Louis Riel School Division embraces AI agents of change

End-of-year report cards will be drafted using a new digital assistant made by and for teachers working in St. Vital and surrounding communities in southeast Winnipeg.

The Louis Riel School Division’s data team has spent much of the 2025-26 school year designing and piloting secure artificial intelligence-powered tools to address common problems for staff and students.

Curriculum-Linked Assessment and Reporting Assistant is one of its five new “AI agents.”

“Teachers put in all their assessment data and it helps them create meaningful, curriculum-aligned, jargon-free comments for parents,” said Marnie Wilson, data strategy officer for the division.

Some users have reported time-saving benefits, but the bigger win is feedback from teachers saying CLARA is helping them co-publish “richer and more personalized” report cards, Wilson said.

The division’s new tools — known by their acronyms: SPARK, LEAP, ATLAS, CHALK and CLARA — are customizable offshoots of Copilot. Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbot is included in the division’s licensing agreement with the technology company.

Each one was tailor-made to solve a challenge, be it the inconsistent nature and quality of plans for English as an Additional Language students or how demanding it is for teachers to regularly differentiate lessons for children with varying levels of literacy.

Wilson said they are all optional tools and there are no plans to mandate teachers use them.

“Our stance is that AI is here to stay and if we need to educate our future leaders and our future workers, they need to have experiences in a safe environment with AI,” she said.

The division started inviting teachers to try them in the winter. A total of 426 individual users accessed AI agents between Feb. 8 and April 28, the latest available reporting period.

More recently, its grades 7-12 student-friendly chatbot, Classroom Helper for Academic Learning and Knowledge, was added to the roster. It is being piloted by one school this spring.

“These aren’t just vending machines of information…. There’s a lot of back-and-forth conversation going on,” said Clarke Hagan, director of information technology systems.

CHALK was programmed not to give students direct answers and refuse to engage in casual conversation. A contained search engine that can draw on all Manitoba Education curriculum and support documents, it is meant to help students with homework.

Asked if it’s a user’s friend, it will reply: “No, I am an agent to help you learn,” Hagan said.

“AI wants to give you the answer, so it was a bit of a challenge,” he said.

While some staff have raised questions about the environmental impact of these tools, Hagan said everything that happens in education has a carbon footprint, whether it’s printing or transporting students.

“Just because we’ve normalized these things doesn’t mean the environmental impact has gone away,” he said, adding that his team wants teachers to use AI when its high educational value justifies the cost.

The division’s efforts to educate students about artificial intelligence are taking place as the province prepares to ban children aged 15 and younger from accessing social media and AI chatbots.

Premier Wab Kinew defended his government’s plans, citing the highly-addictive nature of technologies that are monetizing children’s attention and causing mental health-problems, on Thursday.

During an afternoon scrum in his office, Kinew told reporters he would, however, be interested in creating a “sandbox” where teachers and students can explore AI tools.

The premier said he would be open to allowing “a tool that is legitimately educational that’s opening new vistas for learning for young people and we’re running it locally on computers that we control.”

Jeff Anderson, assistant superintendent of policy, planning and transportation in the Louis Riel School Division, said AI is all around students, and they need to learn how to use it.

“It’s a tool that they have access to and we feel having them learn about it in the classroom from teachers who are able to guide them and set up authentic learning situations and age-appropriate expectations and learning outcomes — that’s really how we approach this,” Anderson said.

Chipalo Simunyola, a school trustee and father of three elementary students, said he initially felt apprehensive about promoting AI tools and their impact on human interaction, engagement and learning inside classrooms.

“You don’t want to lose that to a bot,” he said, “but the fact that a lot of this (technology) is not being used for instruction, but rather for preparation, has made me at ease.”

Simunyola said he’s proud of how division leaders have been focusing on creating a data governance charter and supportive documents to protect data and promote the ethical and responsible use of technology.

The data team said the new charter, along with the creation of AI guidelines and an academic honesty policy, are all connected.

Teachers’ association president Jay McGurran said he welcomes all efforts to help his approximately 1,100 members carry out their duties, “As long as it comes with the time and training to ensure new tools are used effectively.”

He noted that CLARA has the potential to significantly reduce administrative burden.

It isn’t uncommon for high school teachers to have to report on the individual progress of 100 or more students throughout a course.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca