January 2, 2026
Wlea News asked Canisteo-Greenwood School Superintendent Tom Crook the following questions:
Artificial Intelligence – do you think it’s a helpful tool?
Can it be an obstacle to students developing writing skills?
Or maybe a combination of both?
Also, has your school district (or the state dept of ed) come up with any rules on AI?
Below is the answer, from Superintendent Tom Crook:
I personally believe it is an extremely useful tool. However, we need to make sure that our students know how to use it appropriately. As you mentioned, we need to make sure that the students do not lose their creativity and/or their ability to communicate (write). It is my belief that the students (and all) must learn how to prompt correctly and then “audit” the work that is created by AI.
Some schools have created guidelines for the use of AI by students. The teachers let the students know ahead of time what level of use of AI will be allowed. It can range from “no use at all” to full use without the students doing any “work” ahead of time to plug into the AI platform. One thing I like about the level of use is that the students must hand in their chat log to the teacher.
CG at the time has no official policy regarding the use of AI other than our perjury policy. We will not allow students to hand in work that was created through AI and claim it as their own.
There is a lot of work and training to be done around the use of AI, but I believe it has a lot of value.
These are just my personal feelings about the use of AI. We have yet to officially do anything here regarding it but we shouldn’t wait too long as a district. Eventually, we are going to have to create some guardrails for our students.
