Explain It Like I'm a Busy Principal

Principals are drowning. Between staffing, discipline, budgets, and buses, nobody has time for a forty-slide deck on AI governance. So the AI conversation keeps getting postponed — until something goes wrong.

Here's how to brief a busy principal in five minutes. Three sentences, then one ask.

Sentence one: "Our teachers and students are already using AI tools, including some the district hasn't vetted." (This is true everywhere. Lead with reality.)

Sentence two: "The risks are student data leaving the building, biased or wrong outputs being treated as truth, and nobody knowing who's accountable when something goes wrong."

Sentence three: "We can manage this with three moves: a vetted-tools list, a short acceptable-use policy, and one training session for staff."

Then the ask: "I need your backing on the policy and thirty minutes at the next staff meeting."

Notice what this doesn't include: no mention of model architectures, no alphabet soup of framework names, no apocalyptic warnings. Just reality, risks in plain words, and a concrete plan. Leaders don't need to become AI experts. They need to know what's happening, what could go wrong, and what you're asking them to do about it.

If your AI governance plan can't survive a five-minute briefing, it won't survive contact with a real school year either.

I explain frameworks; I don't give legal counsel.