Cariboo’s SD 27 advocates the use of AI as a tool in the classroom
Published Tuesday, February 10, 2026 at 11am
Artificial intelligence is emerging as a tool for students to use within School District 27 (SD 27).
Peter Skene Ogden Secondary School (PSO) in 100 Mile House said in a newsletter sent to parents last month that it was holding meetings with students about the use of artificial intelligence (AI). The school says about two-thirds of students are trying to use ChatGPT at school, in line with the national average.
“The crux of the matter is that we want students to learn how to use AI appropriately. We talked to students not only about the potential support that AI can provide for their studies, but also about the potential pitfalls,” the newsletter said.
They cited brainstorming and idea generation as positive, but said it was a serious problem if students used it to generate parts of their essays and pass them off as their own, as that would be considered plagiarism.
SD 27 Superintendent Cheryl Lendon generally agreed with what the high school told students during the assembly. Lenardon said the use of AI is just a tool.
“All of our conduct and other expectations and policies apply when using AI, for example when talking about intellectual property and appropriately citing such works and works,” Lenardon said. “Whether a human manually copies something from a book or presents something created by an AI as their own work, that’s plagiarism.”
Deep learning AI models are sourced from large data sets from the internet, including images and text available from popular websites. The text is then converted to binary code, analyzed by AI, and after repeated testing, the model improves accuracy by matching the image to the text description.
This caused extensive legal controversy. In the field of journalism, the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in 2023 after claiming that their engine was trained based on articles written by journalists. In Canada, News Media Canada sued OpenAI in 2024 for copyright infringement over a news article it said was used to train ChatGPT.
Furthermore, AI is notorious for so-called hallucinations, which generate false or misleading information and present it as fact.
Lenardon said it is important that students are educated about the use of artificial intelligence and learn both its advantages and disadvantages.
“There are many acceptable uses for AI, such as collecting sources and integrating vast amounts of information, but we need to check the facts,” Lenardon explained. “Being able to evaluate that information is part of digital media literacy. Is the information accurate? So this is like a giant card catalog that really empowers the student’s work.”
Lenardon has no information about the reported use of AI in SD 27 schools. Additionally, he said that teachers have the autonomy to use different tools and sources and could not imagine a course where AI was not used.
As for determining whether a student’s work was generated by AI, Lenardon said this could lead teachers to make different assessments. She thinks this possibility is interesting because it allows teachers to anticipate and take into account the use of AI.
“If you’re doing a summative assessment to determine someone’s achievement in a course, you can design it in a variety of ways,” Lenardon explained. “The best way to do this is to have really rich assessments where you show students their work, show them their steps. You can also incorporate AI, where they search as part of planning and writing their assignments, where they fact-check and show you how they did it.”
Lenardon added that there are real concerns in the education system about whether or not it will be possible to know if something was generated by AI.
“But we have so much control as educators over how we assess student knowledge. We just have to build it in, we expect it to be used, we encourage its use, but we can shape what it looks like,” Lenardon said.
SD 27 does not currently have a formal AI policy, but Lenardon said they are considering adding such a policy in the future. She noted that school districts in British Columbia are discussing the use of AI. Any policy will reflect input from the province, particularly the B.C. School Trustees Association, which sets policy for all school districts in B.C.
As for Lenardon, she personally finds the rise of AI in the classroom both exciting and frightening.
“There are a lot of possibilities. You can personalize learning and give students access to information they would never find or access otherwise, but there is a great responsibility in teaching that media literacy and how to use media literacy in a responsible way.”
