A 17-year-old Boulder student named Om told fellow members of Colorado's Youth Advisory Council about a friend who used ChatGPT to help write an essay, then could not explain what he had actually written. That anecdote, shared at a COYAC meeting on July 31, has become the centerpiece of a student-led push urging Colorado lawmakers to create a statewide task force on artificial intelligence in education, one that would set ethics and policy guidelines for schools still making up their own rules on the fly.
Om and his colleagues have proposed an artificial intelligence in education task force housed within the Colorado Department of Education, according to the Denver Gazette. The group would bring together educators, administrators, educational technology organizations and students to figure out how school districts can capture AI's benefits while guarding against what researchers call cognitive offloading — using technology to reduce mental effort. Om told the Gazette that the lack of statewide guidance is the starting point of the problem, and he has asked lawmakers to consider sponsoring a bill based on the task force proposal in the upcoming session.
Right now, Colorado school districts set their own AI rules with no statewide guidance for implementing the technology responsibly, per the Gazette's reporting. Denver Public Schools, the state's largest school district, banned students' use of ChatGPT this year, saying the district worried the chatbot's chat feature could increase cyberbullying, academic misconduct and over-reliance on AI. The district said the ban prioritized students' safety and privacy, even as it separately unveiled a set of other AI tools on school-issued devices.
Half of Teachers Already Use AI, Many Feel Unprepared
The patchwork approach comes as AI use has already become widespread in Colorado classrooms. About 50% of Colorado teachers report using artificial intelligence tools in their jobs, though roughly half also say they feel unprepared for AI's future impact on education, according to the Colorado Department of Education's Teaching and Learning Conditions survey covered by KUNC. It was the first time the biennial statewide survey asked educators directly about AI tools.
National data suggests students are moving even faster than their teachers. A Pew Research Center study published in February found that 64% of U.S. teenagers use AI chatbots, and 76% of teens who use chatbots for schoolwork say students at their school use them to cheat at least sometimes. That combination — heavy student adoption alongside persistent cheating concerns — helps explain why Om and his fellow COYAC delegates are pressing for clear guidelines rather than leaving each district to improvise.
In Boulder Valley School District, where Om is a student, teacher adoption of the AI platform MagicSchool surged during the 2025-2026 school year as educators built custom chatbots meant to guide students through coursework, per the same KUNC report. Those tools were designed to function as virtual tutors that prompt student thinking rather than hand over direct answers — precisely the balance the proposed task force wants applied statewide, to promote AI as a technology to think with rather than a replacement for thinking. Some students already use AI to bypass the thinking their assignments are meant to develop, and some schools graduate students without ever teaching them how to use the technology at all, according to the Gazette.
State Guidance Exists, but It's Voluntary
Colorado has not been entirely silent on the issue. The Colorado Department of Education unveiled its roadmap for AI in K-12 education in 2024, and the agency later worked with the Colorado Education Initiative to publish the Future-Ready Colorado: Artificial Intelligence K-12 Skills Progression Guide for Educators, mapping AI computer science standards across grade levels. The roadmap serves as a resource for districts developing their own approaches to AI, but neither document carries the force of law, and adoption remains entirely up to individual school systems.
Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova and Colorado Education Initiative leader Rebecca Holmes have written that schools must adapt to AI with cautious optimism. The state has also leaned on public outreach: the Colorado Department of Education co-hosted virtual AI Literacy Summits alongside Governor Jared Polis and Córdova in March 2025 and March 2026 to mark National AI Literacy Day, gathering educators, students and tech industry leaders to discuss classroom integration and workforce readiness.
Meanwhile, Colorado's broader AI regulatory landscape has been shifting under lawmakers' feet. Polis signed Senate Bill 26-189 in May, repealing and replacing the state's 2024 AI Act with a narrower framework focused on consumer transparency and automated decision-making technology, set to take effect January 1, 2027, according to Blank Rome LLP. That earlier 2024 statute had imposed strict risk-management obligations on deployers of high-risk AI systems across several sectors, including education — a legal backdrop Hoodline previously reported had already drawn a lawsuit from Elon Musk's xAI.
Looking to California's Model, and a Narrower Path to a Bill
Om and his fellow delegates have pointed to California as their template. The California Department of Education created an artificial intelligence working group in 2024, the first state-level group of its kind, which brings together educators, students, experts and educational partners to develop guidance and model policy for safe, equitable and effective AI use in schools, according to the Playlab Learning Hub. As of June, 37 states plus Puerto Rico had developed official guidance or policy frameworks addressing AI in K-12 settings, leaving Colorado without a formal statewide framework of its own.
Getting a task force bill introduced will require more legwork than in past years. Colorado students serve on the General Assembly's Youth Advisory Council committee, a joint committee of lawmakers and students examining policies affecting young people, and COYAC members present their policy ideas to legislators for possible introduction as bills each session. But a December 2025 report by the Colorado General Assembly noted that Senate Bill 25-199 repealed the bill-drafting authority of COYAC's legislative review committee, while keeping the council active through a sunset review scheduled for September 1, 2028. That means Om and his colleagues must now convince individual lawmakers to sponsor the task force proposal directly, rather than relying on an automatic drafting pipeline that no longer exists.
The proposed task force would also provide teacher training courses on classroom AI use and student AI literacy, addressing the same preparedness gap flagged in the Colorado Department of Education's teacher survey. Whether that vision becomes law now depends less on the Youth Advisory Council itself and more on whether any legislator in the coming session is willing to put their name on it.
