NEW ULM – From understanding artificial intelligence to ensuring the safety of students, Superintendent Sean Koster covered several topics during Thursday’s school board meeting.

The report comes as students are about to enter the classroom. Sept. 3rd for 5th and 9th grade, Sept. 5 for Kindergarteners, and Sept. 4 for all other grades.

Koster attended the Minnesota School Board Association Leadership Conference August 5th, and the Minnesota Association of School Administrators (MASA) Back to School Conference the next day.

“The conference was nice for networking with other school leaders and challenged us to reimagine some aspects of education,” he said. “There were questions asked about How do we define success? How do we build systems to make that happen?”

At the MASA conference, Koster said there was a presentation on artificial intelligence. He said the presenter demonstrated how students can use AI as a learning tool.

“He spent that morning taking pictures of the PowerPoints from the presentation using his phone,” Koster said. “He then put those pictures into his AI program and said, translate to notes. It did notes for him automatically from the pictures from the PowerPoint slides. From there he said, translate to note cards, so he [could] get highlights from it.”

Koster said many times people think of tools like ChatGPT and the cheating that can be done using AI. He said there are many different aspects besides those first impressions.

“We use AI all the time in our world,” Koster said. “Anytime we have autocorrect on Word or our texts, that’s AI-generated information coming back to us.”

Board member Jonathan Schiro said he had used ChatGPT earlier in the day to get some examples based on a prompt he fed it. He said there is a neighboring school district that hired an AI-focused coordinator. He asked Koster what could be done moving forward.

“There’s a lot of nuances as far as how to use it, how not to use it,” Koster said. “I wouldn’t be surprised the more that we talk about, the more that we look at how we utilize it if we have a policy governing that in the future.”

Koster said he is open to the possibility of further focusing on AI and its place in New Ulm’s education going forward.

“I think there are definitely some avenues for students to learn,” he said. “I think teachers and our district would be really receptive to programming. We don’t have anything in place at the moment, but we’d be receptive to outside programming.”

A series on emergency management held by the New Ulm Emergency Management Committee was also a priority for Koster. He said a key takeaway is knowing what to do after a tragedy has happened, not just before or during.

“We focus a lot on our drills, on getting kids out of the building,” Koster said. “We have an understanding of what happens after that. We know where we’re going, and we have plans for how we would reunify families. What do you do the next day? How do we support the community? How do we support our families? We’re putting things in place to help support families after the fact.”

Koster said safety initiatives like this follow his mantra of making District 88 a support for families and the community.