For schools & districts
AI literacy programs for schools and districts.
CPAI is a Durham 501(c)(3) that teaches people to use AI in ways that build capability instead of replacing it. For schools that means professional learning for teachers, preparation for the coaches who will carry it after we leave, and sessions for students themselves. Every one of them ends with something a district can look at.
The gap this addresses.
82% of teachers receive no formal guidance on applying AI to their work — and the gap is not evenly distributed. Teachers report no guidance for one-on-one instruction at 69%, against 47% for producing worksheets. Guidance is most available where AI saves a teacher time and least available where it touches a student.
Only 11% of teacherssay responding when a student’s AI use is harming their wellbeing was covered in any AI training or information their school provided — the least common topic asked about, below detecting AI-written work.
And more than 80% of students say no one explicitly taught them how to use AI. They are using it anyway.
Full evidence, sources, and where federal and North Carolina law currently stand: Preparing Educators to Teach AI Use — a nonpartisan CPAI issue brief.
What CPAI delivers.
Educator professional learning
- Format
- Six sessions of about an hour each, with a four-week practice period between sessions 3 and 4.
- Audience
- Classroom teachers, any subject, any grade band.
- What a district gets
- Each participant leaves with an AI Use Statement for a task they are about to teach — the short paragraph that tells students what to use AI for, what stays theirs, and where AI stops — plus a pre/post proficiency reading for the group.
Train-the-trainer
- Format
- A condensed intensive plus facilitation practice, using the same materials your coaches will run.
- Audience
- Instructional coaches, curriculum staff, media and technology coordinators.
- What a district gets
- Internal capacity. Your people run the pathway for the next cohort, and the district is not dependent on an outside provider to keep going.
Student-facing sessions
- Format
- Single sessions or a short arc, adapted from the Healthy AI Use guides.
- Audience
- Middle and high school students.
- What a district gets
- The usage-mode distinction, taught directly — the difference between asking AI to do the thing and asking it to help you do the thing, and how to tell which one you are doing.
What we measure.
The CPAI Proficiency Assessment before the first session and after the last, so a district has two comparable numbers, not an attendance sheet. The per-guide interactives — Mode Check, Offload Audit, Calibration Check, Mastery Map, Boundary Check — run as formative checks inside sessions. And the AI Use Statements from the final working session, which are the artifact a department head can actually read.
What we are not claiming
We have no outcome data from this pathway yet, and we are not going to imply otherwise. Nobody else does either: a 2026 review that screened more than 800 papers and identified 20 high-quality causal studies of AI in K–12 found none evaluating AI-focused teacher professional development.
So a district running this becomes part of how that evidence finally gets made. That is the honest framing, it is why we measure pre and post, and we publish what we find — including the parts that do not move.
How a district starts.
A conversation
Thirty minutes. What is actually happening with AI in your buildings, what guidance already exists, and what you would want to be different a semester from now. No slides.
A scoped plan
Which offering, which group, what calendar — including where the four-week practice period lands relative to your existing PD days, because that is the part scheduling pressure tends to remove.
A first cohort
Run it with one group, measured pre and post. Let the reading decide whether to take it wider.
Step one
Tell us what’s happening in your schools.
We respond within two business days to set up a call. No obligation, and no pitch you have already sat through.