Penn’s Graduate School of Education has expanded its artificial intelligence professional development curriculum to serve 37 districts across the tri-state area.
The initiative — Pioneering AI in School Systems — launched as a School District of Philadelphia pilot program in March 2025. Following a $1 million grant in October 2025, PASS expanded its programming free of charge to additional participating districts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
The participating districts are made up of four individual school districts and two intermediate units — each of which acts as a consortium of school districts.
Betty Chandy, the director for AI initiatives and associate faculty at Penn GSE, designed PASS for adaptability across varying types of school districts.
“The field of AI is rapidly evolving, and the program also has kept up with whatever is the latest in AI research and development,” she explained.
The program operates under a tiered system intended to achieve a common understanding of AI’s role in education within three faculty roles: district-wide administrators, individual building administrators, and teachers.
As a former teacher, Chandy’s goal was to not place the “burden” of AI in classrooms on teachers, but instead, on the district as a whole.
“These questions over whether AI belongs in the classroom is so polarizing that we cannot put this burden solely on the shoulders of teachers,” she emphasized. “We need entire systems to be in conversation.”
Programming is meant to be delivered in a suitable manner for each tier of educators, but all three groups work together to achieve the same goal of building “critical thinking” skills.
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“It’s not a one-way training,” Chandy explained. Instead, she described the program as a platform for discussion and “ideation” that helps individual districts “address their problems of practice.”
Laura Paparo, the executive director of the Penn Learning Network, echoed that goal. She explained that PASS aims to ensure educators and administrators “speak the same language” when discussing AI use in faculty conversations and policymaking.
“When somebody says ‘generative AI,’ there’s a common level of understanding of what that is, and then they’re able to make a decision from their district’s perspective about what’s going to work in that community with the students and the teachers,” Paparo said.
Chandy added that PASS also helps educate teachers on how to use AI for “student-centered learning” and innovate classrooms beyond their “traditional models.”
Paparo acknowledged that while “it’s very important to be cautious” when considering how AI should be implemented in schools, “it’s also important to recognize that it is here.”
“It’s not going away at this point, and we have to adapt,” she added.
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