# North Vancouver School District Trustee Election Scroll down to find candidates and click to see their full statements. ## Where do North Vancouver school board trustee candidates stand on AI in classrooms? ![[preamble]] Candidate, sorted alphabetically by family name: - [[#Manoochehr Azizi]] - [[#Mike Boehm]] - [[#Jennifer Branston]] - [[#Michael Charrois]] - [[#Peggy Hung]] - [[#Cyndi Gerlach]] - [[#Rob Haines]] - [[#Raheela Khan]] - [[#Senora Navales]] - [[#Trish Neufeld]] - [[#Laura Nickerson]] - [[#Layne North]] - [[#Raphael Perfecto]] - [[#Ethel Purugganan]] - [[#Ainslie Rinfret]] - [[#George Tsiakos]] - [[#Antje Wilson]] ## Manoochehr Azizi ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] ## Mike Boehm ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] ## Jennifer Branston ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] ## Michael Charrois ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] - [Candidate website](https://michaelcharrois.ca/) ## Peggy Hung ![[election-reply#^support]] ![[north-vancouver-peggy-hung.webp|200]] - [Candidate website](https://www.peggyhung.ca/) > [!Info]- Candidate statement (click to expand) > > ## 1. As a trustee candidate, what is your position on AI chatbots in education? > > I believe the purpose of education is to teach students **how to think**, not simply how to access information. > >The foundations of education should remain **critical thinking, problem solving, writing, communication and creativity**. Those are the skills students need to become independent thinkers and learners. I don't think we should weaken those foundations in the rush to adopt new technology. > >I am not against AI. I think students will need to know how to use it, and eventually I expect AI literacy will be an important part of education. AI can be useful for exploring ideas, analyzing information, improving productivity and helping people improve efficiency. > >But I believe there is an important difference between **using AI to support learning and using AI instead of learning**. That is where I have concerns about bringing generative AI chatbots into classrooms before we have a much better understanding of their effect on learning. > >We've had a similar experience with other technologies. The problems we've seen with social media and children are a reminder that **we shouldn't put the entire responsibility for managing powerful technologies on children, parents or individual teachers**. Recent settlements involving Meta have resulted in significant new measures around children's use of its platforms. Meta did not admit wrongdoing, but the broader lesson is that society has increasingly recognized the need for system-level safeguards rather than relying entirely on individual self-regulation. I don't think AI and social media are the same thing, and I don't think AI is inherently harmful. But I do think there is a lesson there for education: **we should establish reasonable boundaries before widespread adoption, rather than adopt first and try to deal with unintended consequences afterward**. > >For me, this is ultimately about protecting the purpose of school. **Students need to do the thinking, writing, problem solving and creative work** if they are going to develop those abilities. So my position is that AI should support learning, but it shouldn't replace learning. > >I support a cautious approach, including a pause on generative AI chatbots in classrooms while we develop better evidence and clearer boundaries around their use. > >## 2. If elected, would you work to remove, or keep out, AI chatbots from classrooms? > >**Yes. If elected, I would work to keep generative AI chatbots out of classrooms during a defined pause while we establish stronger evidence and appropriate safeguards.** > >My position is not that students should never use or learn about AI. Quite the opposite: I believe AI literacy will eventually be an important part of education, and students should understand both the capabilities and limitations of these tools. But learning about AI is different from allowing AI to perform the learning for students. > >I am particularly concerned about relying on individual teachers to establish and enforce the boundary between those two things. A teacher may reasonably allow AI to help a student brainstorm an idea, while another teacher may consider that same use inappropriate for an assignment intended to develop writing or critical-thinking skills. One student may use AI to check their work after doing it themselves; another may ask the chatbot to produce the work and submit it. The technology makes that boundary increasingly difficult to monitor consistently. The school system should establish the educational boundaries rather than leaving every teacher to independently police them. > >Therefore, I would support a two-year pause on generative AI chatbots in classrooms, accompanied by research and policy development. > >During that period, I would want us to answer some basic questions: > >What uses of AI genuinely improve student learning? > >When does AI support learning, and when does it replace the cognitive work students need to do? > >What age and developmental stage is appropriate for different AI tools? > >What evidence-based safeguards are required? > >How do we protect student privacy and data? > >How do we ensure that AI does not widen existing educational inequalities? > >How do we teach AI literacy without allowing AI to replace the foundational skills students need to develop first? > >My priority as a trustee would be: protect the foundations of learning first, then introduce technology in a way that strengthens those foundations rather than replacing them. ## Cyndi Gerlach ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] ![[north-vancouver-cyndi-gerlach.webp\|200]] - [Candidate website](https://www.cyndigerlach.ca/) ## Rob Haines ![[election-reply#^oppose]] ![[north-vancouver-rob-haines.webp|200]] - [Candidate website](https://www.robhaines.ca/) > [!Info]- Candidate statement (click to expand) > My position on AI chatbots in education is that they are neither something to fear nor something to embrace without question. Like any powerful technology, their value depends on how thoughtfully and responsibly we use them. > > AI is already becoming part of our students' lives and future workplaces, so our responsibility is not to pretend it doesn't exist, but to ensure students learn how to use it safely, ethically, and critically. AI tools have the potential to support learning, increase accessibility, help students generate ideas, and assist educators with routine tasks. At the same time, they raise important concerns around privacy, data security, bias, academic integrity, and the development of critical-thinking skills. Both the BC Teachers' Federation and many school districts, including North Vancouver School District, have emphasized the need for clear guidelines, safeguards, digital literacy, and thoughtful implementation. > > One of my greatest concerns is the potential for AI to become a shortcut around the learning process itself. Education is not simply about producing an answer; it is about developing the ability to analyze, question, reason, create, and solve problems. If students rely on AI to do too much of the thinking for them, we risk weakening the very skills that schools are trying to develop. We also create challenges around assessment. Grades should be meaningful indicators of a student's knowledge, effort, and ability. If AI-generated work becomes difficult to distinguish from studentgenerated work, grades may become less reliable measures of achievement. > > This concern extends beyond K-12 education. Universities and colleges already face ongoing discussions about grade inflation and the challenge of comparing applicants from different schools and jurisdictions. If AI contributes to greater uncertainty about what grades truly represent, I worry that post-secondary institutions may place increasing emphasis on standardized entrance examinations or other assessment measures to evaluate applicants. That is not necessarily a direction that benefits students, educators, or public education as a whole. > > I also believe we must learn from the rapid expansion of social media. As a society, we often adopted those platforms before fully understanding their effects on privacy, mental health, misinformation, and human interaction. With AI, we have an opportunity to be more proactive. Rather than introducing powerful technologies and dealing with the consequences later, we should establish clear ethical guidelines from the outset and explicitly teach students about responsible AI use, including issues of bias, accuracy, intellectual property, privacy, and academic integrity. > > As a trustee, I would support a balanced approach that embraces innovation while maintaining strong safeguards and accountability. Our goal should be to graduate students who understand how to use AI effectively, but who also know when to challenge it, when not to rely on it, and how to think independently. Technology should enhance learning, not replace the critical thinking, creativity, and judgment that remain at the heart of a quality education. ## Raheela Khan ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] ![[north-vancouver-raheela-khan.avif\|200]] - [Candidate website](https://www.raheelakhan.com/) ## Senora Navales ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] ## Trish Neufeld ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] - [Candidate website](https://trishneufeldsd44.ca/) ## Laura Nickerson ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] ## Layne North > [!Question]- Seems to support a Pause on AI in classrooms > [!Info]- Candidate statement (click to expand) > > AI is indeed a very poignant and concerning topic in education.  > > It’s no surprise that teachers and parents are concerned about students AI use and worry about it’s impact on their development.  > > I myself have a background in AI Safety, and I’ve worked with and taught AI safety through BlueDotImpact, a leading AI safety organization looking to educate decision makers and industry workers on safety and existential risk [https://bluedot.org/](https://bluedot.org/). > > I’ve read a number of papers on the effects of AI on cognitive abilities and behaviour and even more articles. At this point it would take quite some time to track down which statistics came from where. But the studies all point in the same direction > > Research has shown time and time again that AI use impairs not only the retention of information, but that consistent use can impair both the development of and the maintenance of core cognitive skills. > > At the same time, more than 80% of high school students are actively using AI, and more than 80% of them have admitted to using it to complete school work in a recent survey. In university it’s even worse > > There are no shortcuts to learning. Because there’s no substitute for cognitive effort. > > The ability to learn and retain information and skills is directly tied to the effort we put into using it. “Use it or lose it” as the saying goes. AI skips the need for students to ever engage directly with material in the first place, meaning not only do they risk losing skills they’ve developed, younger students may risk never acquiring them in the first place.  > > This has become a serious concern even amongst instructors in medical schools, full of bright and capable students. > > Other surveys have shown that despite the boundless excitement of C-suite executives foisting AI into workplaces, AI is not only often resented and distrusted by employees, it can hamper worker productivity. Even in the AI and tech sectors, where many workers were initially excited about AI, other studies found that neither positivity towards AI use nor familiarity with the technology reliably predicted productivity gains. Instead, many workers ended up less productive even as they felt AI was letting them do more. > > That said, all of that applies to the typical ways in which AI is used.  > > There are some narrow use cases in which AI may be beneficial to learning.  > > Namely, using AI to test your own knowledge and force you to stretch your limits. I’ve found AI useful for giving mock exams on specific subjects or skills, and for providing feedback on what resources might be used to grow further. > > It’s not a substitute for engaging with a skilled teacher, and it’s important to know enough to discern whether the way in which an AI is testing you is legitimate, but I’ve found that at this point the frontier models give advice close enough to the professors in the subjects I’ve studied that it’s a useful resource in the absence of timely access to a human teacher.  Even one year ago that was not the case. > > And I can recall many instances in the classroom where my learning was held back because there was no one available to answer my questions or help me take the next step. > > AI can also be useful for picking out inconsistencies in one’s written arguments, pushing a writer to argue from different perspectives and arguing against one’s ideas to force them to better defend themselves. > > That is clearly not how the vast majority of people use AI. And even then, when used properly, it’s easy to let it start pointing out weaknesses for you rather than putting in the effort to first review work yourself, or to come to rely on it too much as an advisor. > > For now, most of what I’ve seen is AI being used as an extension of the dynamic quiz modules that academic publishers and education companies started marketing a decade ago. Offering to test students on all the different fragments of knowledge and using AI to pinpoint areas of weakness and design questions to specifically address them.  > > I’m not particularly a fan of this. When a teacher who knows the student does it, it works great (but the skill and time required precludes most teachers from doing this). What I’ve seen of AI attempting to do this so far doesn’t satisfy me. In fact, despite hearing from a local psych professor that it raises exam scores, when trying it out myself I’ve found the technology to be very frustrating to use as a learner. Part of that is the framework teachers and companies have designed it to stick to. I expect better products will emerge in the future as current tools like Khanmigo (from Khan Academy) get refined. But for now I wouldn’t risk using it in schools and frustrating students to the point that they lose interest in learning. I’d want to see it proven effective outside the classroom first. > > I do think at some point in the near future more restricted AI models will exist that will  be useful for answering basic questions for kids, such as providing definitions for new words incurred while reading, when teachers aren’t readily available. This would be a tool similar to the Dragon dictation software used for students who have difficulty typing. > > But given how important the social aspect of learning is, I think it would be a mistake to ever use models to reduce the amount of time kids have with teachers. > > To recap: > > At a high level, AI use is like social media. It impairs critical thinking, hampers proper social interaction and empathy and has a corrosive effect on trust. It isn’t the kind of thing you’d want anywhere near children.  > > On the other hand, it’s something that kids are likely to get access to regardless of parents attempts to restrict them, and it’s a technology whose reach and importance is only going to grow in the coming years.  > > AI isn’t a tool that should be used to teach in the classroom, or be present in schools.  > > That said, it’s important to note that we’ll have no control over what tools students use outside of school. It’s clear that many will continue to use AI irrespective of school policy. Changing testing methods and assignments can only mitigate that. > > Students will need to be educated about AI the same way we educate them about other harmful interactions, the same way we brought social media educators into school. Students need to understand what AI actually is, what it is not, and how that affects them. > > It’s also clear that students will increasingly be expected to be fluent in AI use in order to secure employment. This means while students should be cautioned about the dangers, we should also consider showing students in what ways AI can be beneficial, and in the later years, providing the basic training on it’s use they’ll need to secure their future. ## Raphael Perfecto ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] ## Ethel Purugganan ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] ## Ainslie Rinfret ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] ## George Tsiakos ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] ![[north-vancouver-george-tsaikos.avif\|200]] - [Candidate website](https://www.georgetsiakos.ca/) ## Antje Wilson ![[election-reply#^candidate-no-reply]] - [Candidate website](https://antjewilson.com/) - [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/antjewilson)