Integrating AI in Education: Wake County's Innovative Approach (2025)

By Lena Tillett, WRAL anchor/reporter

Three years after the release of ChatGPT changed the way we query our world, the Wake County Public School System has yet to publish an official AI policy for staff and students. Tuesday's meeting of the Wake Board of Education was the first in a series of sessions that they will dedicate to coming up with one.

In the meantime, teachers have been taking the lead to implement AI responsibly in their classrooms.

In Paul Cancellieri's eighth grade science class atMills Park Middle School, students learn how to use AI, but not at the expense of learning their lessons.

“Tests and quizzes are going to be places, where you can't use AI to help you," he explains to his students. "What's another white zone situation?"

The "zones" determine how much AI can be used in doing specific work.

"We have this scale of different levels that each assignment falls on," he explained.

"Some assignments, no AI help is allowed -- things like a test or a quiz, where I need to know what you know, and so I need to make sure there's no AI involved.

"But then some assignments, I'm okay with them using the AI to help them brainstorm, as long as they take the idea and then build it themselves.

"And then the next level is where you build the initial work by yourself as a student, and you go to AI to get feedback on how you can make it better.”

Cancellieri was an early adopter of AI. His tier system is being considered as a model for AI use across Wake County schools.

While he uses it to freshen his curriculum, but he found his students needed boundaries for AI use.

He said, “More and more of them have started to use (AI) in ways that shortcut the learning. We don't want them to have the AI do the work for them. We want the AI to help them learn, not replace their thinking, and so I've had to kind of take steps to address that."

AtNeuse River Middle School, sixth grade ELA teacher Whitney Parker started incorporating AI into lessons to keep up with her students.

"I want to be just as cool as they are," she said.

AI helps her students develop their love of reading.Every Friday, the sixth graders use Google’s chatbot Gemini to make a podcast about their reading.

Parker said the assignment checks multiple boxes for her students.

"They always want to know, like, how is this going to get me a job," she said.

The lessons teach key skills.

"Comprehension, being able to communicate and collaborate and be creative, those are the ways,” Parker tells her students they will succeed no matter the job title.

Charles Patton is Wake County Schools’ director of digital content and instruction. His team has been steeped in AI, forming a task force to help craft policy guidelines for the district.

He told WRAL News, “We believe that AI helps get the little things out of the way.”

There are AI rules in place across the district.One of those is a security contract with Google, so that students use only the Gemini chatbot for school work as a way to protect student data.

Patton explained,“It means that the student interactions and the teacher interactions with AI happen within our Google domain. Our data isn't being sent out to train their models. It stays inside of our house. We sometimes call it a walled garden for safety purposes.”

Patton says the roll out of AI depends on the school, principal and even teacher. He hopes that changes with the official adoption of an AI policy.

Parker says she looks forward to more training.

“I think the best way to start out with it is how not to be afraid of AI,” she said.

From grade school to grad school, teachers and professors want to empower students and fellow educators so that they’re not afraid of this technology.

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