Jeffco announced on Aug. 18, 2025 that all students in grades 6 through 12 would have access to Google Gemini starting in the 2025-26 school year.
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This school year, a Jeffco eighth-grader can open a school laptop, pull up Google’s Gemini chatbot, and ask it for help with an essay.
Whether that’s allowed is up to her teacher. And in the state’s every-other-year survey of school staff this spring, fewer than one in three Jeffco teachers said they feel prepared for the changes AI is bringing to their classrooms.
Jeffco’s guidance for students says teachers decide when and how AI can be used, and that different teachers may set different rules.
What the district built
Jeffco made Gemini available to every student in grades 6 through 12 last August. NotebookLM, another Google AI tool, followed in October. In September, the district blocked outside AI tools that didn’t meet its standards for privacy, security and content.
Around the rollout, the district published guidance for students and staff. The student guidance runs several pages and covers principles, classroom rules and academic honesty.
Five guiding principles lead the list, starting with a rule that AI should help you think, not think for you, and that you’re 100% responsible for your final product.
The guidance gives teachers a red, yellow and green traffic light system to mark each assignment. Red means no AI. Yellow means limited use, documented and cited. Green means AI is encouraged.
Students are asked to use an honesty check called the AI Swap Test. Take a sentence like “My parents helped me with this,” swap “parents” for “AI,” and if it feels like you’re bending the rules, you probably are.
On academic honesty, the guidance says, “All existing policies on plagiarism, cheating, and unauthorized assistance fully apply to work produced by or with the assistance of generative AI tools.”
For all its detail, the guidance comes back to one person; The traffic light is set by the teacher. Permission comes from the teacher, and students unsure whether they can use AI for an assignment are told to ask their teacher.
Parents can read the rules their children are expected to follow, but they can’t read the rules for the teacher making the call. Jeffco’s AI guidance for educators and staff sits on a district intranet page that requires a staff login.
Class Notes
Ready or not: Jeffco teachers are deciding how students use AI
Three AI tools reached Jeffco students between August and October 2025. The state surveyed school staff the following spring. Tap any entry for the detail.
AUG. 2025 • Gemini opens to grades 6-12 +
Every secondary student gets access to Google’s AI chatbot.
Jeffco announced on Aug. 18, 2025 that all students in grades 6 through 12 would have access to Google Gemini starting in the 2025-26 school year. It was the district’s first at-scale student rollout of generative AI.
SEPT. 2025 • Outside AI tools blocked +
The district restricts platforms that don’t meet its standards.
In a Sept. 18, 2025 notice, Jeffco said it was blocking external AI tools that don’t meet its data privacy, security and content standards. Students keep access to district-approved tools.
OCT. 2025 • NotebookLM added +
A second Google AI tool reaches the same students.
NotebookLM, Google’s AI research and writing assistant, activated Oct. 1, 2025 for all students in grades 6 through 12. By the start of the school year, Jeffco secondary students had two Google generative-AI tools available to them.
SPRING 2026
The state asks the teachers
Colorado surveys school staff about AI for the first time.
65% have used AI in their work, like planning lessons
31% feel prepared for the changes AI is bringing
35% have a clear way to tell whether a chatbot wrote a student’s work
39% say their AI training has been adequate
3,961 of 7,643 eligible Jeffco teachers and staff responded, a rate of 51.8%. The state publishes district results only when more than half of eligible staff respond. Jeffco’s AI questions scored lower than any other topic in its report.
Source: Jeffco Public Schools; 2026 Teaching and Learning Conditions Colorado survey Class Notes
What the teachers said
Two-thirds of Jeffco’s teachers and staff told the state they’ve already used AI in their work, including lesson planning. Fewer than one in three said they feel prepared for the changes AI is bringing.
The responses are from a survey called Teaching and Learning Conditions Colorado, which asks teachers, counselors, aides and principals every couple of years what it’s like to work in their schools. This was the first year the survey asked about AI.
In Jeffco, the AI questions scored lower than any other section on the survey.
Only about one in three teachers said they have a clear way to tell whether a student’s work was written by a chatbot.
