As a school administrator, you might be fielding questions from parents about your school's stance on AI.
Below is an overview of common areas of parent concern, and how Flint addresses each.
Share your school's and classroom's AI policies
Explain what AI use is encouraged, what requires disclosure, and what is not allowed. Admins can add school policy materials in Admin → Settings → AI policy so Sparky has the school's guidance too.
Where the in-app AI literacy course is enabled, teachers can create a classroom AI policy and find it under Your resources in the course sidebar. On a saved policy with encouraged, disclosure-required and prohibited uses, Parent letter opens a printable letter for families. Review the letter against your actual classroom practices, then print it or save it as a PDF in the browser's print dialog. Save as PDF on the policy itself produces a classroom poster, not the parent letter.
The course is not available on the UK deployment. See AI literacy course and certification.
Student data privacy
Consumer AI tools have different data-use settings and agreements. Some may use conversations to improve models unless users opt out; others exclude particular chats or workspaces from training. For example, ChatGPT's data controls describe training opt-outs and Temporary Chats. Do not put identifiable student information into tools your school has not approved.
Flint doesn't use student data to train AI models. Flint's privacy policy describes authorized educational and school uses of student information, including supporting learning and managing student records. Storage also supports operating, securing and providing support for the service, not just access to records. Share the plain-language privacy policy with families for an explanation of data handling and their choices. Parents can ask their school for access to their child's records; there is no separate parent account role in Flint.
Equitable access
Consumer tools have their own minimum ages, features and subscription options. A school's AI rollout should not depend on each family choosing and paying for a separate consumer subscription.
Students under 13 can use Flint with the required parent or school permission. Confirm your school's consent process and agreement with Flint before rollout; the privacy policy explains the student-data provisions. When a school provides Flint, students use the school's access rather than needing their own paid subscription. Tell families which features your school has approved for students.
Educator oversight of AI use
When students use AI tools outside the school's approved workflow, teachers may not be able to see how the tools were used. Explain which tools your school approves and how educators review student work.
Flint saves activity sessions so teachers can read the conversations in activities or classes they can edit. School or term owners have broader oversight; an Admin or Teacher label alone does not grant access to every student's work. See Roles in Flint. Parents can contact their school to request student records, and administrators can contact support@flintk12.com to request an export of a student's data.
Controlling the behavior of AI in an educational context
A general-purpose chatbot may provide an answer when a teacher wants a student to work through the problem. Explain how your school's activities are designed to support learning rather than replace student work.
Flint lets activity editors set instructions that shape how Sparky interacts with students. In student sessions, Sparky is instructed not to solve assigned problems outright or write work a student could submit as their own. Sparky's instructions call for guiding questions, checking what the student has tried and steering toward the activity's learning objectives. These are model instructions, not a guarantee of every response; teachers should test activities and review the sessions they can access.
Ensuring accuracy in an educational context
AI models are trained on millions of documents, ranging from textbooks to news articles to online forums. This makes these AI models seemingly knowledgeable on any topic, but dive deeper and you'll find that AI might make content up when it doesn't know the answer, or fail to provide specific sources for its knowledge.
On Flint, teachers can give the AI content from their own class — a worksheet, a textbook chapter, lecture slides, a lesson plan, or a link to a recent news article. Those materials help Sparky ground responses and cite the sources it used, but AI can still make mistakes. Teachers and students should check important facts and citations against the originals. See Uploading content to Flint and What knowledge does AI have access to?.
AI for teacher augmentation, not replacement
Students are already using AI for homework help, through tools like ChatGPT and many other apps (just search "AI homework" on the App Store). In the long run, if AI use continues to be driven primarily by students, there's a risk that the importance of teachers as the source of learning is undermined in the minds of students.
Flint changes the equation by letting teachers augment themselves with AI instead of feeling as if they are competing against it. Teachers have incredible context on the needs of their students, and can use Flint to multiply their own effectiveness, such as by providing students with more personalized help in the classroom.
If parents want to understand how the AI itself works, the AI training articles are written for a general audience and are a good thing to share.