Above is a video of the terrific testimonies of four NYC students involved in NYCLU's Teen Activist Project on the use of AI in their schooling, presented at the Joint Hearings of the Education and Technology Committees on June 26, 2026 with also their responses to questions from Chair Eric Dinowitz.
Yelani Joseph’s testimony
Good afternoon, my name is Yelani Joseph, I’m sixteen years old, a sophomore from Brooklyn, New York, and an organizer with the NYCLU’s Teen Activist Project. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
When people talk about artificial intelligence in schools, I often hear one assumption: that students either fully support it or don’t care about its impact. But many of us do care — because we’re the ones experiencing these changes in real time.
My concern is how quickly AI is being normalized in schools without enough accountability, transparency, or guidance on how it should support student learning.
Recently, my friend and I were reviewing a reproductive health slideshow for class and came across a sentence full of scrambled words, errors and unclear information–our impression was that the teacher created classroom content with NotebookLM, an AI tool and we were shocked. Even though we were eventually able to make sense of it, we shouldn’t have had to spend time guessing what the curriculum was trying to say. Students deserve educational materials that are clear, accurate, and understandable — especially when learning about subjects as important and personal as our own health.
And that experience reflects a larger issue — so much that it’s something I’ve also heard echoed when talking with my peers about AI in education.
I had one of my peers recently tell me, “Although AI is helpful in some ways, students often use it to cheat instead of studying… and when exams come around, students can feel lost because they don’t have that sense of security they did before.”
And another student, my friend, shared with me that her “My school is shutting down… and they’re opening up a school for an AI focused school in its place. I loved my school because everyone was able to get the attention they needed. And taking that away feels like a step in the wrong direction.”
Even though the plan for an AI school was paused for now, what stood out to me wasn’t opposition to technology — it was a pattern: AI is being normalized faster than students are being taught how to engage with it responsibly.
AI literacy has to mean something other than filling classrooms with AI products. It has to mean understanding how and when to question these products, and protect against the threat they pose to teaching and learning. Students are asking for accountability — clear standards that protect student learning and ensure human judgment stays at the center of education.
Thank you.
Odin Adeler’s testimony
Hello City Council, and thank you for spending time out of your busy day to listen to what I am here to say.
My name is Odin Adeler, and I am a leader at the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Teen Activist Project. I am 18 years old, and have just graduated Urban Academy Laboratory High School this week. I am here to talk about my views on AI and tech products in schools.
At my high school, we did a lot of writing. Before I went to Urban Academy, I did not feel so confident about my writing skills. We were also not allowed to use AI to write our papers at all. That was not a problem. Without AI, I could do something else. Ask my teachers for help,
I now feel much more prepared for college. In college, which I will be starting this summer, I am sure there will be much to write. And it will be writing that I am sure I will be expected to come up with ideas for myself. Fortunately, I believe I can now put some of the many ideas I think about onto paper quite well, without AI. That also helped prepare for my high school’s frequent class discussions, where subject knowledge and critical thinking is essential.
Knowing how to write well without AI also helps creatively. I am not sure I would have had as much fun or learned as much in my playwriting class, where I wrote up a play that got acted out to my school, if I just used AI. My classes felt much richer due to me and others avoiding using AI to replace thinking.
I have heard that official guidance on artificial intelligence is being sent to schools. Part of the guidance encourages students to use AI for research, exploration, and creative projects–this is unwise. I am concerned that it will guide those in schools how to use software that is not useful in the classrooms. In schools, I believe not just the final typing up of a paper, but more, including gathering ideas, should all be done without AI. At schools, students should be taught to think for themselves. I am sure it is possible as people knew how to do so for a while before AI. That is why I am glad my high school is as restrictive of AI as it is, for both the writing students produce, and the creation of the material used to properly teach students to be critical thinkers. I support that kind of AI restrictive policy throughout the city.
I am also concerned about risks to student data privacy. It is required by the government for minors to attend school. Students should not be effectively forced to sign away digital rights to big tech companies to fulfill that requirement.
