Celebrating visionary school systems leading the way in responsible, human-centered AI integration
Awards presented at Student and Community Voice AI Summit in partnership with Orange County Department of Education and AI for Equity
Award Recipient
Anaheim Union High School District
Anaheim, CA | ~26,000 students
AUHSD's guiding principle: technology is built with the community, not for them. The Student AI Framework, approved December 2025 and co-authored by student interns, centers 'Youth Voice & Purpose' across grades 7–12.
Key Highlights
Skrappy AI metacognitive coach: 151,000+ student reflections this year, averaging 6 per student.
AI Workgroup: students serve as strategic co-designers — not focus group participants — of district technology decisions.
Multilingual AI Town Halls in Spanish, Korean, and Vietnamese ensure equitable community engagement.
CTE AI Innovation Pathways from junior high through specialized high school cybersecurity and engineering programs.
Cajon Valley moves 'at the speed of trust' — a deliberate, stakeholder-led rollout that sought systematic input from unions, families, and students before advancing, earning consistent community praise for prioritizing people over speed.
Key Highlights
Family-student AI testing events: grades 2 through high school test tools alongside parents as equal co-designers.
High school students design and deliver digital literacy lessons to middle school peers on AI ethics.
AI ethics embedded directly into teacher lesson-planning tools at the point of design.
District-wide staff privacy training day unified all employees — teachers to support staff — on data protection.
Capistrano's AI Institute (launched 2025–26) serves 40,000 TK–12 students through a '10% Club' of early-adopting teachers who design replicable AI-integrated lessons — students use AI as a thinking partner, not a shortcut.
Key Highlights
Adult Transition students who couldn't read or write independently used AI to author, revise, and hear her own stories.
High school ELA: AI-supported analysis of character perspective and bias in a To Kill a Mockingbird unit.
AI Taskforce was a co-design body — students, parents, Board members — producing the CUSD AI Guidelines.
AI-generated personalized social stories help students navigate emotions, supporting social-emotional learning at scale.
DREAM designed its own K–12 AI Literacy Standards — aligned to the school's equity mission — and embeds AI instruction in core subjects including ELA, World History, and Social Studies, rather than treating it as a standalone course.
Key Highlights
AI Literacy Accelerator partnered with Hendy Avenue and AI for Equity to position teachers as curriculum co-designers.
January 2026 AI Innovation Index: DREAM ranked above the top quartile vs. peer districts.
9th graders at DREAM Charter High scored +5.8 above the top quartile — strongest results in the network.
Student AI Usage Policy frames AI as a learning resource, requires disclosure, and prohibits sharing personal data.
ESUSD's core belief: AI is designed with students, not for them. The district built a community-centered ecosystem including an (AI)dvisory Team of students, parents, and staff, district-wide adoption of MagicSchool AI and Canva AI, and a formal Emerging Technologies policy co-shaped by families.
Key Highlights
Student-led AIM Symposium (grades 7–12): students plan, present, and run workshops for families and community.
Student-run AI Clubs at both school sites — officers set agendas, lead prompt workshops, and mentor peers.
PTA Real Deal Day: students teach parents about responsible AI use.
AI Education Community Committee: Board members, parents, students, and teachers collaborated to help shape the district's academic honesty policy for AI use.
IUSD launched AI Literacy modules for all grades 4–12 at the start of 2025–26, paired with equitable access to vetted tools: Gemini for high school, MagicSchool and Snorkl for younger grades — all privacy-compliant.
Key Highlights
40+ student focus group classroom visits to ground next steps in actual student needs and experiences.
AI Pioneers Community of Practice: teacher think-tank identifying and spreading high-value AI use cases.
Consistent month-over-month growth in staff and student AI tool usage since school year launch.
AI Steering Committee includes Coastline ROP representatives for perspective beyond the district.
La Habra integrates AI literacy across TK–8 through hands-on experiences that position students as active trainers and evaluators of technology — embedded within a newly developed TK–8 Digital Literacy Progression.
Key Highlights
Students are introduced to artificial intelligence through guided activities.
Students engage in age-appropriate lessons about how AI systems learn from examples and why responsible, thoughtful input matters.
Teachers guide students in using AI as a support tool while continuing to emphasize creativity, critical thinking, and student voice.
The AI+ Committee includes educators, parents, California State University Fullerton Educational Technology professors, and community members who work together to guide the responsible and thoughtful use of AI in schools.
Beginning in 2026, student representatives will join the committee to help ensure student perspectives are included.
Lynwood's AI Collaborative (launched 2024–25) positions students as civic problem-solvers who choose real-world challenges and use AI as a thought partner to research, prototype, and reflect — with student choice at the center.
Key Highlights
Students and teachers co-design AI tools including PlayLab bots for tutoring and classroom discourse.
By May 2025, the majority of participating teachers at Firebaugh High used AI tools weekly or more.
Currently piloting after-school AI courses, co-building curriculum with teachers and students — with showcase events planned for the next phase.
District AI Task Force established early guardrails; all new tools vetted by Technology & Innovation.
Oak Grove believes knowledge is power. Starting in May 2025, the district built an AI Guidebook with teachers and launched the Oak Grove AI Use Levels — a grades 3–8 framework that gives students and teachers shared vocabulary for responsible AI use.
Key Highlights
All K–8 students participated in the global Hour of AI initiative to close the AI opportunity gap.
MagicSchool AI chatbot tutor in 7th-grade math — one student wrote: 'It helped me because I didn't know where to start.'
Teachers model AI use in class, reinforcing that humans control the input and evaluate the output.
AI Family Focus Group held in November 2025 to surface parent concerns and inform future learning opportunities.
dTech treats AI as a shared learning journey using an Explore → Create → Learn framework. By centering student agency first, the school produced real-world innovation before ever writing a formal policy.
Key Highlights
The school views the ethical use of AI as a tool for active creation, with students participating in—not just preparing for—the AI economy.
Students have launched multiple companies, winning state pitch competitions with classmate.app and being accepted into the Fall 2025 Y Combinator cohort.
The school actively partners with organizations including PlayLab, The Rithim Project, Future State University, and the Stanford AI Tinkery.
The AI club visits local middle schools to encourage AI fluency among younger students.
Students co-designed the school's AI framework and hosted the UK Secretary of State for Science & Technology at a Stanford roundtable.
Val Verde built the most rigorous AI governance framework in its district history: 36 educators generating 223 approval criteria through an AI Task Force — with 71% of criteria explicitly protecting student data privacy.
Key Highlights
Every AI tool is evaluated through five stakeholder lenses including explicit Student and Parent perspectives.
Equity audits built into the approval process — not added later — as a non-negotiable threshold.
Post-Task Force, AI conversations shifted from 'Is this allowed?' to 'What learning experiences does this enable?'
Spring 2026: Language-Based Programming Hackathon with Google AI Studio — students tackle civic challenges.
Award Recipient
Washington Leadership Academy
Washington, DC | ~400 students
DC's first high school to offer four years of CS, WLA has since 2023 positioned students — predominantly Black and Latinx youth, 28% differently abled — as co-designers of the AI systems that shape their learning.
Key Highlights
Annual student-led AI hack-a-thons where students build and test real AI-powered solutions.
Student survey cycles and policy committees directly drive tool selection and instructional practice.
73% student survey response rate: 70%+ understand AI's benefits and harms; 63.8% can write effective prompts.
SPED and multilingual learners serve as key co-designers — accessibility shapes every AI decision.