How students, staff, and families may use AI at JCA — and the one rule everything else rests on.
JCA teaches artificial intelligence rather than avoiding it. Our students are growing up in a world where AI is already part of how people learn and work, and sending them into it unprepared is not protection.
But a tool that can write an essay in four seconds can also quietly do a child's thinking for them, and thinking is the thing school is for. This policy exists so that everyone — students, teachers, and parents — knows where the line is before anyone crosses it.
Discernment before dependence. We are not trying to catch students out. We are trying to raise people who can tell the difference between a tool that helps them think and a tool that thinks instead of them — and who choose the first one when nobody is watching.
Any tool that generates work for you when you describe what you want. That includes chat assistants, image and video generators, AI writing and “humanizing” tools, homework-solver apps that photograph a problem and return an answer, and the AI features now built into search engines, word processors, and phone keyboards.
It does not include spell-check, a calculator, a dictionary, or a search engine used to find and read sources yourself.
If you are unsure whether something counts, assume it does and ask your teacher. Asking is never the wrong move.
The work you hand in must represent your own thinking. You must be able to explain any part of it, in your own words, without the tool in front of you.
Everything below is an application of that one sentence. If a situation is not covered here, hold it against that rule and you will usually have your answer.
“The thinking stays with the student” is also how we build our own tools, which is why Mr. Spartan will not simply hand over an answer (Section 06).
Unless a teacher says otherwise for a particular assignment, students may use an approved AI tool to:
In every one of those, the student does the work and the tool responds to it. That is the right order.
Handing in work you cannot explain is the clearest sign the line has been crossed, whatever produced it.
There is no single answer that fits every subject and every age, so teachers set the rule for each assignment and say so in writing on the assignment itself. Three settings:
If an assignment says nothing, the default is AI to help you think.
Mr. Spartan is our AI learning coach, built on the ShepherdOS platform for this school. He is guardrailed on purpose:
Sparkbot is our classroom coding module. Students sign in with their school account, and it records their progress on puzzles so teachers can see how the class is doing.
Both are school tools, which means school rules apply to them. Conversations with Mr. Spartan may be reviewed by staff for safety.
Staff may use AI to plan lessons, draft materials, and reduce administrative load. Three limits hold:
Staff may not enter a student’s work — essays, assessments, or anything a child wrote — into an AI tool the school has not approved, even with the name removed. Work submitted to an outside service cannot be taken back. If a tool would genuinely help with marking, ask the administration first rather than afterwards.
Never enter a student's name, photograph, address, grades, health or family information, or any identifying detail into an AI tool that the school has not approved. Once information is submitted to an outside service, the school cannot retrieve it.
How the school's own tools handle data — what is collected, how long it is kept, and our obligations to children under COPPA — is set out in our Privacy Policy. Conversation logs with Mr. Spartan are kept no longer than twelve months and are then permanently deleted.
A first incident is treated as a teaching moment, because for most students it will be one. The teacher talks with the student, the work is redone, and parents are told.
A repeated or more serious incident is handled under the school's existing academic integrity and discipline procedures, in the same way as any other work that is not a student's own. Using AI does not create a separate category of offence, and it does not excuse one.
Nothing here changes the standard the school already holds about honesty in schoolwork. AI is a new way to break an old rule.
You do not need to police this at home, and you are not expected to become an expert. The most useful thing a parent can do is ask your child to explain their work to you. If they can, the thinking happened. If they cannot, something went wrong — and that is worth a conversation, not a punishment.
If you would prefer your child not use the school's AI tools, contact the office and we will talk it through with you and your child's teacher.
Our broader approach, and what we teach students about discernment, is on the AI & Innovation page.
This policy is reviewed at least once each school year, and sooner when the tools change — which, at present, they do often.
| Policy owner | JCA Administration · info@jcakids.org |
| Last reviewed | 20 October 2026 |
| Next review | October 2027 |
| Questions | info@jcakids.org · (850) 494-2477 |