Virginia Beach Schools enters partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to educators

Virginia Beach City Public Schools educators will have access to ChatGPT for Teachers, a version of the popular chatbot designed for districts.

The division joins a new cohort of 55 school systems nationwide partnering with OpenAI, the company announced Wednesday. The company works with about 100 districts in total. As part of the group, districts can learn from each other and get training from OpenAI.

The program is for teachers and staff, not students.

“Our goal with this initiative is to give educators the tools, trust, training and voice to decide when AI is useful, when it is not, and how it can support learning for students without replacing the human relationships and professional judgment at the center of school,” said Leah Belsky, the vice president of education at OpenAI.

ChatGPT for teachers is a secure environment, meaning OpenAI doesn’t use the data to train its large language model, she said. The data is protected, and districts can control and monitor the information. Districts also can assign different users various access levels and use content filters.

Virginia signed a National Data Privacy Agreement through the Student Data Privacy Consortium that allows the state, rather than individual districts, to negotiate privacy requirements.