Bethalto School Board to Implement AI in Board Meeting Summaries

BETHALTO - During their regular meeting on June 25, 2026, the Bethalto Community Unit School District Board of Education learned about ways to implement artificial intelligence.

Director of Teaching and Learning Alyssa Smith explained that the district’s AI Committee, which was created last year, recently went to a training and finalized their first recommendation of how to implement AI in the district. The Board of Education meetings, which are recorded and posted to the district’s website, will now use AI to summarize the video’s transcript and create timestamps.

“Essentially what we’re doing is taking the YouTube videos, getting the transcript from it and then putting it into AI and saying ‘write us a summary’ and then reviewing it before it’s posted,” Smith explained.

The district website will now have a summary of the video with timestamps to help parents and community members determine which part of the video they’d like to watch. This new AI feature will help people find information and engage with the district’s Board of Education meetings in a new way.

Smith and the AI Committee agreed this “might be a good starting point” to “start dabbling” in AI. She noted that they have identified additional ways to implement AI for teachers, but they have yet to make a recommendation.

“We have a couple of ideas of how we want to start rolling that out with the teachers in kind of an open and easy way that will be helpful to them, but not overwhelming or nothing that’s too dangerous,” Smith explained. “It’s all in a closed circuit, meaning you put a document into a program, and then it only pulls answers from that. So it’s not like Chat GPT, where it’s out pulling answers from all kinds of things. The internet’s not taking our information.”

Smith added that Superintendent Dr. Jill Griffin already utilizes Google NotebookLM, an AI tool that allows her to upload staff contracts and quickly search for information within the contracts. Similar tools will likely be recommended by the AI Committee in the future.

The AI Committee plans to make additional recommendations soon, but this first use of AI will be implemented immediately.

“It’s kind of a low-risk but high-reward type of thing,” Smith said. “The Board gets to be the first one to benefit from our AI Committee.”

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