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The Broward County School District is going all in on teaching artificial intelligence, betting that the new technology will encourage families to stay in the public system.
Five schools will get elective AI programs in the next academic year, said Keyla Concepcion, a school district spokeswoman. In addition, three Nova schools in Davie are scheduled to begin classes in the 2027-28 year, complementing existing programs at Nova High, South Plantation High, Glades Middle in Miramar and Dillard High 6-12 in Fort Lauderdale.
The expansion plans are part of multiple initiatives designed to tackle 15 years of decreasing enrollment, which has left the district with more than 50,000 empty seats. The decline started with the surge of charter schools more than 20 years ago, but officials now also attribute the falloff to dwindling birth rates, the growth of private school vouchers and immigration issues.
As they brainstormed ways to keep families interested in public education, officials decided to embrace the enthusiasm of students such as Miguel Niebles, a senior at Nova High’s AI Academy, who has given some thought to AI in contemporary American life.
Niebles said he and his peers are aware AI can be used to cheat on exams or mislead with false information. He has friends who are wary of the technology; as artists, they are concerned their work can be copied and manipulated without their permission. But he tries to show them AI’s benefits while acknowledging its deficiencies.
“You can use it to tutor, you can use it to practice for tests,” he said. “It’s not just to replace us but to empower us.”
Many grownups are skeptical of AI. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found half of American adults are “more concerned than excited” about its growing presence in daily life. Teenagers, on the other hand, are welcoming this new digital world: Pew found more than half of teens have used AI to find information, help with homework and have fun.
At Nova High, students are using their AI skills to help the public with a problem they often encounter: navigating the Broward school district’s website, which often requires multiple clicks to get to a desired page. The project is one of several undertaken by the second-year class at the school’s AI Academy, which is teaching 60 students this technology of the future.
Academy students surveyed parents and young people and compiled a list of the most common challenges they face maneuvering through browardschools.com‘s 10,000 pages. Among the repeat issues: how to email school staff; how to report an absence; and how to locate each school’s online store, calendar, parking decal forms, summer assignments and clubs.
Seeing how many clicks are needed to find an after-school club, senior Jan-Carlos Reyes Santana, 18, designed a user-friendly chatbot so each club can be accessed through the district’s main landing page by posing a simple demand, such as “Take me to the Nova High chess club.”
Senior Sofia Mazumdar is working on a virtual assistant for the website that examines transcripts and details whether students are on track to graduate.
“A lot of people are kind of lost” when it comes to figuring out if they can graduate on time, said Mazumdar, 18. “But if you upload your transcript, this will tell you what you need.”
The work of these future AI experts will soon be online for all to see: Their chatbots are expected to be available to users for the school year that begins in August.
Nova High students are using their AI skills not only to help the district’s website. Alani Parhm, 17, built a self-tutoring schedule to help her study for an anatomy exam. Valentino Constant, 16, proposed a new design for the school’s courtyard, winning a contest initiated by Principal Olayemi Awofadeju.
“The students are pushing us, and that’s good,” said Manuel Castaneda, the school district’s executive director of enterprise analytics and intelligence. “They’re showing us how we can learn from them as much as they can learn from us.”
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