The John Cooper School has formed an AI Council to set ground rules for how students across every grade level interact with artificial intelligence, pairing classroom guidelines with a new partnership aimed at protecting kids from deepfake threats.

The council, announced Aug. 15 on the school's website, is led by three staffers: Travis Gasper, the school's AI innovation coordinator and a Middle School English teacher; Katherine Navarra, lower school educational technology coordinator; and Scott Ardill, chief technology officer. Together they convene faculty and administrators from Cooper's Lower, Middle and Upper School divisions.

A key piece of the effort: guidelines tailored to each age group. Rather than a blanket AI policy, the council is building expectations that account for where students are developmentally, from pre-K through 12th grade.

Gasper, who also coordinates the Middle School English department, has emerged as a national voice on AI and adolescence. In a Feb. 26 essay published in The New York Times, he wrote: "Students now make their mistakes in private, with a sycophantic parrot that squawks empty encouragement."

That concern about young people outsourcing vulnerability to chatbots now shapes his work at Cooper, where the stated goal is building judgment and literacy rather than training students on any single platform.

All Cooper faculty read Ethan Mollick's bestselling book "Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI" over the summer as shared preparation. The school's strategy for the 2026-2027 year includes professional development for teachers, curricular AI literacy, student and parent engagement sessions, and selective adoption of AI tools.

On the safety side, Cooper has partnered with Evan Harris, president of the Pathos Consulting Group, whom the school describes as the nation's leading expert on deepfake safety in schools. Harris, a Technology Ethics Fellow at Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, has advised the Office of the First Lady and the Department of Homeland Security and co-authored the National Association of Independent Schools' legal guide on deepfake abuse. He met with Cooper's senior leadership team this summer.

Cooper's All-School Handbook now explicitly prohibits creating, distributing or threatening to distribute nonconsensual intimate images of any student or employee, including AI-generated deepfakes, in alignment with federal law.

Harris will return for additional community-facing sessions during the 2026-2027 school year. No specific dates have been announced. Families can contact the school at 281-367-0900 for updates.