Kopel Infinite SolutionsCA District AI Decision Guide

A preview of the guide

California District AI Decision Guide

A step-by-step way for district leaders to decide how their schools will use AI, write those decisions down, and show where each one lives.

This page shows what the guide is and what a district gets from it. The guide itself is a private web app that district teams sign into, so everything you see below uses a sample district and sample data.

The problem

Everyone is asking what the plan is for AI.

Boards ask. Parents ask. Teachers are already using AI tools, and they want to know what is okay.

The guidance exists, but it is scattered. There are state laws, a state model policy, federal student privacy rules, and a lot of acronyms. Most leaders are not sure what to decide first, or who should own it.

So decisions get made in pieces. A tool gets approved without a privacy check. A policy gets drafted, but no one is named to carry it out. A teacher puts student information into the wrong tool. And when someone asks where it is all written down, no one can point to it.

What the guide does

It walks a leadership team through the decisions, in order.

There are five decision areas, 37 decisions in all.

1

Governance. Who makes AI decisions, and how community voices get included.

2

Policy. The six areas the statewide guidance covers, and how the CDE model policy fits in.

3

Professional development. Who needs which level of training, and how to know it is working.

4

Procurement. How to check AI tools for safety, privacy, and equity before approving them.

5

Curriculum and instruction. AI literacy in the classroom, and making sure every student has fair access.

Each area has plain-language explanations, an equity check, a short knowledge check, and a reflection question. Every decision comes with a sentence explaining what it actually means, written for a busy administrator who has never written an AI policy.

For each decision, the team records four things:

What was decidedIn plain language.
Who owns itA named point person.
Where it standsNot started, in progress, or complete.
Where it is documentedSo anyone who asks can be shown.

What it looks like

Here are the real screens.

The Decision dashboard for a sample district, showing five decision areas with progress bars and an overall completion ring.
The dashboard. Five areas, with progress that saves automatically as the team works.
Two decision rows. Each has fields for what the district decided, an owner, a status, private notes, and where the decision is documented.
A decision. The team writes what they decided, names an owner, sets a status, and records where the proof lives. Private notes stay off the report.
The District AI Decision Report for a sample district, showing each Governance decision with a summary, owner, status, and documentation location.
The Decision Report. It shows what the district decided, who owns each decision, and where each one is documented. The report stays marked DRAFT until every decision has a documentation location noted.
A six-step path from documented decisions to an adopted, living AI policy, with step one marked You are here.
The path from here. The guide ends with the steps that turn decisions into policy: drafting, review, board adoption, rollout, and training.

This is a sample district with sample data.

What a district walks away with

A clear record of its decisions.

  • A clear, plain-language record of what the district decided in all five areas.
  • A named owner for every decision.
  • A pointer to where each decision is documented.
  • A Decision Report the team can share with a board or the district's counsel.
  • A clear path from decisions to an adopted policy.

What the guide is not. It is not a policy template, and it is not legal advice. It does not hand a district a finished policy.

California's statewide guidance and the CDE model policy are optional for districts. The guide helps a team decide what it will adopt, adapt, or decline. Then, when the team sits down with its counsel to write the policy, it already knows what it actually thinks.

Student privacy laws like FERPA are different. Those are real legal requirements, and the guide does not replace your district's counsel.

Built with care

The district stays in control.

  • Each district chooses whether Kopel Infinite Solutions can see its responses, and it can change that choice at any time. If a district says no, its responses are locked, even from me.
  • Private notes and reflections stay off the report.
  • The guide reminds staff never to type student names or other personal information into any field.

Who built it

I'm Belynda Ray.

I taught in California classrooms for 20 years, 13 of them at Bret Harte Middle School in Hayward, where I chaired the math department. I have a Master's in Applied Mathematics. Today I help schools and districts use AI in ways that support human judgment instead of replacing it.

I built this guide because the leaders I work with kept asking the same thing: where do we even start? I built it with AI tools. I'm an educator, not an attorney. I read the state documents myself and check them against the original source before they go in.

Ready to bring this to your leadership team?

Email Belynda

If you want to try something of mine right now, these two are free and open to anyone:

Try the free readiness check See the AI literacy course for educators