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Seckinger High School AI-themed Buford, Georgia; students outperform state averages in math, reading, science US schools are banning AI or ignoring rampant misuse. This “AI-themed” high school found a better way. | IBM Think 2026 Turn agentic AI into real business value | Think keynotes Georgia’s Seckinger High teaches AI as a superpower. Its students are beating the state average in math, reading and science. At a pep rally this February in the Atlanta suburb of Buford, Georgia, a crowded gymnasium of over 2,000 students erupted with cheers when Seckinger High School’s unofficial mascot stepped onto the gym floor: a “robotic jaguar” with four animatronic legs and camera lenses for eyes. Seckinger opened in 2022, three months before the launch of ChatGPT, calling itself the nation’s first “artificial intelligence themed” public high school. The school, according to its mission statement, is focused on “growing its community through an unafraid approach to new technologies and showing students that AI is an important tool and a key skill to their future careers.” Seckinger implements this approach through courses on AI and an AI framework for all teachers to apply within the classroom. The school operates on the belief that students should learn how to use AI responsibly and effectively, just as they’ll be expected to in the workplace. This education could be crucial for a graduating cohort facing a tough job market and tight college admissions. It may be equally crucial to schools struggling to curb rampant AI-assisted cheating, and to colleges desperate for students to enter with some understanding of what work should and shouldn’t be done with AI. Where Seckinger leads, the country may follow. Since opening its doors, Seckinger has gotten attention from school districts across the country. The school holds AI showcases, giving tours and explaining its methodology to representatives from other districts on a regular basis. And an AI-forward approach is growing popular. Though New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar H. Samuels recently announced a one-year moratorium on AI use in elementary and middle schools, they simultaneously introduced “AI critical thinking modules” for high schoolers, which “will introduce students to what AI is and is not, as well as AI-related bias, risks, ethical considerations and impacts on careers and future skills.” The city also introduced limited AI pilots to assist with subjects including English, math and community involvement, and to teach students to analyze AI outputs. Many US schools lack such a plan. A new survey of US K-12 educators, administrators and parents, commissioned by IBM and conducted by Morning Consult, found a disconnect between AI adoption and preparedness in K-12 schools. Teachers are widely adopting AI: 62% of those surveyed reported using it for teaching or instructional use, and 58% said they use it in the classroom more than once a week. But only 50% said their students understand AI, and fewer believe students use the tools responsibly or are prepared to use it in the workplace. Of the respondents, 52% said they fear students becoming overly dependent on AI. Only 27% said they feel well-equipped to support student AI literacy. Parents aren’t yet content with schools’ AI plans either. Of 1,029 K-12 parents interviewed in the survey, 77% said they want input on how AI is used in their child’s classroom, but only 20% said they clearly understand the AI guidance their child receives at school. They’re right to worry: today’s students face a challenging job market reshaped by AI. Get curated insights on the most important—and intriguing—AI news. Subscribe to our weekly Think newsletter. See the IBM Privacy Statement. Angeline Le graduated from Plano East Senior High School in Plano, Texas, this year. She only started to use AI in her junior year, to practice AP College Board questions as she prepared to apply for college. She will be attending Texas A&M for engineering this fall. “Everything has become much more competitive,” she said in an interview with IBM Think. “You really have to find a niche or something that you’re insanely good at that AI can’t replicate.” Standing out among applicants is increasingly hard, as students widen their college searches, driving down acceptance rates. Students going straight into the job market face similarly fierce competition as applications surge and the job market slows. While the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2026 projects a net gain of around 170 million new jobs by 2030, this includes the displacement of 92 million existing jobs as the workforce automates and reskills. The 2026 graduating class are the first generation to encounter this technology throughout their entire high-school career. They’re already navigating issues of ethical use and academic integrity, reaching their own conclusions about when, and what, AI use is appropriate. Soon they’ll join a workforce facing displacement, redefinition and opportunity through AI. Some will find their reliance on AI left them unprepared for real work; others may find their lack of AI experience leaves them at a disadvantage. This puts educators in a tough position. Students are using AI to write papers and answer test questions, setting themselves up for failure. Some schools are fighting back with blunt instruments, banning AI completely or requiring students to write in-classroom and longhand, undoing years of digitization efforts. Meanwhile, teachers at schools without AI frameworks or policies in place are struggling to meet academic standards and provide hands-on teaching, while others worry about leaning too heavily on AI-generated lesson plans and other shortcuts. Even for AI-forward institutions like Seckinger, it’s difficult to transform education as quickly as technology transforms the workplace. Which is the problem most schools face when it comes to instituting AI policies: the technology is evolving rapidly, leaving administrators fearing they