Google announced that Google Search and its Gemini AI tools will be off by default for all K-12 student accounts. Administrators can turn Search back on, but it comes with AI built in, so schools must choose between Search with AI or no Search at all. Critics, including superintendents and parent groups, call it an ultimatum, especially after New York City and Los Angeles paused student AI tools this year. Google hasn’t said when the change starts or whether schools can set it by grade or school, so now is the time to decide which students get Search and write that decision into your AI policy.

One in 3 educators don’t know whether their school or district has a policy on AI-generated fake images and videos, and 9 in 10 haven’t been trained to spot or respond to them in the past two years. Experts recommend adding deepfake language to existing policies on harassment, cyberbullying and technology use, and creating one incident response plan that every staff member follows. Train teachers on the reporting steps, including never having a student send an explicit image to a teacher’s personal phone. Deepfakes are also more serious than cyberbullying in one key way: sharing a nonconsensual, sexually explicit image of a minor is now a federal crime. Experts say schools should explain these consequences to students in plain language, including that some laws carry jail time.

Principals whose schools had four or more effective attendance strategies were nearly twice as likely to report big drops in chronic absenteeism as principals with only one effective strategy: 77% compared with 41%. The key is matching each strategy to the specific reasons students in your school are missing, according to a Johns Hopkins researcher. Strategies that build student connection to school earned the strongest ratings, and efforts that rely heavily on truancy laws ranked below family engagement and connection. Schools with a dedicated attendance team that regularly reviews data were three times as likely to have four or more effective strategies, so a team is a good place to start.

A Brookings analysis of more than 30 countries found that U.S. elementary teachers earn about two-thirds of what other college graduates make, the lowest ratio of any country studied. The gap is widest for teachers in the middle to upper salary ranges, which is where your experienced staff sit. One reason for the gap is spending. Teacher salaries made up 57% of public school spending in 1919 and 26% in 2019, as districts chose to add staff rather than raise pay. Leaders planning budgets can use these numbers to weigh the tradeoff between staffing levels and salaries.

About half of California’s school board candidates were likely running unopposed this fall, which means less public debate just as K-12 faces major changes. Board members cited budget cuts, school closures, labor disputes and a hostile political climate as reasons for leaving. Many also described the job as often taking 40 hours a week for a stipend of a few hundred dollars a month. Most said they need more training, especially in using social media, judging whether programs and curricula work, and handling political tension, but the state requires only a two-hour ethics class. Every superintendent should be looking at how they onboard and train board members in these three areas, especially before hard decisions like school closures.

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