November 2026 | Written by Avery
This is the third post of our AI series highlighting AI’s impact to our services and our clients across our primary sectors. Click “When AI Meets Your Values” to catch up on our first post where we discuss how Kinetic West is thinking about our own use of AI using a values-centered approach. Read “Rebuilding the First Rung of the Ladder” to learn what’s top of mind around AI’s impact on Workforce Development. Now we turn to K-12 schools.
Navigating AI in Education
Ask a high schooler how they’re using AI and you’ll likely get a shrug, then a long list: homework help, college research, questions they’d rather not ask an adult. Ask an elementary schooler and you might just get a joke. Kids are starting to squint at things and announce, "That has to be AI," which is its own kind of progress. Students aren’t waiting for schools to decide how they feel about this technology. They’re already navigating it every day, mostly on their own.
That’s the reality districts are facing, and it’s arriving faster than anything education has absorbed before. The internet and 1:1 devices took years to reach classrooms. Generative AI showed up in students' pockets almost overnight. For districts, the question is no longer whether to engage with AI. It’s how to do it in a way that keeps students, and their thinking, at the center.
Over the past year, Kinetic West has had a front-row seat to districts navigating that question. We facilitate the K-12 Community of Practice for Microsoft Elevate Washington, supporting ten grantee districts from metropolitan Seattle to rural Walla Walla as they work out how to use AI effectively and responsibly in teaching and learning. Their projects range from student AI literacy curriculum to supporting teachers in differentiating instruction for multilingual learners.
What we’re seeing
Year 1 surfaced many learnings, but a few patterns stand out:
AI literacy is a top priority, and districts are mostly building it alone. Half the cohort is focused on it, yet districts describe state guidance as minimal.
Professional development is available but uneven. Most AI training is optional, so early adopters are building their AI understanding while other school staff miss out.
Districts want to learn from peers like them. Their most consistent request is for real examples from districts of similar size and context.
Policy comes before tools. Many districts are slowing down to get clear AI policy and guidance in place for educators and students before incorporating student-facing AI tools.
Small districts, big lessons
Microsoft’s data (gathered last year via its AI for Good Lab) reveals a sharp geographic divide in AI adoption across Washington counties. More than 35% of residents in Puget Sound coastal counties use AI, compared with fewer than 10% in rural Eastern Washington.
We’ve seen this pattern before. Past waves of technology advanced furthest and fastest where capacity already existed. Smaller, rural, and higher-need districts, with thinner budgets and fewer specialized staff, were left to catch up.
Yet in our cohort, some of the boldest work is coming from those smaller districts. Staff who wear many hats are used to learning new things and getting creative with limited resources. Together, this lets them move from idea to classroom faster than larger systems can. That makes them more than recipients of support. They can be demonstration sites for the whole state. Two Central Washington districts, Manson and Quincy, show what that looks like.
Manson: Navigating AI together
This fall, Manson launched a required nine-week AI course for its high schoolers called Navigating AI. Students meet for 35 minutes a day, four days a week, and rotate to a different teacher each week. Every teacher chose a topic they were genuinely excited about, from creating with AI to environmental impact to bias.
The design is intentionally balanced. Students learn to prompt well and build their own agents. They also dig into data privacy, energy use, and the line between AI supporting learning and AI replacing it. One early lesson asked whether AI makes students better writers. The class landed on a sharp answer: it makes them sound like better writers. Manson district teachers say students now describe over-reliance on AI as cheating themselves out of an education.
Students are talking about the course in the hallways. One student built an agent that helps her develop fictional characters by running them through personality frameworks, using AI to stretch her imagination rather than replace it. The school shared the full syllabus with families up front and offered an opt-out. Notably, no one has opted out, and parents are now asking for community classes of their own.
Quincy: Building the architecture
Where Manson started by going deep on a single course, Quincy built the scaffolding for AI learning across kindergarten through 12th grade. Its AI Readiness Framework moves students from Awareness to Literacy to Fluency. Each stage is mapped to the district’s Profile of a Graduate, to state standards, and to the Washington State Board of Education’s Future Ready recommendations.
The ingenuity is in how they found the time. Rather than adding a new course, Quincy mapped where AI learning will naturally fit:
K-5 STEAM lessons for all students on how AI learns from patterns, awareness about how models are trained and how to spot bias.
An AI literacy unit of study in the 6th-grade Success course.
Middle school digital citizenship days, where math classes take on privacy and data and language arts classes take on media literacy.
Priority standards embedded in 9th-grade computer science course for all students.
A key step was naming what could come off the plate before adding anything new.
Quincy’s AI team, made up of school and district leaders, has invested heavily in its own learning taking trainings led by Gonzaga University, joining convenings through UW's Colleague AI, and attending conferences. Now it’s giving back. This fall, the team presented its framework to peers at the state association of school administrators’ conference, packaged as a tool which other districts can adapt.
What they share
The two approaches look different, but demonstrate common lessons:
Educators come first. Manson’s teachers were surprised by how much of their own learning had to happen before they could teach. You can’t teach AI literacy without educators who are ready, and who are comfortable learning alongside students.
AI literacy is the work of schools. Both districts decided this couldn't wait for someone else to figure out.
Time is found, not given. Whether it’s a 30-minute block or a carefully mapped set of standards, both districts made deliberate choices about where AI learning lives.
Balance builds trust. Presenting both the promise and risks, alongside open communication to families earns valuable buy-in.
Students are ready. Students want to engage critically and build practical skills for navigating AI. The narrative that they’re only looking for short cuts is simply not true.
Manson and Quincy show that helping students navigate AI thoughtfully is itself a response to the world they’re growing up in.
Room to act
For education leaders and funders, a few moves would help this work spread:
Invest in rural and Title I districts as demonstration sites. We don’t want AI adoption decided by which districts can afford it, furthering systemic inequities that too often drive opportunity in education.
Fund educator learning time, not just tools. Building the knowledge and capacity of teachers is foundational and takes longer than anything else.
Develop common, open-source resources. Too often 295 WA state districts create their own policy, guidance, and curriculum. Strong shared resources like OSPI’s Human-Centered AI Guidance, AESD’s AI Innovators trainings, and Common Sense Media’s digital literacy curriculum, reduce the burden for everyone.
Prioritize AI literacy today, not tomorrow. Right now it can feel like AI is happening to us. Providing educators and students the opportunity to unpack its role, wrestle with the ethics, and learn how it can enhance learning and work, builds agency and prepares us to be shapers of AI.
The learning curve is steep for everyone, including us. What gives us hope is watching districts like Manson and Quincy climb it with curiosity and care.
Up Next: AI + Economic Development. We'll revisit some of our past work developing an investment agenda for an equitable Seattle economy and reimagine that agenda inclusive of a growing AI economy.
