What Parts of Growing Up Are Too Important to Outsource?

As Schools Reconsider Screens and AI, Where Does WHPS Stand?

Where WHPS Stands

Technology has to earn its way into a child’s day.

We can teach children about a technology without handing it over to them.

Our practices will evolve as the technology and evidence change. Our educational priorities will not.

The pendulum is moving again.

Not long ago, putting a device in every child’s hands was widely considered educational progress. More technology often seemed synonymous with a more modern school.

Now schools are reconsidering how much screen time children need, what technology genuinely contributes to learning, and where artificial intelligence belongs in the classroom.

Meanwhile, AI is advancing faster than schools can develop settled answers about it. Researchers, educators, technology leaders, and governments are still weighing its possibilities against its risks and the safeguards it requires.

If adults are still working through these questions, schools have every reason to be especially thoughtful about introducing AI to children.

So where does WHPS stand?

We use technology selectively when it adds meaningful value to learning, and limit it when another experience serves children better. We are not banning it, nor are we introducing it simply because it exists.

At this time, WHPS students are not using generative AI to complete schoolwork. Teachers may use it selectively to support their planning and, particularly in Upper Elementary, demonstrate how AI works and how to evaluate its output.

We’ve Seen the Pendulum Swing Before

After more than 25 years in education, I’ve watched the pendulum swing more than a few times. Debates over phonics and whole language, direct instruction and discovery, homework and no homework, and eventually whether every child needed a device in front of them.

Each new approach tends to arrive with genuine promise, and sometimes a great deal of certainty. I’ve learned to be interested in the promise without surrendering my judgment to the enthusiasm surrounding it.

Large school systems sometimes need broad policies that can be implemented consistently across hundreds of schools. One of the privileges of leading a small school is that we can make decisions at the scale of childhood, not at the scale of a school system.

We know our students. We know our teachers. We can consider the age of the children, the purpose of a lesson, what a tool makes possible, and what it might replace.

Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes it will be no. And sometimes a teacher-guided demonstration will serve children better than putting the tool in their hands.

The real question is whether technology has earned its place in the classroom, or whether it’s replacing something more important.

That is how we put our educational priorities into practice. The learning determines the tool, not the other way around.

Especially When Children Are Young

As children move from Preschool into Elementary at WHPS, technology does not suddenly become the center of their school day.

Children are learning to sustain attention, turn thoughts into writing, make sense of numbers, persist through difficulty, listen to other people, and develop ideas together.

Those aren’t prerequisites we should rush through so children can get to the technology. They are the education.

That is why technology use in our youngest grades remains intentionally limited. As students move into second and third grade, they begin using individual Chromebooks more regularly to organize their work and develop digital independence. Books, handwriting, conversation, collaboration, physical making, and hands-on investigation remain central.

I’ve watched a teacher use a simple app during an early writing unit so children could orally organize a story with a beginning, middle, and end before bringing those ideas to paper. The technology wasn’t telling the story. The child was.

Technology & AI at WHPS: What Parents Should Know Student devices, AI literacy, and how teachers use these tools

Preschool Through First Grade

Technology use is intentionally limited. Children spend most of their day learning directly with teachers, classmates, books, materials, and the world around them.

Second and Third Grade

Students have individual Chromebooks and begin using Google Drive more regularly to organize and manage their work. Device use increases gradually but remains selective, supporting growing digital independence without allowing screens to crowd out other important learning experiences.

Maker and Technology Programs

Students explore coding, design, 3D printing, digital safety, and opportunities to understand and create with technology. These experiences are purposeful parts of a broader education, not reasons to make every learning experience digital.

How Teachers Are Exploring AI

Our educators are exploring AI selectively to brainstorm instructional approaches, adapt materials, develop resources, and consider ways to make complex ideas more accessible. Teachers may also use it to help examine student work and consider possible next learning goals.

These uses still require professional judgment. Generated information and resources must be checked for accuracy, bias, and relevance. A suggested learning goal must make sense for the actual child. Teachers remain responsible for instructional decisions and for protecting student privacy.

AI can surface patterns and possibilities. The teacher knows the child and makes the instructional decision.

Some Things Should Remain Inefficient

Generative AI presents a particular challenge for schools because it can do more than retrieve information. It can produce writing, explanations, images, and solutions that look remarkably like the work we ask children to develop themselves.

That makes knowing when not to use it especially important.

Children need to struggle with a sentence until it finally says what they mean. They need to get stuck, make something that doesn’t work, disagree, reconsider, and develop judgment of their own.

Efficiency is not always the goal of childhood. Sometimes the inefficient part is where the learning is.

There is a reason partner and small-group work is built into the WHPS day. Children develop their thinking by explaining ideas, listening, defending a position, reconsidering, and sometimes changing their minds.

Before we ask children to have sophisticated conversations with machines, they need plenty of practice having sophisticated conversations with people.

AI Literacy Without Making AI the Assignment

Ignoring AI’s existence would be neither realistic nor in our students’ best interests. Children need to understand the technology shaping the world around them, even while adults are still learning about its capabilities and limitations.

As students grow, we see a place for developmentally appropriate AI literacy. In Upper Elementary, this may include teacher-guided demonstrations and discussions about how AI works, how to verify its output, and questions of bias, privacy, authorship, and responsible use.

In many ways, this builds on the digital literacy skills we have long taught: looking at who is behind a website, considering whether a source is trustworthy, verifying information against reliable sources, and properly citing the work of others.

AI introduces new questions, but the importance of critical judgment remains the same. A confident answer is not necessarily a correct one.

Educational frameworks such as AI4K12’s grade-band progressions offer useful guidance as we consider what is appropriate for children at different stages of development.

Our goal is to help children understand and question AI, not have it do their thinking for them.

A Classroom Example: Finding Your Roots How a teacher-directed use of AI can support historical inquiry

Recently, I watched our Upper Elementary teachers use AI to help find or create a map illustrating notable waves of immigration as they prepared to launch one of my favorite projects, Finding Your Roots, a family history investigation.

What interested me was not simply the resource they could produce. It was the opportunity to make the process visible to students: explain how the tool was used, model how to verify its information, and ask whether the map accurately represents the history being studied.

Who or what might be missing? How were the routes and time periods selected? What does the map help us understand, and what might it obscure?

AI can give children something else to question. It should not give them the work they were supposed to think through themselves.

These experiences do not require handing students a chatbot or asking AI to complete their assignments. They give teachers another way to model the habits of thoughtful inquiry.

What Parents Can Expect From Us

We don’t know what AI will look like when today’s Kindergarten students graduate from high school. No one does.

Our practices may change as the technology, evidence, and educational possibilities change. But the standard we use to make those decisions will remain.

We will protect attention, handwriting, books, conversation, physical making, collaboration, and productive struggle when those are the better ways to learn. We will introduce new tools when they contribute something meaningful, not simply because they exist.

We will continue to ask what a particular use of technology makes possible, what it might replace, and whether it truly serves the children in front of us.

We aren’t preparing children for a world without artificial intelligence. We are preparing them to enter a world full of it without surrendering the capacities that make their own intelligence valuable.

Before children learn to collaborate with artificial intelligence, they need an intelligence of their own worth collaborating with.

Those are the parts of growing up we are unwilling to outsource.