Leadership Guide
AI Tools for Principals and School Leaders
AI tools for principals are software that uses large language models to draft, structure, or reason through the written and decision-heavy parts of school leadership — evaluation narratives, staff and family communications, incident records, policy questions, and planning. This guide covers the five jobs where they actually save time, the one line you must not cross, and how to choose a tool you can defend to your superintendent.
Written by Mike Giroux, a K–12 school administrator in Massachusetts and the founder of School Solutions. Disclosure: I build two of the tools mentioned below. I also tell you where a free general-purpose model is the better choice.
The honest starting point
Principals are already using AI. Not in a district-approved platform with a signed agreement — in a personal ChatGPT tab, at night, pasting in notes that name a teacher and describe a classroom. The silence around it isn't caution; the silence is the risk.
So the useful question for a school leader isn't should I use AI. It's which jobs is it actually good at, and what am I allowed to put in it. Those two questions have clear answers, and the rest of this page is them.
Five jobs where AI saves a principal real time
Ordered by how much of your week they eat.
Observation write-ups and evaluation narratives
Six walkthroughs in a notebook, three in shorthand, summative conferences in eleven days. The writing is the bottleneck, not the observing.
Where AI fits: AI is excellent here — if it works from your evidence and your rubric. The failure mode is a tool that invents observations you didn't make.
EduEval
Turns your notes into rubric-aligned, evidence-cited feedback on Danielson, Marzano, or a district rubric. Free tier; no district contract.
See EduEval →Thinking through the hard call before you make it
A staff conversation you're dreading, a parent complaint that touches Title IX, an IEP question with no one to ask at 6 a.m. You are the most senior person in the building and there's no one to think out loud with.
Where AI fits: AI is a good sounding board when it knows the constraints you work within — FERPA, IEP timelines, union language — and a bad one when it gives generic management advice.
Pocket Principal
Leadership guidance built for K–12 constraints: staffing conversations, compliance questions, instructional decisions, and communications drafted in your voice.
See Pocket Principal →Incident documentation that will hold up later
A rough note from a hallway incident needs to become a defensible record — factual, sequenced, free of characterization — before the parent call.
Where AI fits: AI is good at structure and neutral language. It should never be given the student's name; initials and roles are enough.
Student Incident Report Generator
Free. Turns a rough note into a structured, defensible record. Asks for initials instead of names, and stores nothing you type.
Use the free tool →Planning the observation year
August. A roster, a district evaluation plan with different requirements by status, two observers, and a calendar that fills up before October.
Where AI fits: This is a scheduling problem, not a language problem — a deterministic tool beats a chatbot, and nothing needs to leave your browser.
Observation Schedule Builder
Free. Plans a full year of walkthroughs and formals across observers, honoring deadlines and blackout weeks. Runs entirely in your browser.
Build a schedule →Communications that don't start from a blank page
The weekly family newsletter, the staff memo about the schedule change, the letter after the snow day that wasn't called.
Where AI fits: AI is very good at this and the risk is low — as long as nothing in the draft identifies a student. A general-purpose model with a house style and a hard rule is fine here.
Any general-purpose model
ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, with one rule written down: no names, no records, no case details. Give it three past newsletters and it will learn your voice.
The line: what never goes into a general-purpose AI
FERPA doesn't mention AI, but it does govern where student education records go. The consumer version of every major chatbot has no data agreement with your district. So the rule is simple and it applies to every tool without a signed agreement:
Never
- Student names, IDs, or anything that identifies a student in combination
- IEP or 504 contents, evaluations, or eligibility details
- Discipline records, incident narratives with names, or attendance histories
- Health, counseling, or family-situation information
- Staff personnel records or evaluation ratings, unless the tool is built and contracted for it
Fine
- Newsletter and memo drafts with no individual referenced
- Meeting agendas, schedules, and planning documents
- Policy questions phrased generally (“what does FERPA say about…”)
- Aggregate data with no path back to an individual
- Your own thinking, framed with roles and initials instead of names
Purpose-built tools move that line — but only if the vendor can tell you, in writing, where the data goes, how long it's kept, and whether it trains anything. If the answer is a FERPA page and nothing else, treat it as a general-purpose tool.
How to choose an AI tool as a school leader
- Ask what it was built for. A tool built for “education” is usually built for teachers or students. A tool built for school leadership knows what a summative conference is.
- Ask who built it. The gap between AI builders and educators is the whole problem. A tool built by someone who has never run a building will get the workflow wrong in ways you'll only discover in March.
- Get the data answer in writing. Retention period, training use, subprocessors. Before the demo, not after.
- Try it on a real task before you decide. Paste in an actual (de-identified) observation and see whether the draft sounds like something you'd sign. That test takes ten minutes and tells you more than a feature list.
- Prefer tools you can start alone. A district procurement cycle is a fine way to buy a system of record. It is a terrible way to find out whether AI helps you personally. Start with something free or monthly, prove it on your own work, then make the case.
AI tools for principals — FAQ
What AI tools do principals actually use?
In practice, most principals are using a general-purpose chatbot — ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — for drafting communications and thinking through decisions, often without a district policy. Purpose-built tools for school leaders are newer: EduEval for drafting teacher evaluation narratives from observation notes, Pocket Principal for leadership guidance on staffing, compliance, and communications, and single-purpose free tools for incident documentation and observation scheduling.
Is it safe for a principal to use ChatGPT?
It's safe for tasks that involve no student or staff records: drafting a newsletter, outlining a staff meeting, thinking through a scheduling problem. It is not safe to paste in anything that identifies a student — names, IEP details, discipline incidents, attendance records — unless your district has a data agreement with the provider that covers FERPA. The default consumer version of most chatbots has no such agreement.
Can AI write teacher evaluations?
AI can draft the narrative from evidence you collected; it cannot supply the evidence, decide the rating, or replace your professional judgment. That is the line. Used that way, it turns a two-hour write-up into a twenty-minute review. Used to generate observations you did not make, it is fabrication.
What is the best AI tool for school administrators?
There is no single best tool, because the jobs are different. For evaluation write-ups, a tool built around your rubric (EduEval). For leadership questions and communications, a tool that understands the constraints principals work within (Pocket Principal). For everything else, a general-purpose model with a clear rule about what never goes in.
Do I need district approval to use AI tools as a principal?
Check your district's acceptable-use and data-privacy policies first; many districts adopted AI guidance in 2024–2025. For tools that touch staff evaluation data, treat it like any other system that stores personnel records. For tools that touch nothing identifiable, most districts have no restriction — but the honest move is to tell your staff you're using AI and how, before someone else tells them.
Related
- Can you use AI to write teacher evaluations? — the long version of job #1, including what to say to your staff.
- Teacher evaluation tools for administrators — eight platforms compared, with and without AI.
- How School Solutions handles FERPA — our own data answer, in writing.
Two tools built by a principal, for principals.
EduEval drafts your evaluation narratives from your evidence. Pocket Principal is the colleague to think out loud with. Both start free.