HAL Transcript: Dr. Judy White on AI and Student Records

This is the full transcript of the HAL: Who Signed Off On This? episode with Dr. Judy White, retired Riverside County Superintendent of Schools. Listen on Libsyn. The show is also on Spotify and YouTube. For the highlights, read Does the Need-to-Know Rule Survive AI? A Former County Superintendent on Student Records.

The transcript follows the published episode. It is lightly edited for readability: repeated words, false starts and short acknowledgements are removed, and names that the transcription software misheard are corrected. Timestamps mark where each turn begins in the episode.

Editor’s note: This episode was recorded in person, and the transcription software sometimes confused the two speakers or misheard a word. We corrected what we could. Where a passage is unclear, the episode audio on Libsyn is the authoritative record.

Transcript

Chris Sowa (00:00): Hello, this is Chris Sowa, and this is HAL: Who Signed Off on This? This episode, we’re lucky to have Dr. White with us. Dr. White is retired superintendent of schools. She is also in charge of Mosaic, this show is about leaders and decision makers and we bring them together to talk about artificial intelligence, these are the people who actually have made those calls in real life rather than theoretical. Dr. White, please welcome to the show. If you could take a couple minutes and talk a little about yourself,

Dr. Judy White (00:32): Thank you, Chris. I always find it a wonderful opportunity to be able to talk to people and share my experiences. As you know, I’ve been a leader as a teacher because I became a mentor teacher and a principal, assistant, superintendent, a local superintendent, and a county superintendent. And most recently, I served as an interim superintendent. My experiences go from preschool through college. I’ve been a professor at CH. My passion right now is two things. Mosaic, which is a nonprofit for racial healing. And also I’m the vice president of Think Transcend, which actually supports and trains aspiring superintendents and current superintendents.

Chris Sowa (01:22): Super. Okay. That’s fantastic. And if my math over here is right. You’ve been in the field of education for over forty two years and as a leader more than that. Yeah, as a leader you were as a superintendent, you were in charge of a district that had four hundred and thirty thousand students, if anybody has a perspective on scale of these topics, you certainly would. Now when you are focused on you know the kind of the some of the key periods within a school system process. So now we just had a big you know new school year kicking off. What s what are a few of the large administrative things that happen that happen behind the scenes of the school?

Dr. Judy White (02:13): I think that you have these systems in place. And sometimes there’s movement in your staff and then you have to make sure you fill those positions so that you don’t lose any of the content. Professional development is very important. And we make sure that our teachers are ready to teach and serve. And then of course you have to think about the needs of the students. More recently in California, we have community schools. Where there’s health professionals, social professionals working in collaboration with the schools in order to be able to serve the total students. But of course you always have to have that school rah-rah event that inspires people of around their purpose, their true purpose of being an educator at whatever level. And you want to also have systems of responsiveness. Making sure that whatever does go well, you have a way to press all the needs.

Chris Sowa (03:18): Now some s in some cases the school really is that point of safety, as well as a place of education, right?

Dr. Judy White (03:27): That’s fair because there was a time when education means just teaching the fundamentals. But right now at QA 26, you have to address the needs of the total student. But we don’t want the teacher to feel like they have to do it. And that’s why we have these other professionals surrounding the schoolhouse to make sure that the needs are met.

Chris Sowa (03:51): Now there’s a lot of process and documentation I think that the average parent and certainly students probably don’t appreciate that the staff are managing, things like IEPs, disciplinary files, medical records, obviously academic re records, maybe even family information if you’ve had f you know people come in to see your principals and teachers. And that all that information is put together. Can you talk a little bit about some of the administrative challenges and the teachers as they’re assembling this because like you said, ideally, you know, we free them up to spend as much time with the kids as we can, right? But I mean maybe so if it’s not some of the ones I mentioned, maybe either there’s something else from a just from a ministry level.

