Sebastian Girstl
Efficiency is a core principle that drives progress, yet this idea has often not received the attention it needs in discussions about public education. As expectations for public schools grow but budgets remain limited, districts must focus on improving efficiency, reducing costs, and modernizing operations to better serve students and families. Now, public school districts have an opportunity to transform how they operate by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to become more effective and financially sustainable.
For decades, public school districts have operated under structures that provided limited incentive to innovate or adapt. Instead of innovating, most districts developed layers of bureaucracy and outdated systems, both of which drained resources at the expense of students. Districts should now modernize by using AI to optimize operations such as transportation, automate paperwork, and more effectively analyze student performance data.
Districts that have embraced these shifts are already seeing results. In Colorado Springs, the district was struggling with bus driver shortages leading to students arriving late to school, which frustrated parents. Shortages got to the point that administrators with CDL certifications were out driving school buses to get students to school. Their solution was to utilize AI-powered transportation scheduling, which cut the number of routes by more than a third. As a result, on-time arrivals improved from 85% to 99% and costs were reduced significantly, allowing the district to raise driver salaries while cutting its transportation budget by 40% over ten years.
In Texas, a district had long struggled with inefficient, manual administrative burdens in tasks such as student enrollment. Staff were required to manually do the tedious and time-consuming task of receiving, processing, and uploading data from vaccination records, residency forms, and birth certificate documents. This not only drove up administrative costs but also contributed to high turnover due to burnt out staff. The district turned to AI-driven enrollment tools to eliminate the need for manual data entry. Consequently, they were able to streamline enrollment and cut paperwork burdens by more than half, freeing staff to focus on serving students’ more complex needs. Altogether, this resulted in over $100,000 in work-hour savings per year, higher staff retention rates, and stronger parent satisfaction with the enrollment process.
The most promising frontier, however, lies in how AI can support teachers. Most districts still rely on manual and labor-intensive data collection to identify and track at-risk students. By automatically analyzing data trends and compiling information from across a student’s educational profile, AI can help identify students at risk of not graduating before it’s too late, giving educators the chance to intervene earlier. AI has the potential to aid administrators and counselors by rapidly integrating data from behavior incidents, attendance, and grades to assess whether a student is on track for graduation along with ensuring they are on a path toward long-term success, in whatever form that may take for them. The kind of early insight AI can provide can be transformative for student success and provide students in large public schools a more tailored education suited to their individual needs.
Notably, there are concerns about integrating AI in education and what it might mean for students and educators. While mainstream outlets often focus on fears of AI, these worries should not hinder the simple and clear benefits it offers to streamline the fundamental yet mundane tasks in the classroom. In Colorado and Texas school districts, AI is already delivering consistent results that help deliver better outcomes for students and educators alike. These improvements demonstrate that AI can strengthen public schools from within, reducing administrative burdens, improving cost efficiency, and freeing educators to focus more on teaching and student support. In the long term, AI can enable large public schools to offer a personalized education supported by modern, efficient infrastructure.
Efficiency and modernization are the keys to advancing accountability, progress, and success in public schools. By adopting AI-driven tools and practices, districts can deliver stronger educational outcomes without expanding budgets or bureaucracies. This is not about replacing educators with screens, it is about breaking down the bloated administrative and financial barriers that have unnecessarily held schools back. In that regard, AI is not a threat to education, it is a solution.
