A Practitioner Publication
What's safe, what's not, and how to decide
If you teach in Texas, the guidance you have been given about AI in your classroom has probably come from a vendor webinar, a compliance training slide deck, or a colleague down the hall. None of these is what you actually need. What you need is a field guide — written by a practitioner, for practitioners, that says what the rules are, names what the rules aren't, and gives you a decision you can make in ten seconds.
This playbook exists because a 1974 privacy law (FERPA), a 2026 AI statute (Texas HB 149), and your district's policy — if it has one — are each addressing a different part of the same problem, and none of them is writing for the teacher. The document below is.
After months of conversations with colleagues about AI tools, student data, and what counts as a safe account, I realized the answers I was giving in hallways and PLC meetings were the document that didn't exist yet. So I wrote it down, verified every vendor claim against primary sources, and built it to be the document I wish I had handed myself two years ago.
Table of Contents
Between a 1974 privacy law and a 2026 AI statute sits a teacher holding a laptop at 4:45 on a Thursday. Nobody has written down, in plain language, what that teacher should do. Three forces — federal law (FERPA), state law (Texas HB 149), and district policy — are each addressing a different part of the problem, and none of them is writing for the classroom teacher.
This section names the gap explicitly and positions the playbook as the document that fills it — written by a practitioner, for practitioners, in the space the other three forces leave empty.
If a teacher tapes one page of this playbook above their desk, this is the one. Three questions, in the order to ask them. If any one of them gives a bad answer, the prompt doesn't go through.
Does this prompt contain any student PII — names, IDs, scores tied to a child, IEP content, metadata that could identify?
Is this account covered by a signed data agreement, or is it a consumer account that can't be made compliant with any toggle?
Is a human reviewing the output before it affects a student? AI drafts. The human decides.
The section includes a five-outcome flowchart that turns the three questions into a decision gate, and a test under each question a teacher can use in under five seconds.
FERPA was passed in 1974, cited as 20 U.S.C. § 1232g and implemented at 34 CFR Part 99 — when a school principal kept grades in a locked filing cabinet and the word "upload" was not in the dictionary. None of that context has been updated. The law has not been meaningfully amended for the cloud era.
This section gives a teacher a working model of FERPA: a ten-item concrete list of what counts as an "education record," a then-vs-now view of how AI changed the calculus of disclosure, and an honest three-tier breakdown of what actually happens when something goes wrong — federal, district, and family. The core argument: FERPA is not a paperwork law, it is a trust law.
The same AI tool can be safe to use with student data on Monday and unsafe on Tuesday — depending entirely on which account you signed in with. This section is the reference table that turns that decision into a five-second check.
The section includes a master matrix of ten account tiers across OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Microsoft — verified against primary vendor documentation in April 2026 — plus side-by-side vendor blocks detailing the exact distinction between each consumer and institutional tier.
The three questions, applied to real classroom moments. Some are safer than they feel; some are riskier than they look; all thirty are things a teacher somewhere is doing this week.
The red list opens with the highest-risk action a teacher can take: pasting an IEP, 504, or evaluation report into any AI. The yellow list closes with the clearest articulation of the drafting-vs-deciding distinction: AI drafts, you decide, every comment reads like it came from you because it did.
What a teacher can safely do with AI depends less on the tool and more on the district they teach in. This section gives three archetypes, a scene that makes each concrete, and a three-column playbook of what to do today, what not to do, and what to push the district toward next.
The rules are identical in all three. The paths to the tools that satisfy them are not. The section closes with five universal moves that work in an 800-student district and a 300,000-student district equally well.
A district does not need a fifty-page AI policy. It needs a two-page one that is current, specific, and actually used. This is that one — adapt, approve, and attach an approved-tools list.
The framework includes fillable fields for district-specific details, instructional drafting notes in the margins, and a closing section explaining what was deliberately left out and why. Labeled as a "sample policy framework for district adaptation," not a model policy — the legal difference matters.
Twelve questions, ten minutes, an honest picture of where your practice stands today. Print the page, circle yes or no, total the score, adjust the one or two things that stand out.
"Have you, in the last 90 days, pasted any part of an IEP, 504 plan, or evaluation report into any AI tool?"
The scoring rubric reads from "confident practice" at 10–12 down to "stop and reset" at 0–3. The audit closes by naming question 6 — not question 12 — as the most telling answer. That one marks the line between thoughtful AI use and the kind that ends careers.
Every vendor claim in this playbook was verified against primary documentation in April 2026. This section organizes the citations by category — federal guidance, Texas state law, FERPA references, vendor docs, practitioner analysis — so readers can find what they need in seconds.
Prepared by Austin Lee, 6th Grade Advanced Math & Robotics Teacher and Instructional Leader, Cleburne ISD. All vendor-specific claims verified against primary documentation in April 2026.
This is a practitioner resource. It is not legal advice. It does not replace district policy. Where this document and a district's current policy disagree, follow the district.
This playbook was written to be forwarded, adapted, and improved. If your district is building AI policy and any of it is useful, use it. If something needs correcting, say so.
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