Dr. Judy White (04:43): I think you’re totally right in having a lens on this issue. Because what we find is that years ago when I started everything within file. In a cloud you’d have to pull out something to find out something about somebody but today because so much information is stored and there is information from the health to the social sciences to you academics all of these things but now they’re integrated around that student and so parents sometimes w don’t mind you knowing their academic deficiencies, but they don’t want you to know something about the house. And then what happens, you do have all the information in one place. And it makes it difficult because you cannot really responsibly respond unless you know the total child, unless you know everything that’s going on. But that means you have to actually teach more privacy laws for your teachers. You have to talk to your staff about confidentiality at a greater level.

Chris Sowa (05:53): And I think that you know, one example of that might be discipl disciplinary records and things of that nature. You know I don’t know any of us that haven’t made a mistake at some point in our lives. And a lot of times that happened when we were kids. I mean, sometimes I as an adult did a couple dumb things as well. But you know, I would say looking back on my teenage years, I’m like, how did I survive that, Dr. White? You know? So that said. You know, that information obviously being highly confidential, and it’s not something that we would want shared often in the wider community. That’s perfect. Professional assessments of that data. But I based on some of the information I was reading, in s in some cases, because they’re so overburdened with all the things that they have on their plate and the administration aspects, even though we have tried to offload it a lot of that stuff, you know, teachers reasonably are trying to leverage tools like AI and bring that information together to maybe make a response for a parent or somebody else to summarize it. And y they might not understand first of all, I think that if AI Could help them, right? That’s a great thing, right? They bring together a bunch of information, and you know they can point to very specific incidents that may have occurred, that as somebody who’s seen all this data, right, let’s start how does that make you feel, right? Are you concerned about this? Do you see an opportunity here?

Dr. Judy White (07:27): So Yeah, I am concerned. If I were going to label what we’re feeling in 2026, I would say quantum. You know, and I find you this state of uncertainty and perplexity or confusion about what to do when facing a through choice. So we’re trying to find this balance. Having technology support, but not take over. However, there are people that do not mean well. And they will access different data points and use it against what we’re trying to do. And so the this data security is a high priority. And some districts their data has been hurt. And then they’ve had to put levels and levels of security in order to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And then they end up re restricting their opportunities for collaboration and for knowledge about every topic within a student’s profile.

Chris Sowa (08:29): How important is to give faculty the opportunity for development. But as it relates to AI, how much development do you think that we need to provide our faculty and staff within the school system and do you think that they’re getting enough support considering how fast AI is moving?

Dr. Judy White (08:57): I do not think that they’re getting enough support, only because they’re coming. In order to properly train have to capture time. And then you work in our curriculum and content. So when do you capture that? And so that there’s a cost. You bring your teachers in during the summer for a full week of AI, that has to be paid out of the budget. And then you in some cases teachers are volunteering to come to professional development because they want to be knowledgeable. So I believe that’s gonna have to be a budgeted unhound. But when you’re talking about professional development, also talking about a human element. AI should act as a teaching assistant, not a teaching replacement. Human educators were they’re essential for emotional support. We don’t want AI to replace them. What about mentorship and social emotional learning? Right now, AI is not designed to address those issues, but the professional development is essential. Teachers also have to be taught how to guide the students in the use of AI so that they’re not allowing them to do the work. And we want to make sure that they’re able to still think critically. So that has to be taught.

Chris Sowa (10:18): The one of the things we talk about in this show are decisions, right? And you’re somebody who’s had to make a lot of hard decisions, you know and ultimately be re be accountable, right, for those decisions on quite a number of occasions. Maybe it would be helpful and we can, you know, frame it in a couple different ways, but first I want to go back to the disciplinary question because I know that there’s a lot of controversy about this topic. But it’s hard for us humans, right, when we’re making these decisions about disciplinary actions and what’s fair. To one student versus fair to another student who may also be involved in some way. And the emotional context you mentioned is so important. If you could just give us an example of the of some decisions in that process that you’ve been a part of that you would maybe benefit from AI to inform you or add bring data together, but you’d say, I need my principal. My teacher, or myself, right, to actually make those hard decisions. So could you give us some examples? Of kind of those critical human consequential decisions?

