Sara Dessert
MTSS Specialist
Ferndale School District · WA
A K-12 AI Practitioners Commons
A nationwide group of K-12 technology leaders actually building, deploying, and governing AI agents in real school systems — and sharing what works so others don't have to rebuild the wheel.
Most AI groups are still defining agentic AI. This is a practitioners' group: people moving past awareness into the practical work of building with agents — against real data, real privacy constraints, and real users — without creating avoidable risk.
Hosting, local/open-weight models, MCP servers, authentication, delegated accounts, role-based data access, and cost.
Training, guardrails, starter packs, and "builder's permit" pathways so staff can innovate without risking student data.
Concrete recipes, code patterns, and use cases — the implementation-level ideas too technical for broad policy groups.
Technology and data leaders from districts and organizations across the country.
MTSS Specialist
Ferndale School District · WA
Data Engineer
Peninsula School District · WA
Founder
Learn21 · OH
IT Director
White River School District · WA
Infrastructure Engineer
Peninsula School District · WA
Director of Data and Accountability
STEM Prep · CA
Computer Science Teacher
Boise School District · ID
IT Director
Maryville Schools · TN
Network Administrator
Maryville Schools
Peninsula School District (PSD401) · WA
Fairfax County Public Schools · VA
Director of Innovative Solutions
Agua Fria Union High School District · AZ
Chief Information Officer
Peninsula School District · WA
Superintendent
Grand Island Central School District · NY
Director of Data & Analytics
Alpha Public Schools · CA
Chief Technology Officer (transitioning)
New Trier Township High School District (formerly Agua Fria) · IL
Director of AI
Agua Fria Union High School District · AZ
Technology Director, Boise School District
Boise School District (formerly Idaho Digital Learning Alliance) · ID
Systems / network engineer
New Trier Township High School District · IL
New Trier Township High School District · IL
AI Lab lead ("wild idea generator in chief")
Montana State Virtual School (Montana Digital Academy) · MT
The thorny ones. If you've solved any of these, we want to hear from you.
What members are passing around — articles, posts and episodes worth your time, with a note on why. Links go to the original sources.
Two members of this group, in long form: Brian Graham (Grand Island CSD) interviews Kris Hagel (Peninsula SD) for 50 minutes on the Erie Niagara superintendents' podcast. Worth it for the numbers and the governance rather than the enthusiasm — roughly $500k in subscriptions avoided so far and about $300k/year projected, two cancelled contracts at ~$75k each, against a token spend that could reach ~$10k/month…
Collaborative book led by Brian Graham with chapters from members of this group, including Luke Allpress, Drew Olsson and Lauren Owens. Launched October 2026.
Shared during the cookbook discussion on the Aug 11 call — the counterweight perspective on conversational building.
Dictate the context you'd normally edit out of a typed prompt — rambling gives the agent the conversational detail it needs. Luke's been trying it with success.
Kris Hagel's case that EdTech vendors should make their systems agent-ready — safely accessible to district-owned AI agents coordinating across platforms — rather than shipping isolated chatbots, or districts will build the replacements themselves. Grounds the group's 'agentic access for vendors' thread.
Development strategy using multiple agents in concert to create a vetted, deployable solution that resulted in 70x-450x improvement in SQL parsing.
Monthly syncs where members share what they're building.
2026-10-21
Eighth call. Logan Barnes-Wilkey (STEM Prep, a Los Angeles charter network) joined for the first time as Director of Data and Accountability, a team of one feeding PowerSchool into BigQuery — the third member now on that stack, so a BigQuery side conversation was spun off. Two pieces of group business opened the call. …
2026-09-24
Seventh call, and the biggest intake yet — five new members introduced themselves. Sara Dessert (Ferndale SD) automates manual workflows for school teams in Google Workspace and Apps Script, and is moving de-siloed data into a BigQuery warehouse on a $40,000 Gates Foundation grant. Andy Lombardo (Maryville City Schools…
2026-09-02
Sixth call, on Peninsula's first day of school. Brian showed Cosmo Study — an accessible cosmetology exam prep app built in Perplexity for one graduate with a reading disability — plus a Traitors-lore game built with his daughter. James Saniger described pulling 10,000+ content-filter policy entries out of a vendo…
2026-08-11
Fifth call, with new faces from Maryville Schools and Boise. Infrastructure updates: Kris burned through a month of unlimited Codex reviving a network monitoring project, rebuilding a paging app, and updating a maps program integrating cameras and intercoms; he also demoed chaining NVIDIA DGX Sparks to run DeepSeek loc…
2026-07-06
Fourth practitioners call — a more philosophical show-and-tell on how agentic AI is reshaping district operations after a three-week summer gap. Luke Allpress walked through the Builder's Permit course; members demoed a wave of working education tools: Brian Graham's sentence/"Traitors" games, a per…
2026-06-16
Members reviewed updated stacks and demonstrated a wave of working education agents: Jason Neiffer's Course Intelligence Agent (an Obsidian-vault course-revision system with NotebookLM 'committees') and Frontier Intelligence System / Hermes (OSINT aggregation into a CRM); Ryan Gravette's agent-skill…
2026-04-23
First gathering of a nationwide group of K-12 practitioners building AI agents. Members introduced their stacks and current work, surfacing a shared opportunity to become a practitioner-builder community focused on actually building, deploying, governing, and scaling agentic tools in education — not just defining agent…
2026-05-19
Second call. Members shared what they are excited about building and moved to formalize a collaborative roadmap. Kris detailed the OpenClaw rollout to the executive cabinet on AWS micro-VMs with MCP-mediated role-based data access and Google Workspace integration. Ryan raised the challenge of an intelligence/semantic l…
We're looking for K-12 technical practitioners who are already building with agents and want to share, steal, and push each other's work forward. Email Luke Allpress and we'll get you connected.
Email to get involved →The structured knowledge base lives in Coda (group access required):