Dear Ursuline Families,

It is my pleasure to start another school year as Ursuline’s Honor Council Moderator! This is my second year working with the Honor Council, and my role as Moderator has been rewarding and enlightening, especially in our current age of AI. This summer, as I prepared for another year with the Honor Council, I was struck by this verse in Isaiah: "Before they call I will answer; while they are yet speaking I will hear.” (65:24) As an Honor Council we strive to listen to and honor the integrity of our students as we guide them through their time at Ursuline. We embrace that sometimes our students make mistakes, but our goal is to help them reflect, learn, and grow.

The world is a very different place in 2025 than it was in 1997 when the Honor Council first started. In 2022, education arguably faced its most dramatic change since perhaps the graphing calculator – OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT launched and was quickly followed by Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini. With generative AI programs now widely accessible, educators everywhere, including at Ursuline, are preparing our students for a world with AI while protecting their learning and skill-development.

And AI is not just a student-teacher-school conversation; from AI-generated search results, to how your social media algorithms suggest the next video, its presence is everywhere! I encourage you to talk to your daughter about AI: how she might be using it at school or for schoolwork, how she might have used it in her personal life, and even about how you are using AI in your daily life or in your workplace.

Perhaps even consider these questions:

Have you ever used AI before? What tools did you use? What was your experience like with those tools? Did you like the results? Why or why not?

What do you think should or should not be allowed by your teachers when it comes to AI? Do you think your teachers should use AI in their work? Why or why not?

What do you know about the ethics surrounding AI? Have you seen any news about it?

I hope you can explore these questions together, and Seek answers together too. We are all entering this brave new world together, and no one is the expert. Although we use resources like Turnitin.com to help guide us, it is just one of many pieces that can give context to a student’s case.

If you’d like to learn more about the Honor Council process you can check out pages 31-33 of the Student/Parent Handbook. I am also always available to answer questions and receive any feedback you may have!

I hope you and your daughter have a great year.

Sincerely,

Caroline Golson