Dr. Judy White (11:29): Absolutely. In the superintendent’s role, whether it was at the local district or the county, we remain at a seat of appeal. People parents can come say something you’re not considering or you didn’t follow a policy. Now it’s easy if it’s just a process, policy. Then you might have to just create that or you might not be able to actually implement that level of discipline. However, with AI, you aren’t able to capture incidents that the students had since the very beginning. If the teachers are putting referrals in the system, when you get to a place of expulsion, you’re able to see a pattern. However, AI won’t tell you that father died from cancer. It won’t tell you certain things. And so you as a decision maker have to make sure you take the time to find out all the information. Did you as a school district intervene when you saw that student just putting his head on the desk every day, trying to manage that on their own? You know, or did you just wait until you know striking out, aggressive strike out, but then that’s when you want to intervene. So we do have to pay attention to all types of human behavior and provide opportunities for discussion. One role that has been essential is the counselors. When we place counselors at the elementary, middle, and high school, we’ve been able to address things at an earlier time. And then let’s talk about restorative justice. Is it always right to the extreme? Okay, you can’t be in school. I mean, sometimes we’re not home to that school and we should have been allowed to teach her and to support.

Chris Sowa (13:31): Yes. Okay, no, I think some really great examples, and that’s why we love to have people like you on the show, because you know, this idea that there’s a child who’s done some disciplinary things that are not acceptable, right? On the other hand, having the information about the death of a loved one, whether it’s a father or somebody else to die from cancer, you know, that’s context that doesn’t fit neatly into little disciplinary boxes, right? You know, n number of strikes and things like that. I mean, people need to realize, I like to say, if somebody’s really in physical, that means they’re they themselves are sick or mentally they’re having a lot of strain just talk about kind of the medical role that people might not realize are happening in a large school system like the one that you managed.

Dr. Judy White (14:27): Yes. There has been a increase in mental illness even amongst our young people. Also if their students are not I mean their individual medical needs are dressed in the home then they’re coming to school sick. And so you have to have the nurses and happiness to be able to assess and respond. So as medical issues have increased, even with diet, obesity, you know, food allergies. You have to be responsible in the moment. And you also have a bank of resources to be able to refer the parent to in order to get that child’s needs met. So nurses is a high priority now. You have more nurses in schools than you ever have in the history of education. And we have to make sure that not only are they just addressing something when the child is ill. But what can we do before they become ill? You know, increasing the hand washing, doing presentation with classes around healthy food, talking about how do you talk to people when you’re feeling a certain way. So the nurses at the councils kind of work in tandem. But if you don’t pour that into the budget, some of your schools won’t have that support.

Chris Sowa (15:50): I think that w you know what’s coming through is that of perhaps you know other i other issues within our support systems that the school has kind of become the backstop for a lot of communities, whether it’s medical, it’s diet and having adequate food, and you know, you mentioned mental illness as being a key issue. And my sister actually was a mental health counselor at a school for a while so I know how hard that work is. You know from an a i from an artificial intelligence and tech nerd guy that I am, I also I see opportunities to help organize information in a very confusing place in terms of like does the nurse know what the so what the counselor knows, what the math teacher knows? There’s a lot of touches in the chain. But when it comes to protecting that medical information, I start to think about HIPAA, and basically you know health laws, not only FERPA, and we’ll come back to FERPA in a couple minutes, this idea of protecting health information becomes maybe not an obvious thing for a lot of people on this call, but how are your teams thought about that historically. Do we have when I was a kid, I can tell you I was handed a paper file when I went from middle school to high school. They said, here you go, take this to your nurse in the high school and give it to her to that person, and nowadays I would imagine that’s electronic.

Dr. Judy White (17:36): That is an electronic activation from one school to the next. We have absolutely proof. To look at it and urging. If something’s not needed to know, take it out. And then there are some school districts that still have the paper file that follows with other types of pages. The most effective system I’ve seen is when people treat the students as individuals and the team sits together and meets around that student. The nurse, the counselor. A teacher, like the secondary might be the representative. And you sit there with the vice principal or administrator and talk, are we setting this student up for success? And you st you have to have a spirit of confidence. You can’t go out and share everything that you know. So these professionals have taken an oath. An oath to be able to discuss and amongst themselves for purpose but not necessarily to get outside that room.

