Every first Wednesday of the month during early release, the Student AI Task Force Committee meets to reflect and take action steps towards the usage of AI here at North, prepare for presentations and also interview students or staff to get other points of view.
The AI task force is more of a committee-based approach as opposed to a club.
“I know the kids are involved in it like a club because they’re so excited, and it’s something they’re passionate about. But it is a voluntary thing that all of us are doing,” said Tanis Simoncelli, instructional technology specialist and adviser of the committee.
It all began in January of 2025 when Simoncelli went to a tech conference and noticed that AI was one of the most up-and-coming tech innovations. She wanted to ensure students and staff were all well-versed and had a good foundation to build from to meet everyone’s needs when it comes to AI technology.
“I knew that we would probably have to figure out how it would affect our classrooms and our students and our staff, and I was hoping that it would affect us in a meaningful way,” said Simoncelli.
The next step was to meet with Student Council’s Student Issues Committee to get this task force started, where two seniors, Neel Bhate and Vidhi Patel, joined the instructional leaders in the building to give a student perspective and help bring it to the next level.
“I joined immediately, and I knew that I could help grow this club by getting more people involved,” said Bhate.
The biggest hurdle was to get people to reveal their stance and opinion on AI, especially in a classroom setting, because AI can be a very controversial topic in classrooms because of the charged, passionate feelings on both sides.
“It’s got such a negative rhetoric to it where people who are pro-AI, like myself, find it hard to necessarily always stand up against that rhetoric, and that was my biggest hurdle: allowing people to express their own opinions and feelings about it,” said Bhate.
This committee is combined with a mix of people who are pro-AI and anti-AI, helping provide diverse opinions and leading to a collaboration where they share opinions on what they find valuable as students. Anti-AI people believe that when they work so long on their craft, it is unfair, which helps provide eye-opening moments for pro-AI students to hear the anti-AI point of view. Additionally, it helps the anti-AI people see the benefits of AI and how it can work with a student and not against them when it comes to the pro-AI students.
“I identify that there is a wide spectrum of different viewpoints that have joined the committee, and so not everybody in the committee is a positive force when it comes to AI. Some students feel like AI is negatively impacting their world and the academic world,” said Simoncelli.
Bhate’s favorite part of the Student AI Task Force Committee is being able to connect everyone from teachers to administrators to students’ thoughts on AI into a collective agreement.
“[I like] being able to connect the bridge between students and staff and [being] able to come to a meaningful definition where we’re able to communicate to teachers why we need this very powerful tool and how important it is for the future,” said Bhate.
They have much planned for the future, including meeting with Superintendent Paul Gordon, talking to freshman English classes on how to ethically use AI while collaborating with teachers and creating an AI stoplight, which is a visual guide instruction that shows students how and when to use AI.
“In our meetings, we’re typically talking with staff members, heads of departments and all of these people around the school to get their opinions on AI to see how, from an administrative side, AI is impacting them, to counterbalance that with our own opinions of how we use AI collaboratively,” said Bhate.
Simmoncelli invites students who may be interested in participating in this committee’s discussion to their next meeting on March 18 after school in Think Tank A.
“[The committee members] went from not really understanding or knowing all of the viewpoints, and I really feel like now at this time of year, they really respect each other so much, and the work that they’re doing, and that’s really empowering, I think, for them moving forward,” said Simoncelli. “They’re also looking for more students to pick up in their footsteps and continue because we have the majority of seniors that are in this group.”
