School Board Pauses Generative Artificial Intelligence in PPS

The Portland School Board unanimously approved a temporary pause Tuesday night on generative artificial intelligence use, buying it time to develop a more official and durable policy.

The board’s resolution will apply both to contracts Portland Public Schools is currently in and ones it may sign in the future—preventing, for now at least, the expansion of generative AI use in the district. The resolution defines generative AI as artificial intelligence systems that “generate text, code, images, audio, video, or other content in response to prompts or other use input.”

The resolution directs the district to bring the board a more comprehensive overview of its generative AI implementations and uses.

Within 120 days, the district must report back with an inventory, associated contracts and costs, data shared with vendors, and recommendations for future usage. (At least one learning company PPS partners with, that appears to toy with generative AI, collects student data that raised concerns for one board member.)

“The board must ensure students are never treated as a commodity,” says School Board member Virginia La Forte, who spearheaded the resolution. “We can’t allow parents and educators to be sidelined while ed tech companies pitch generative AI as a cure-all for student outcomes or district budgets while they profit from student data.”

The resolution also requires that contracts related to generative AI get board authorization in advance—regardless of whether they are above or below the board’s $150,000 approval threshold—until the School Board adopts an official policy around artificial intelligence.

The resolution was tacked on as an amendment to the district’s budget for the upcoming 2026–27 school year. It comes as, in the last month, a Portland chapter of the national coalition Schools Beyond Screens started making a steady presence at School Board meetings to protest screen use and artificial intelligence across the district.

Miranda Rake, a co-lead of that chapter, tells WW it’s worth slowing down the district’s ramp-up of AI to protect students, their data, and their brains. She says she hopes PPS can lead a national effort to regulate AI in classrooms.

“We only founded this group like a month ago, and it has been wonderful to see how many people on the School Board are actually really on board with this,” Rake says. “It’s really heartening, actually, to feel like there’s a lot of pushback on the AI stuff that happened in the 2025-26 school year.”

The discussion around the pause was not entirely smooth. Some School Board members questioned bringing what they termed a policy discussion into a budget amendment, advocating that it go through the appropriate channels.

Vice chair Michelle DePass raised another objection, telling fellow board members that when decisions are made on the dais, they have the possibility to exclude key stakeholders. A sense of urgency, DePass said, is, according to the activist Tema Okun, a characteristic of white supremacy.

DePass acknowledged that the matter is indeed urgent, but said that a “continued sense of urgency that makes it difficult to take the time to be inclusive, to encourage democratic and or thoughtful decision-making, to think long term, to consider consequences—this frequently results in sacrificing potential allies for quick visible results.”

Yet board members clarified that they were not looking to shape policy in the long haul without such engagement, and the pause sunsets in the wake of a more developed oversight framework. The district’s policy committee has plans to broach these topics in the upcoming school year, though it has at times taken the School Board years to develop policies.

“Urgency and inclusion are not opposing values,” La Forte tells WW. “We can move quickly without leaving stakeholders behind.”