Chris Sowa (18:43): And I think that, you know, when you’re touching on some really important things, again, in terms of how much information do we need to have in a file. You know, we want to keep it visible to just the people that need it and just ultimately what should be kept not anything you know, in addition to that. So I think that those are two th those are two principles that I would also apply to AI as well. I would say, you know, what audits to see at a given moment in time. And what should we say is not essential, right? There’s a limiting provision that we can stick in there and say it needs these things to do this task to help organize information for the faculty or for a student, but it doesn’t need this other stuff. So it should have that information taken out as well. The admittance process and we talk about FERPA a little bit. I know that’s something you know is highly on the minds of a lot of principals as they as they’re starting off the school year.

Dr. Judy White (19:51): Students, and then a larger district has 70,000. So they have to develop policies and projects that meet their needs. And in average district, what would happen is that during the summer, with the attendance work, the counselors, everybody’s crunching numbers of getting students into classes. And then when the students show up, they their files are accessible to the teachers they have been assigned to. And so files are also flagged. We’re talking about virtual files and physical files. They’re flagged with IEP if there’s some emotional discipline issues. So that way the necessary educator who oversees that would be able to follow through with them. One of the things that I noticed is that the problems are not really within the districts themselves. Hundreds of districts have been hacked or they’ve been held hostage, you know. With their numbers. I think they followed a way that they keep their information and then they have to buy it, they’re gonna buy it, and that has happened. Their district had to pay for their information back because the foreign system has locked up everything, you can’t communicate from district to district, and within your district, you don’t have your information. So then what happened? You some districts have to pay the ransom.

Chris Sowa (21:35): That’s terrible. I mean Yeah. That’s outside in right. So yeah, we’re your teams are trying to manage, you know, the budgets the best that they can, limited resources, there’s never enough no matter what anybody says. There’s never enough. And then you have these bad actors that are coming in and taking advantage of the technology that sometimes has been helpful but then can shut everything down. Right? Yes. The same way and cause chaos. Especially I would imagine at key times of the year like graduation and you know, report cards and stuff like that, if you have one of these bad actors and they’re unfortunately, you know, not dumb and they know how to press pain points. And that’s something that we’re highly sensitive to prompt injection, which is a new way for AI to make its way into these school systems. The teacher doesn’t ha or have to click on an email anymore. To cause a problem. The screen just has to see the information and then they can get in. One of the things I really appreciate about different schools is the passion of an individual principal, right? I you know you walk in, you see such a difference in a school when you have the right principal in place. And obviously all the faculty are important and I don’t want to diminish that. But having a gr amazing principal energizes everybody, right? In the mission. And so, you know, you want to have them be as empowered as they can be, on the one hand, right? For sure, because they’re on a mission, they know their teachers, they know their students. But on the other hand, you know, there’s these larger challenges. Things like and I’m gonna touch on social media in a minute ’cause I think that’s a correlation to what we’re dealing with AI in many ways. We’ve you’ve seen this before, Dr. White, right? Kids starting to use the internet, looking stuff up, and then being on their mobiles when they came out all the time. So what do you think needs to be at that school, right, at the school level, at l a superintendent or district level, in terms of protections and policies.

Dr. Judy White (23:54): The leader is critical. And even if the leader doesn’t have everything that they need, if they can keep that inspiration up and understand the non-negotiable is student achievement, students are gonna achieve, non-negotiable care and engagement. And we talk about the skill, the will, and the heart. Because you have to be able to connect to the families, the teachers. And the students, the great leaders do all three. The weaker leaders might be good with students, but they’re not good with the staff. Or they might be good with the staff, but not good with them. But you have to be good with your stakeholders. I do believe that social media has impacted greatly, and too often students actually feel that the social media information is more true and more believable than even what they hear in school. So you have to actually intentionally instruct them to find out what the difference is. We’ve had to have restrictions on personal social media for teachers. So when you talk about a personal experience early in the game and even as much as last week, I’ve heard of stories, I’ve experienced stories with people felt, teachers felt, educators felt that their social media was private. And they would put personal feelings about educators as well as students in that setting. Or they will have behavior that was not conducive of what we see as morality for students. And so then you have to address it. And then they say, well, this is my private Facebook, but this is my private social media. And students actually have access to that. So you have to have policies in place. Before it happens. You sit down, you develop the policies, and you get and then you have to have opportunities to teach them the policies.

