Allentown School District leaders on a district podcast said the district has moved from pilot projects to a coordinated AI strategy that pairs a formal guidance document and an administrative policy (identified in discussion as policy 8 15.1) with vendor and university partnerships.

"AI is shifting the overall schooling experience for students in k 12 education," host Dr. Birx said at the podcast opening, framing the district's goal to address excessive teacher workload, delayed feedback and inequitable access. District innovation director Kyle Kaufmann said an AI task force—made up of teachers, administrators, parents and students—drafted a guidance document and the policy to set safety guardrails and usage expectations for staff and students.

The district named Google Gemini as its core generative AI model and said Gemini features have been integrated into Google Classroom and Google Meets to support lesson co‑planning, live translation and multimodal resources. "Gemini is incredibly powerful," Kaufmann said, adding the district prioritized platforms with built‑in safety and compliance features.

A Google for Education program manager, Jojo Ferrell, described Gemini tools built for classrooms, including a guided‑learning mode aimed at prompting student thinking rather than supplying answers. "We're building a tutor for every student. We're building a TA for every teacher with Gemini," Ferrell said, and noted Google emphasizes COPPA and FERPA compliance for education accounts.

District staff also highlighted other selected platforms: Canva Education and Adobe Express for multimodal creation, ALEKS for personalized secondary math, and Course Mojo for differentiated sixth‑grade ELA. Kaufmann said those choices were made to strengthen the instructional core—students, teachers and content—while professional development and teacher modeling remain central.

DeSales University researcher Dr. Purcell described the higher‑education partnership that produced paid summer programs in which students earned college credits and industry certificates in data analytics and deep learning. He also noted research projects that used local air‑quality and court data to help Allentown identify eviction hotspots.

The district said it has distributed professional learning widely: more than 700 staff members have participated in Google professional learning, and district teams will continue training work through grants and partners. Kaufmann emphasized that the guidance document includes limits and legal ramifications for misuse and that administrators have controls to enable student features gradually.

The podcast closed with the host inviting teachers to join the district task force and announcing the show will run quarterly. Dr. Birx said the AI work is aligned with the district’s strategic plan and framed as a way to expand individualized learning while maintaining safeguards.