A fall 2025 College Board survey found the majority of high schoolers use Generative AI tools, such as Chat GPT, for schoolwork, even though nearly half of American schools restrict its use. As educators struggle to keep pace with AI, one rural Virginia school system is embracing it.
Educator Kenny Bouwens directs career and technical education and innovation at Louisa County Public Schools. Jokingly referred to as Louisa County Public Schools’ “AI godfather,” he’s been functionally blind since childhood— his superpower, he says.
“Everything I want to do I’ve had to figure out a different way to do it,” explained Bouwens, who’s worked in Louisa County Schools for the past nine years, and been a teacher for the past 15. “I’ve been flexing that muscle since I was a child. So, that’s kind of like, when we talk about AI, I see it as unleashing my abilities to do more than I could ever do before. It saves time, it saves energy that I can put in other places. So, when people say it’s killing creativity, I don’t see it in that way. I see that it’s giving us more tools to be creative with.”
Louisa County was the first Virginia district to license for SchoolAI for its 500 instructional staff and 5,200 students, a platform that offers lesson planning tools, online workspaces, and learning insights about students. Now in year three of Louisa’s AI embrace, Bouwens has become a leading voice for the technology, convening regular forums to help teachers, administrators, and community members understand AI’s power and place in schools.
Bouwens pitches AI as a time saver. It can be used to grade student writing, integrate curricular themes, draft parent emails, develop quizzes, and quickly come up with graphic design. Louisa teachers aren’t required to use AI, and many still don’t.
“The technology is not going away, it’s never going to, you know, disappear,” Bouwens said. “There’s no putting it back in the bottle.”
Marcia Flora taught elementary school for 17 years. For the last year, she’s taught high schoolers who want to become teachers. Flora uses AI daily, including to create conversational warm-ups with AI chatbots and lesson plan-building exercises for her sometimes-dubious students.
“They’re getting better,” said Flora, “but, even now, when we do projects, and I say, ‘I’ve put a space for you, I want you to use AI to generate ideas, or make your ideas stronger,’ they still stay, ‘But that’s cheating. Isn’t that cheating?’ And I say, well, if you get it to do the entire project for you, then, yes, that’s cheating,” Flora said. “But if
you use it as a tool, to bounce ideas off of, ‘Here’s my thoughts, how can I make this better?’ then you’re specific about how it can help you, then you’re using it to make yourself better as a tool. So, they’re coming along. A goal we’ve set is to try to change that mindset for them.”
Bouwens observed that many school districts get bogged down restricting AI even as many companies expect young workers to arrive AI-ready.
“Everything we do educationally, I really do believe, is important,” Bouwens said. “But one of the things I follow that up with is, when they graduate high school and maybe they go to college, and they go to a job, their employer’s not going to care how they got the job done, for the most part. They’re just going to care that they got it done. And that they got it done in the most effective way possible. So, we create these parameters now where we tell them they can’t use it, but the second they go to work for any corporation or any business, they’re going to say, ‘Why aren’t you using AI to do these things?’ So, you know, we just have to shift a little bit.”
Louisa County—which banned cell phones from its campuses in 2010—may be ahead of the curve. Fewer than half of American teachers have had training or professional development related to AI. Just 48% of students say they received instruction at school on how to use AI.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
