Haddonfield’s policy, adopted in August, divides access by grade level. The Camden County district, which has about 2,700 students, prohibits elementary students from using AI but plans to teach AI literacy starting in first grade. Middle and high school students may use a district-approved Google AI platform under teacher supervision.

The system is designed to work with materials users provide rather than give students open internet access, Assistant Superintendent Gino Priolo said. A student, for example, could use class notes to generate flash cards for studying chemistry. District software blocks ChatGPT and other chatbots, he said.

Haddonfield developed the policy after surveys found students and teachers were already using AI on at least nine platforms. Previously, the district’s academic-integrity rules required students to cite AI when they used it as a source.

“We’d be putting our heads in the sand if we simply tried to avoid AI,” Priolo said, describing the district’s effort to set privacy protections and limits rather than ignore classroom use.

Cherry Hill’s school board approved a revised policy Oct. 13 after officials dropped a proposed option for parents to opt their children out. Superintendent Kwame Morton said the district’s selected platform, School AI, allows teachers to monitor student interactions.

The policy uses a scale from zero to four to tell students how much AI may be used on an assignment, with zero prohibiting it and four allowing it to help draft content. There is no AI use in pre-kindergarten or kindergarten. By second grade, teachers may use it with the whole class under close supervision; fourth- and fifth-grade students may use it more fully with specific instructions, but not to produce original work, said Allison Staffin, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction.

Cherry Hill parent Carolina Bevad criticized the policy as insufficient and said elementary students should not use AI. She also called for stronger privacy protections. Some families had raised concerns that an opt-out policy could leave students with less access to technology than their classmates.

Glassboro has adopted MagicSchool and does not set grade-based restrictions, Superintendent Alfred Lewis said, although the platform has mostly been used in middle and high school. Some students use AI to assess assignments before submitting them, while teachers use it to prepare instructional materials and identify patterns that may help them improve learning, he said. Lewis said the tool cannot take the place of a skilled teacher.

The districts’ decisions come as schools nationwide debate whether and how to bring AI into classrooms. Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, described the shift as a major challenge for educators and said research has not yet settled how AI affects learning. She also cautioned that opting out may be difficult when the technology changes quickly.

Temple University professor Subodha Kumar said bans may not prevent students from using AI and that there is not conclusive evidence that bans improve outcomes. It could take years to determine which policies work best, he said.

In South Jersey, Deptford has added an AI course for high school students. At the state level, Assemblywoman Heather Simmons, a Gloucester County Democrat, has introduced the Educators Before AI Act, which would require human presence in classrooms and bar public schools from replacing teachers with AI. The state has nearly 600 public schools. Simmons said safeguards are needed; no teacher job losses tied to AI had been reported in the discussion of the proposal.

As districts set their own rules, families and educators are confronting a central question: how to prepare students to understand a technology they may encounter in school and beyond without letting it displace foundational skills or human teaching.