St. Cloud Summit Sparks Collaborative Efforts to Integrate AI in Minnesota Schools

(KNSI) – How Minnesota schools adapt to artificial intelligence has become a hot topic, and a conference held in St. Cloud Monday hopes to lay the groundwork for a potential answer.

Grant Dossetto/KNSI News

The Minnesota Thought Leaders 2024 Summit gathered at Tech High School with business executives, teachers, and policymakers all taking part. Senator Mary Kunesh says government has the tools in place to tackle the issue.

“The Computer Science Committee was created and tasked with looking at computer science program and curriculum and perhaps review creation of standards for K-12 across Minnesota.”

Kunesh envisions AI being a significant piece of the committee’s work in the future. Kunesh says corporate partnerships would help speed up adoption of AI tools by districts and she believes the technology will eventually become important enough to be part of required high school curriculum.

She is chair of the Education Finance Committee and was previously a library media specialist. Kunesh says fears over students using AI to plagiarize could be overblown. She says we have to show them from a young age it is wrong.

“You can work with as young as kindergarteners with the concept of ‘You can’t steal somebody else’s ideas, you can’t take somebody else’s words and pass them off as their own.’ That’s a concept that they understand very well.”

She hopes to get schools to add back a library media specialist position to their staffs. At one time, it was required.

Superintendent Laurie Putnam guiding the morning panels and participated in the breakout sessions afterwards. She tells KNSI News education isn’t always proactive by its nature and that sometimes gets the industry into trouble. Since we know AI is coming, Putnam wants to get out ahead of it.

“That’s happening. It’s going to happen with or without us, so I’d rather we be with it, so that we aren’t playing catch up like we did with social media. We see what that’s done to our kids.”

Monday’s conference was only a starting point, but Putnam says she is impressed by how eager the different groups were to come together and develop a framework.

She praises the work of the attendees, saying it is inspiring to see everyone pull in the same direction.

“One of the things that I’ve been most amazed by is really listening to the interconnectedness of ideas between the business and industry folks and our policy folks. Seeing a lot of common thread about the need to do something different to change outcomes for our kids, and really the willingness to work together.”

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