FolioBridge

Everyone's debating whether AI belongs in schools.

I think the more useful question is: where does it actually help students?

After years in the classroom and in school administration, here's how I'd use it including one area I think is being seriously underutilized.

Swipe through. 👆

Shoutout to Scholar Education https://joinscholar.com/ for building AI tools actually designed around how K–12 classrooms work.

More than half of high school students admit to using their phones during class. Nearly 80% of teachers say they regularly compete with phones for attention. New research suggests phones are often a symptom of disengagement, not the cause. Schools seeing the most success are combining clear phone rules with lessons students actually care about. 📱

https://www.discoveryeducation.com/blog/educational-leadership/2026-education-trends/

Here's your Feel Good Friday moment!

Leon Smith just became the 2026 National Teacher of the Year — and his whole philosophy is worth knowing. He calls himself a "warm demander." High expectations, surrounded by genuine care. He starts every class with a community-building exercise before diving into hard topics. He's spent his entire 25-year career at the same school. That kind of consistency means something. 🏆

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/04/21/meet-leon-smith-2026-national-teacher-of-the-year/

I started school administration in the summer of 2020.

The summer of Covid.

3 out of 4 of us on the leadership team were brand new to the school. The fourth was new to her role.

On top of learning a new school, a new culture, and a new team, I was put in charge of the students who were still enrolled but learning from home. Building a program from the ground up for a situation nobody had ever faced before.

We were given access to a shared drive. Notes, plans, templates from whoever came before us everything we supposedly needed to understand how this school ran.

Except there were multiple copies of everything. No one knew which was the most recent. No one knew what had been updated, what was outdated, or what had just never been right to begin with. And then after 30 days, access was gone. Whatever we hadn't captured in time simply disappeared.

We were trying to learn a school's culture, its rhythms, its unwritten rules, its history from a shared drive with no source of truth. While simultaneously trying to serve students in a way that had never been done before.

It was hard. Genuinely hard. And it wasn't anyone's fault. That's just how institutional knowledge had always been stored in people.

When people left or the world turned upside down, what remained was a folder full of good intentions and no timestamps.

I didn't have a solution then.

That feeling is a big part of why FolioBridge exists. Schools shouldn't have to lose their memory every time they lose a person or every time the world changes overnight.

Has anyone else experience something similar?

Nearly 30 of the 50 largest school districts are cutting budgets this year school closures, layoffs, higher class sizes. The cause is a mix of enrollment declines, rising costs, and pandemic aid drying up. Broward County alone has lost 40,000 students over the past decade. Districts planned for growth that never came. 📉

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/05/28/schools-making-budget-cuts-and-layoffs-due-to-inflation-enrollment-declines/

After a day of teaching I am utterly drained. I can remember parents who came in to my classroom for the Great American Teach-in ask me, "how do you do this every day, I'm exhausted?"

While physical exhaustion is part of the challenge the real causes of teacher exhaustion run deeper and its more that just salary.

Ever-growing expectations
Mountains of non-teaching tasks
Overwhelming, inefficient systems
Never enough time for what matters because time is taken up with meetings.

Let’s stop blaming pay alone and shine a light on what really needs to change to better support teachers. What are some things you are seeing that have been effective?