will create outdated policies or guidance. Babak Mostaghimi saw this coming. He’s been a key figure in the development of Seckinger’s AI framework since 2017, five years before the school opened. At that time, Mostaghimi had just joined Gwinnett County Public Schools as the Executive Director of Innovation and Program Improvement. (He became an assistant superintendent in 2020 and is now a partner at the AI-focused non-profit LearnerStudio.) Gwinnett is the largest public school system in the state of Georgia, and one of the largest in the nation, serving over 182,000 students. It is a two-time winner of the Broad Prize for improved and sustained student achievement and narrowed achievement gaps. District leadership, Mostaghimi learned, didn’t want to stop there. “I was charged by the superintendent at the time; ‘We are Blockbuster and Netflix is coming,’” said Mostaghimi, in an interview with IBM Think. “What is [our] Netflix? And what do we do to get our kids ready?” In his research, Mostaghimi found a report called “Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained” from McKinsey Global Institute that laid out the potential for automation and AI to change, eliminate or produce jobs. “We’ve found Netflix,” Mostaghimi told the superintendent. “The existential threat to what we’re doing, in terms of preparing young people for their future, is a combination of AI and automation.” Mostaghimi and other administrators decided that schools must rethink not only curriculum, but also how skills and knowledge are defined. In 2019, they released an AI learning framework to the public. In 2022, the rapidly growing system opened Seckinger High with an embedded six-component AI framework: programming, data science, mathematical reasoning, creative problem solving, ethics and applied experience. Teachers at Seckinger are instructed to embed one or more of these components within their teaching, from lesson planning to class instruction. (The “Seckinger cluster,” including three elementary schools and a middle school feeding into Seckinger, also follow the framework.) The programming component of Seckinger’s framework focuses on building coding skills and logical reasoning. The data science component explores how AI can manifest into more than just machine learning models and can be broadly integrated into tools like spreadsheets or charts. Mathematical reasoning teaches computational thinking, and how every equation or step is an algorithm. Creative problem solving, a popular choice, uses AI to aid in brainstorming, design thinking methods and collaboration among peers. Applied experience, meanwhile, is most popular among late-stage engineering classes. The school also offers a three-course AI pathway, optional to students. Foundations of Artificial Intelligence focuses on the history of AI and how it came about. Concepts of Artificial Intelligence focuses on using AI ethically. And Applications of Artificial Intelligence teaches the basics of AI. According to Seckinger student Gabrielle Watkins, the most important component is ethics. Before any teacher introduces an AI tool to the students, they are instructed to teach students the ethical use of the tool for at least a week. The framework, she told IBM Think, is designed to teach that AI is not a shortcut, but a “superpower.” “We’re looking at how we can teach these things through the content that we teach each and every day,” said Jimmy Fisher, Principal at Seckinger, during an interview with IBM Think. “We want our students to walk away being proficient users, but also ethical users.” In 2024, Gwinnett partnered with the EDSAFE AI Alliance to create responsible AI practices and policy recommendations for teachers, students and parents. Fisher urges his teachers to become an expert in one AI tool. Staff and students used to have free rein to use any LLM, but now the district pays for Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini for students and employees. In her freshman year, Watkins took an AP Human Geography course, which focused on human interaction with the environment and the positive and negative impacts that humans have on the world around them. The students studied the Gulf Coast winter storm of 2014, known in Atlanta as “Snowmageddon.” Students had thousands of available data points to investigate, such as the number of individuals who received aid and the time it took for them to get the resources. The students used creative problem solving, mathematical reasoning and data analysis to analyze the impact of the storm. Instead of taking an entire class period to dig through data points, students spent the class collaborating and drawing conclusions based on the data using Google Sheets and Excel. They used AI and predictive analytics to make cost analysis predictions and review the budget considerations made by the state to manage the cleanup operations. “We used AI to improve efficiency, but never at the expense of our raw human thought and creativity. That’s something AI can’t replace,” said Watkins, now a senior. Scott Gaffney, a social studies teacher at Seckinger, still uses Snowmageddon as an assignment. In an interview with IBM Think, he said that since students are able to complete data analysis in one class period, instead of several days, they have more time to discuss the real-life impact from the storm, and to plug-and-play other scenarios with the students. “You can tangibly see the skill advancement and progress in these kids,” he said. “It’s amazing, the capacity of these kids.” Test results bear this out: according to U.S. News & World Report, Seckinger students outperform the state average in mathematics, reading and science. When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, education specialists like Bree Dusseault, Principal and Managing Director at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), began tracking how school systems were responding to the new technology. “The very first reaction to generative AI or large language models was a bit of resistance or pushback through bans,” s