What happened in Lawrence Lawrence Public Schools in Kansas has wound up its AI committee. It met four times. It never got as far as recommending a single specific policy.

The school board agreed to set the group up in June 2024, saying the technology was moving too fast to ignore. The district didn't advertise for members until November 2025. The superintendent then expected a proposal by early 2026. That didn't happen either.

Broad guidelines on data privacy, academic integrity and AI literacy reached the board in August, over a year late. Several members told the Lawrence Times they never discussed or agreed what was shared.

Policy is now pencilled in for the 2027-28 school year. That's more than three years after the board first asked for it. And the students haven't waited: the same report cites research showing more than half of US teens already use AI for schoolwork.

Where it went wrong Read the members' accounts and the problems were baked in from the start.

Nobody knew what the group was for. Members said the committee never had a clear objective. Board members now admit the policy recommendation part of the brief could have been clearer. One said they should have explained up front that actual policy comes from the board's own policy committee. So volunteers thought they were writing policy, while the district thought it was gathering views.

The big question was off the table. Christin Bowman, a parent who works in tech, said the group never got to discuss whether the district should use AI at all. She felt sessions were steered towards the upsides, with a few guardrails bolted on. Many members were far more cautious than that.

Expertise was sidelined. Katie Conrad, an English professor at the University of Kansas who researches critical AI literacy, said much of her input was ignored. She called the process "a kind of performative gesture."

Momentum drained away. The group rarely met and shrank over time. Some members gave up waiting and wrote their own student privacy recommendations, then sent them to the board directly. Those are people who cared enough to do unpaid work twice.

What UK schools and trusts should take from it It would be easy to file this under "American district bureaucracy". I wouldn't. Plenty of UK schools and trusts are setting up AI working groups this year, and every one of these mistakes is easy to repeat.

  1. Write the terms of reference before you recruit. Say what the group decides, what it only recommends, and who signs it off. If policy goes through governors or the trust board, tell members on day one.
  2. Put a date and a deliverable on it. Lawrence's group drifted for over two years. Give yours a named output, such as a draft AI policy, and the meeting it goes to.
  3. Let people ask "should we?" If the only permitted question is how to use AI, sceptical staff and parents will notice. Then they'll stop turning up.
  4. Start from principles. Conrad's point is a good one: the tools change too fast to write policy around them, so agree principles that hold whatever you're using. UK schools already have anchors here, including the DfE's guidance on generative AI in education and its product safety expectations for AI tools.
  5. Show people what happened to their input. If you invite a specialist, record what they said and what you did with it. People will forgive a decision they disagree with far sooner than being ignored.

None of this is complicated. It's ordinary governance, applied before the first meeting instead of after the last one. It's also the ground we work through on the AI Leadership units at Primary Goal, because getting the structure right is most of the job.

The bottom line The Lawrence board says the conversations will still shape policy, and one member is open to bringing the committee back. Maybe it'll work second time round.

But by the time policy lands, Lawrence pupils will have spent three school years using AI without one. Delay is a decision too.

If your school or trust is forming an AI group this term, read the Lawrence story first. Then write the terms of reference.

So where does your school's AI policy sit right now? With a group that knows its brief, or one still waiting to be told?

Source Lawrence school district's AI committee disbanded with no specific policy recommendations, Cuyler Dunn, The Lawrence Times, 16 October 2026.