Virginia's AI Guidelines for Educators

Promulgated from Governor Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Order 30 (January 18, 2024), these are the AI guidelines for educators in Virginia, as of September 2025.

AI Education Guidelines 

Governor Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Order 30 (January 18, 2024) implements AI standards and guidelines to protect Virginians, utilizing $600,000 in proposed budgetary funds for AI pilots in state agencies. This order includes guidelines to support education institutions while ensuring flexibility, appropriate guardrails, and necessary constraints. 

• Recognizes that AI brinks both tremendous potential, and risks to manage
• AI should never fully replace teachers, who nurture students’ critical thinking, values and character development

Guiding Principles 

• Do No Harm: All AI integration must follow policy and IT standards, and other state and federal policies, including safeguarding the privacy, security, and confidentiality of personally identifiable information, and ensuring results are not based on biases that lead to discriminatory outcomes. AI is only allowed when its use has the potential to contribute positive good and improvement to the status quo. 
• Prioritize integrity: A core purpose of education is the development of responsible, ethical, and engaged citizens. AI in education must teach about morality, ethics, honor, cheating, and how AI can lead to perverse and destructive outcomes for individuals, relationships, and communities. 
• Augment, not replace humans: AI cannot and should not ever replace human judgement. Synthesis and analysis of information can be expedited through AI, it will never replace teachers who provide wisdom, context, feedback, empathy, nurturing and humanity in ways that a machine cannot. It also should not overpower/over-ride the critical thinking, judgement, and morality of the learner. 
• Harness AI to empower student success: AI can enable more adaptive, personalized learning. We must embrace an outlook of innovation and experimentation, while ensuring access for all learners. Rather than just digitizing practices, we can reimagine education to nurture each student’s unlimited potential. Our vision should focus on possibility - AI to expand human capacity - not conformity to conventions of the past.
• Work in partnership: AI researchers and experts in colleges and universities and employers are key partners and guides around building the skills and knowledge required to be successful in the new economy. This includes how to think about evolving AI systems and the practices needed to use them responsibly.
• Be constantly discerning and responsive to the continuous expansion of AI capabilities and uses: This is not a one-and-done. Guidelines, best practices, and tools available will constantly need to be revisited to keep pace with the changes brought by the exponential growth of AI and technology advancements. Nimbleness and urgency, balanced with careful considerations, will be critical to ensuring we are prepared. 

Strategies for Successful Integration of AI in Education
At every level of education—from governing boards to individual classrooms—these strategies can improve the effective integration of AI into education.
Encourage Exploration — For informed discussions on AI, educators need hands-on experience to understand its capabilities and limitations. Leaders should facilitate teacher teams exploring AI tools. Through guided firsthand use, educators can discover ways to enrich instruction, as well as critical risks and challenges. Rather than rely on rumors or perceptions, we must empower teachers with deeper practical knowledge. With structured experimentation, schools can tap into educators’ insights to uncover use cases while proactively addressing ethical concerns. This ground-up understanding will produce more thoughtful and responsible approaches to adopting AI.

1. Provide Professional Development — As with any new tool or strategy, educators need professional development to feel comfortable using it. Workshops, courses, micro-credentials, or micro-badges on AI, follow-up implementation and application activities, and discussions and opportunities to collaborate with colleagues and experts can help teachers understand and experience its capabilities and limitations. 
2. Spotlight Success — Spotlight examples of AI already being used in schools. Ensure educators have meaningful outlets to share what they are trying and whether it is working. Encourage teachers to collaborate in their exploration of AI to learn from each other and build a supportive community for this new educational environment.
3. Host Stakeholder Conversations — Host conversations with business leaders, educators, governing members, leaders, and families about AI and how schools are preparing students with the skills to thrive in an AI-infused world. Discussions could include topics such as ethical AI use and integration of AI in the curriculum. 
4. Set The Right Conditions — It is important to establish conditions for effective use. Clearly outline the school or system’s policies and protocols around data privacy, honor code, student code of conduct, acceptable use, and ethical considerations when using AI, including those related to plagiarism and proper use of secondary sources. Teachers should know what is expected of them and the boundaries within which they should operate. 

Specific roles of Educators

1.  Establish a culture of integrity by discussing the honor code often with students and parents, implementing an honor code system with real consequences .
2. Follow an Acceptable Use Policy inside and outside the classroom: Review and discuss the Acceptable Use Policy with students and parents; implement and hold the learning community accountable for living up to Acceptable Use Policy.
3. Design assignments and assessments that encourage critical thinking and original thought and human judgement.
4. Create opportunities for collaboration and peer review.
5. Communicate clearly and specifically when and how students can utilize Generative Artificial Intelligence in assignments
6. Integrate digital citizenship with the following Standards of Learning
   1. Computer Science: The Impacts of Computing
   2. Digital Learning Integration: Digital Citizen
   3. English: Communication and Multimodal Literacies, Research
   4. Fine Arts: Innovation in the Arts, History, Culture, and Citizenship o Health: Safety/Injury Prevention
   5. Mathematics: Computation
   6. Science: Scientific and Engineering Practices: Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information
   7. Social Studies and History: Skills
   8. World Language: Interacting in School and Global Communities