Chris Sowa (26:03): Tough learnings and it’s still a battle. I know with social media it’s not I’m not pretending that it’s any easier, right? But now there’s the AI level as well and as you know there have been horrible stories about AI giving the wrong advice to people and they can be great tools. But even you know, e even myself I chall have to challenge that AI when I’m asking question, have to ask it three or four different ways. So I operate. So I think that it’s especially challenged for a student who’s kind of s if they start to see this AI as you know the answer, right, for all things. And I think that the teachers ha could fall into the same trouble as well. Let’s settle this with Chat GPT, you know. And it’s the critical thinking part in the decision making that I think is really important. We talk we talked about policy, we talked about I think that some of the key decisions. Are there any other places that you know there’s really important decisions that we who send our kids to school don’t fully appreciate accountable.

Dr. Judy White (27:14): I like about what you’re saying to me is that you understand the value of AI, but it cannot be the all in all. That’s all we are. And I do know that. That one of the best examples I saw was at a conference and they asked the students to put in a question in and then they compared their answers. And then they showed them where some places were errors, some places were hallucinations. And then the students themselves started saying, what can we do to check information? What can we do? And they created from that experience a rules for their classroom. So you’ve got to give people experiences so that they will be able to build those critical thinking skills on their own. My own grandchildren, they believe everything that they Google. And I’m like, can we call the grandma? I know something. And so I when I’ve been able to prove it, that was the only time I had to prove it though. Before whatever grandma said was right. But now I have to prove it against AI. So I thought about the movie Terminator. You know, that’s over forty years ago. And it was telling us a lot of things about today, and now we’re living in it. So what is happening now that’s gone at 40 years from now has been impact. We need to be aware and we need to be responsive.

Chris Sowa (28:44): I think that’s a great way to kind of round out some the questions. I want to give you the last word Dr. White an opportunity to maybe talk about some of the work that you’re part of

Dr. Judy White (28:50): Thank you so much. Mosaic is a nonprofit. That’s designed for racial healing and celebrating humanity, even over diversity. And I mentioned because unity doesn’t come on its own. You have to be intentional and provide opportunities for healing. So that’s not nonprofit was given out over 50,000 students who actually demonstrate on their campuses, 11. And we’ve given out 30 recognition to educating group. Model inclusivity. And then the second group, like I mentioned earlier, Think Transcend, that I’m working with, you have to be able to teach the superintendents and aspirant superintendents. To stay true to their core and their purpose and to understand AI. So I close with that with a quote from Stephen Hawking, and he said, success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization or the worst. We do not know if we will be infinitely helped by AI or ignored by it and sidelined or conceivably be destroyed by it. So we have to be strong and know what we where we want to go in our vision and just help humanity.

Chris Sowa (30:30): And just as a close, how can people find out more about Mosaic, Dr. White?

Dr. Judy White (30:35): If they want to go online to Mosaic. Underscore legacy. Okay. And it’ll pop up.

Chris Sowa (30:41): All right. Well thank you very much. This is great to get your experience. You know, hope we may call on you again, Doctor White. I think this has been very informative for our viewers, people that are thinking about what are the key decisions, what’s the role of technology in society? And again, you know how who signed off on this is either about the key decision makers, the people who have had to ha have had to make those, and we’re very fortunate to have had you on today, Dr. White. Thank you.

About the show

HAL: Who Signed Off On This? is a show of short conversations with the people who have to sign for AI: how they decide what to approve, where they insist a human still looks, and what they would need to see before they trusted a machine with more. HAL is the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The show is about the people who make sure that never happens on their watch.

About the host

Chris Sowa is a founder of RedactSure and a former CEO of an AI company; he started it years before ChatGPT existed. He previously led AI at Accenture, served as Global VP of Strategy & Innovation at Schneider Electric, was CCO of Sovos, and spent more than a decade at Oracle, with earlier roles at SAP and IBM.