Instead of spending much taxpayer money on AI and data capturing products which are not what students need, the city should focus resources on actual human education.
Thank you.
Ariana Ahmed Misha's testimony
Hello Chair Dinowitz, Chair De La Rosa, and members and staff of the Committees on Education and Technology,
I am Ariana Ahmed Misha. I am a rising junior at the Institute for Collaborative Education,, and a member of the Teen Activist Project at NYCLU.
This spring, I helped plan a weekend student event,, with over one hundred students, to listen to their concerns about the new AI guidance. There was a very specific session about AI policy, where the conversation among the students about AI was so deep, that the session had to go overtime. Even after the event, we students could not stop talking about how much we hate this new policy.
Critical thinking is the whole purpose of education. All we are supposed to get at the end of everything is having the skill to critically think, Ai is something which prevents the students from critical thinking and does the work for them. Ai gets in the way of real learning.
As students, we want real human teachers to teach us about the world. We want real human teachers to teach us effective human communication. We want real human teachers to create assignments backed by human expertise, and we want real human teachers,, to provide us feedback,, on how to improve our work,, by reading our hard worked assignments,, and get to know how we think,, and who we are as human students.
However, for many students today, they instead have an AI teacher bot telling them how to work on improvements and how to do assignments. The difference is clear. Not only is an AI bot biased against certain ways of thinking,, it is also highly perfectionist,, which makes the students discouraged about any work they do,, as it tells them to fix any work again and again and again until infinity. These AI products simply do not work.
AI policy at the end of the day pushes us into being a fake and unrealistic world. We do not want a robotic policy, in this already robotic world, where real connection with people has been rare.
For this reason, I, on behalf of hundreds of students who care, would like to request you, to push the DOE to make our policy dependent on humans,, rather than AI,, because rearranging the system after AI would destroy it might be possible,, but the lives which would be destroyed in the process cannot ever be fixed.
Selena Wu’s testimony
Hello city council, thank you for allowing me to speak today. My name is Selena Wu, and I am a rising senior from Francis Lewis High School and a member of the Teen Activist Project
The field and market of AI is growing at a rapid rate, which is why it starts getting implemented everywhere. First handedly, I know how strong artificial intelligence can be. In fact, I’ve spent my past summers researching and building machine learning models at schools like MIT and Princeton. This is why I would like to oppose the use of AI technology in the school system. My comments will focus on the use of GenAI products.
Firstly, the highlights of learning are the interactions and jokes my teachers make when teaching. In my AP Lang class, we start off every day spending 10 minutes discussing different things, whether it is political, philosophical or controversial. These interactions not only creates a bond between the class and makes the classroom more lively, it also sharpens our critical thinking. It actually makes me look forward to learning and attending class, which is something not many students experience. Having to think about complicated topics and shaping them into concrete words are a skill needed for the AP Lang curriculum and AP test. Offloading tasks to AI jeopardizes these human relationships, and means me, my classmates, and my teachers understand one another less.
Furthermore, when GenAI is used in school, it is often incorrect. Last year, I had an English teacher that graded our essays with AI. Not only did his AI incorrectly deduct points from us , it also accused multiple of my classmates of using AI themselves to write their essays. However, we wrote the essay in class on paper, with the prompt given to us the day of. There was no possible way for us to use AI, and we were unfairly getting points deducted despite following the rubric. Compared to my AP Lang class this year, there is a huge contrast between my learning and relationship with a teacher that uses AI compared to one that doesn’t.
Secondly, I have seen that implementing AI and robots into the education system has made learning even more boring for some students. The rise of AI chat bots like ChatGPT and Claude have encouraged students to cheat, plagiarize and break numerous honor codes. But this issue is much more complicated than adults acknowledge. Rather than implementing AI into schools and allowing students to further rely on such technology, I think that there should be a focus on creating an engaging learning environment that addresses why students use such technology in the first place. By encouraging curiosity and making learning more interesting, students may feel more confident, less afraid, and find less need for AI.
In all ways, by bringing AI into schools, it can hinder students' education and growth.
Thank you!
