Last school year, Mercer Island High School gave its students a Google Gemini subscription. This year, the only artificial intelligence tool on our school computers is NotebookLM, a note-taking tool. Giving every student Gemini last year was far ahead of the game. But this year, the district has pulled back, leaving students little access to the tools of the future. Washington must build a statewide baseline that ensures each student becomes AI-literate while still giving teachers power to decide how AI fits their class. If the decision is left to districts each year, some students learn AI and some don’t, the latter entering the rest of their lives unprepared.
Many schools restrict students’ use of AI to prevent cheating and to protect critical thinking skills. Many humanities assignments would lose their purpose if AI did the critical thinking for the student, while on the flip side, AI can be leveraged in research and math to aid the student in reasoning through a complex task.
In January 2024, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal described AI as a production tool that students shouldn’t fear. One of the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s guiding principles states that schools should give students control over how much and in what ways AI is part of their education. But there is a large disconnect between the state’s guidance and what’s happening on the ground.
Across the Seattle area, schools have gone even further than ours. A senior from Roosevelt High School in Seattle told us that “we can’t use generative AI on assignments, and teachers check our work with Turnitin.” He added, “AI is banned on school computers.” Similarly, a junior from Lake Washington High School, part of the Lake Washington School District, said that their school “has a strict no-AI policy” and that “many assignments and tests have also moved to paper.”
These actions have merit, but they have a major problem. Severe restrictions ensure that students without access to guidance learn it alone, leading to misuse of its capabilities and unequal access. In fact, a student from our school didn’t even know we had access to the Gemini Pro model, instead using their own subscription. The student who could afford to pay got ahead, leaving one who couldn’t afford it behind.
AI is arriving in our schools faster than educators can teach it, and our generation cannot afford to wait to learn how to use it. Ninety-six percent of HR leaders said they expect entry-level roles to shift toward supervising AI, as found by a 2026 Cognizant and Pearson survey. Most of that work depends on judgment, and failure to incorporate AI in tasks where efficiency matters leaves students unfamiliar with the new technology.
Though the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research suggests that AI hasn’t caused mass layoffs yet, a large Harvard study found that starting in early 2023, junior employment at firms that adopted generative AI fell sharply compared with firms that didn’t, while senior employment kept rising. Washington’s schools are preparing us for the job market of the 2010s instead of the present.
On Oct. 1, Mercer Island School District Superintendent Fred Rundle announced an AI advisory group that will “create a framework to address student and staff use in schools, plagiarism, ethical responsibility, and overall acceptable use.” Without a statewide standard, districts like ours are already starting to develop their own AI policies. The extent to which students are prepared depends on their ZIP code, creating a knowledge inequality that will continue to grow until the state sets one.
In 2024, the state Senate voted 46-3 to pass SB 5849, which would have made computer science a graduation requirement. It died without even receiving a House vote. So while the two of us are heading off to college and the military, we hope that when lawmakers return to Olympia on Jan. 11, they will finally revisit the computer science graduation requirement, adding AI literacy and resources for schools to teach responsible use. We are looking forward to hearing from students at our school that they are learning how and when to use AI.
