Sixteen-year-old Rahul Nair adjusted his glasses before delivering the two-minute speech he had practiced every day for a week.
He’s a senior at Skyline High and took the morning off to pitch the creation of an AI student task force to the Utah State Board of Education's Standards and Assessments Committee. Nair wants to help advise future policy surrounding artificial intelligence and how it’s used in K-12 education.
“It not only allows the State Board of Education to create proactive policies rather than reactive policies, but also allows us to bridge the gap between decision makers and students like myself,” he told committee members.
Utah is a leader in overseeing AI at a statewide level. In the 2026 legislative session, lawmakers passed a bill that required the State Board of Education to create a model policy for AI in schools. That policy needs to be ready and sent out by Dec. 1. The state also entered a partnership this year with Google Gemini, allowing school districts to choose whether they wanted to use that platform or not.
“I feel like because we, the students, are the ones actually using these policies on a day to day basis, it's really important that our voices are heard and our opinions are also shared with the state board of education,” Nair told KUER after his public comment.
He said he already uses the technology for studying on a daily basis, like asking an AI chatbot to design a series of math problems to better prepare him for an upcoming test.
“I really feel like the way AI is supposed to be used in high school is for that specific reason, expanding our knowledge rather than replacing our knowledge when it comes to doing classes,” he said.
Nair recognises that not every student would use the technology in such a wholesome way as he did. Others might use it to write a whole essay or answer a math set instead of doing the work themselves.
But as the state board’s AI Education Specialist Matthew Winters puts it, cheating has been around for as long as students have existed. A study by Stanford University shows the amount of cheating in schools hasn’t really changed despite the introduction of generative AI.
“Kids who cheat are always going to find a way to cheat,” Winters said.
To him, the nation is only just waking up to AI and its uses in education. Winters said he is only one of “seven or eight” AI education specialists across the United States.
“Generative AI isn't a technology that we invented,” he said. “It's an arrival technology that showed up in our classrooms, in our households, in our cell phones, in our devices all across, and now we're having to work through that.”
Winters said the state board has an internal group that has been working to figure out how best to mold AI tech policy around education since 2023.
So far, the focus has been how to best educate teachers on its use. Last summer, the state provided over 6,000 teachers with classroom training on the subject.
“It was a matter of ‘OK, how can we move forward in a way that helps our students to grasp this technology for their future?” he explained. “Then also for our teachers to understand it so they can help our students grasp that technology.”
One of main things Winters is tackling is data privacy. In his view, Utah has positioned itself well over the last 10 years by providing local data privacy laws that go beyond current federal frameworks. Right now, for an AI company to be allowed to be used in a Utah school, he explained they have to sign stringent data privacy agreements outlined by the school district itself, not just the state or country.
“When we start talking about AI, it's ‘are you using a tool that's approved in your district? Does it have a data privacy agreement? and do you know how to use it in a safe way with your students?’” he said.
AI is an ever moving target for lawmakers, and Winters said one of the toughest things to grasp is the sheer number of applications of it.
“Generative AI is one animal in the larger zoo of AI,” he said, which is why he is backing Rahul Nair’s proposal for student input. To him, students are the ones who use it, so they should have input in state policy.
The Standards and Assessment Committee committee voted in favor of moving forward with Nair’s idea for a student-led task force. Now, the full board will hear the proposal in October. To Winters’ knowledge Utah is the first state to consider such an idea.
The most important thing for Nair is that students from across the state be part of the taskforce.
“Every student has different opinions, and a student from South Utah might have a completely different idea from someone like me living in Salt Lake City,” he said.
