet firmly established, meaning that certain facilities require more while others require less and that the energy they consume is constantly fluctuating. Sethi also revealed that in a recent meeting with state delegates, there was a proposal for Virginia to spearhead the transition into fusion energy, reducing the carbon footprint of current energy sources.
Through the Journalism Roundtable, Reid and Sethi stressed that FCPS will be frequently updating and reviewing their policies on A.I., in the effort to best keep up with the rapid development of A.I. and to ensure the establishment of guidelines that best reflect the interests of students and teachers.
In conclusion, FCPS is committed to moving forward in this ever-changing technological age, to best train both its students, and staff to be successful, with a main focus on maintaining ethics is the face of ever-growing A.I. and the possibility of human capabilities being enhanced with A.I. resources.