Fewer than two in five said they’ve had enough training to use AI at all, and just over half said the district gives clear guidelines for responsible AI use.
The survey scores its questions in groups, one per topic. In Jeffco, the three AI groups came in lower than every other topic on the survey.
Lowest of all was the group on using AI in the classroom, at just under half.
In Jeffco, 3,961 of 7,643 eligible teachers and staff answered, a response rate of 51.8%, clearing the 50% threshold the state requires before it will publish a district’s results.
The district doesn’t dispute the numbers. Asked about the AI results, a Jeffco spokesperson said the district welcomes the data and treats it as a starting point.
“The fact that only 31% of staff feel prepared for future AI changes and 39% feel they have had adequate training confirms what we already knew,” the district said. “This is a massive, industry-wide shift, and our educators need time and support to adjust.”
For next year, the district points to its 2026-27 ed-tech professional learning plan.
That plan includes a self-paced course built in-house, “AI for Teachers: Jeffco Supported Tools & Ethical Implementation,” with modules on classroom ethics, using Gemini with students, using NotebookLM, and AI image tools. Other courses in the plan fold in AI for teacher productivity.
The AI course is on-demand and virtual, the kind a teacher works through on her own time rather than a session the district schedules for everyone.
The district didn’t write a standalone AI policy. Instead, it folded AI into the policy that governs student use of district technology and the internet. That policy names AI only in passing, as a privilege students can lose and as something they can misuse to cheat, with discipline up to suspension or expulsion for misuse.
The honor system
Students are told to document their AI use, cite it when a teacher permits it and be open with the teacher about it. The district’s guidance states that being transparent about AI use is part of maintaining academic integrity.
The check on that honesty is the teacher, the same teacher who, in the survey, is more likely than not to say she has no clear way to spot AI-written work.
The district also says its AI rollout came with thorough training for teachers and clear policies.
Still, more than three in five said their training wasn’t adequate, and nearly half said the guidelines weren’t clear.
What the board policy covers, and what it doesn’t
What it doesn’t do is govern how AI gets used in a classroom: When it’s appropriate, how a teacher should weigh AI-assisted work, what “responsible use” means in practice. All of that lives in the administrative guidance, the traffic light and the five principles, not in anything the board voted on.
The district says that’s by design. Updating existing policy, a spokesperson said, keeps the district’s “core standards” unified while letting the “day-to-day” AI guidelines stay administrative, so the district can “adapt and respond to rapid technological shifts” without a policy rewrite each time.
The district also said the decision to roll out Gemini when it did was deliberate.
“Our leadership team recognized that students were already using unregulated, consumer-facing AI tools outside of school hours — often on platforms that do not protect student data privacy,” the district said. “We believe it is far safer and more instructionally sound to teach students responsible digital citizenship than to ignore the reality of these tools.”
Jeffco also has a volunteer advisory committee looking at AI. The Technology and Data Privacy Advisory Committee named AI a focus area last fall, held what it called an “initial conversation about best practices and pitfalls from other workplaces” in March, and gave the board a year-end update in June that listed AI alongside student data privacy and screen time.
The committee plans to keep AI on its list next year.
Not just a Jeffco problem
Jeffco isn’t an outlier. On nearly every AI question, its teachers answered almost exactly like teachers across Colorado.
Statewide, 54% of school staff said they’re comfortable with AI, compared with 53% in Jeffco. About a third feel prepared for what’s coming, in Jeffco and in the state alike, and two-thirds statewide have used AI on the job.
That cuts both ways. Jeffco’s teachers aren’t unusually unprepared for AI, and the readiness gap the survey found here is one the state as a whole shares.
Across the Front Range, few districts have put a standalone AI policy before their school boards.
Denver, Douglas County and Academy District 20 all operate through guidance documents, the way Jeffco does, teacher discretion and existing academic-integrity rules stretched to cover AI, rather than board-adopted rules written specifically for the technology.
Colorado’s August 2024 AI roadmap, produced by the Colorado Education Initiative with the state education department, was explicitly non-binding and urged districts to favor “fluid guidance over rigid policy.” Three years into the ChatGPT era, that’s largely where the region’s districts, Jeffco included, remain.
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