Literacy Before Licenses

Here's the typical sequence: a district buys AI licenses, rolls them out with a cheerful email, and discovers months later that teachers are pasting identifiable student data into unvetted side tools while the expensive licensed platform sits unused.

Flip the order. Literacy before licenses.

Before spending a dollar, run one training session. Teach staff what student data is, which tools are vetted, how to strip names from prompts, and how to spot confident-but-wrong AI output. Thirty to forty-five minutes. Then — and only then — decide what to buy.

Three things change when literacy comes first. First, you buy less, because trained staff can tell the difference between a tool they need and a demo that dazzled them. Second, adoption goes up, because people use what they understand. Third, incidents go down, because the most common failures aren't technical — they're a tired teacher pasting too much into the wrong box at 9 p.m.

Vendors sell in the opposite order for obvious reasons: a confused buyer is a bigger buyer. Your job is to be an educated buyer instead.

Train first. Buy second. It's the cheapest AI governance investment a school can make, and the one most schools skip.

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