As artificial intelligence continues to make inroads into school districts, K-12 human resources professionals say the tech has expanded their bandwidth — but urge caution in regard to handing too much over to the technology.
In the case of Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools, the district leveraged AI to create a Python script that helped sift through all of its more than 40,000 employee records, extract relevant information, and put the records in the correct order to upload into the same system. Beforehand, those same records were scattered across different systems, said William Solomon, the district’s chief human resources officer.
“It probably doesn't sound like the most glamorous use case for AI, but I would argue that it actually empowered us to focus on more of the strategic work and less of the task-oriented work,” Solomon said.
But Solomon also stressed the importance of keeping human decision-making at the center of district HR decisions during a virtual panel of school district and state HR leaders hosted on Aug. 11 by ILO Group, an education strategy and policy firm.
The discussion for schools comes at a time when some uses of AI in HR within other sectors — such as relying on the technology for hiring or helping with layoff decisions — is leading to pushback and even legal troubles.
As the largest district in Indiana, Indianapolis Public Schools often has to navigate a “massive pool of candidates” for open roles, including school principals, said Christina Aden Hamer, chief human resources officer at IPS. To provide more support to the director of talent acquisition, she said during the panel, the district used AI to create a more efficient and targeted candidate processing system for hiring principals.
Aden Hamer later told K-12 Dive on Aug. 19 that, before the AI tool was rolled out, a team of staff would have to review every initial application submitted before advancing a candidate further into the hiring process for a principal position. To decide that, the team would score candidates using a rubric assessment based on the person’s experience, she said.
Now, Aden Hamer said, the district has built its own internal AI tool that uses the same rubric and department priorities to score the initial pool of principal applicants. Then, the candidates with appropriate scores move forward to the in-person process overseen by a hiring committee.
Indianapolis Public Schools spent a year collecting feedback from its school community about its level of comfort with the district's use of AI, said Aden Hamer on the Aug. 11 panel. From there, she said, the district began a pilot program for school buildings and the central office.
“I think the overarching North Star — that we have continued to not only be accountable to for our community and stakeholders — is that AI for IPS is not a replacement for any decision,” Aden Hamer said.
AI, the panelists agreed, provides an opportunity for school HR professionals to save time to focus more on what matters most: training and hiring talent.
AI governance and data privacy
When implementing AI in school districts — or, even more broadly, at the state level — it’s “healthy” to let staff initially experiment with AI tools, said Margarita Tovar Rosales, deputy commissioner of policy and talent at the Colorado Department of Education. But without governance, AI use can become too sprawled, costly and unproductive at scale, she said during the panel.
At the Colorado Department of Education, Tovar Rosales said, the state agency worked with education nonprofit WestEd to help every operational team develop AI use cases. After the department went through its own AI pilot, staff were able to exercise the muscle of asking prompts and questions with these tools.
The pilot program has allowed the department to move toward developing workflows and consistency with its AI use, Tovar Rosales said. Additionally, staff now know who the point of contact is when they want to start AI initiatives.
When it comes to protecting data, Indianapolis Public Schools already has a culture that prioritizes the safeguarding of personally identifiable information, said Aden Hamer during the panel. That also means the district does not approve using personally identifiable information in its AI tools, she said.
To avoid putting personally identifiable information — including names — into AI, Aden Hamer told K-12 Dive that IPS has built its own AI tools and processes through Google’s Gemini system rather than relying on multiple third-party vendors. Within that, the district’s HR department has built templates based on certain secure spreadsheets that do not include sensitive data, she said.
By only building internal AI tools, Indianapolis Public Schools has saved over $300,000 districtwide for the 2026-27 school year, Aden Hamer told K-12 Dive. Those savings are expected to grow up to an additional $500,000 for the following school year as the district sunsets more third-party software tools.
Another way that Indianapolis’ HR department taps into AI is by using the technology to help generate and standardize salary offering emails, Aden Hamer said. The tool does not assume compensation but rather completes a manual calculation using the district’s compensation rubrics, which can be based on salary schedules or collective bargaining contracts, she added.
“So it is saving a lot of time in a space where we keep that human-centered concept in place,” Aden Hamer said. “We're not asking it to assess non-tangible or soft skill criteria that then goes into compensation.”
In Fairfax County Public Schools, Solomon said, the district doesn’t use sensitive data like Social Security numbers or dates of birth when using AI tools. However, because the district uses multiple AI tools with single sign-on credentials within its own secure network, Fairfax County Public Schools does use some specific information like names and work locations.
“The flexibility to be able to use AI to tease out details is gold,” Solomon said.
