The Blue Valley school district disabled the Chrome application Grammarly for students on May 1 due to its violation of the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
Blue Valley Northwest principal Leah Vomhof said the main concern was with Grammarly’s recently added artificial intelligence feature called Superhuman Go which allowed students to bypass filters put in place such as Securly.
“We can’t give kids a tool that then bypasses the other tool that we put in to comply with federal guidelines,” Vomhof said.
Alongside data privacy concerns she said due to the inability to disable the AI feature, the district was required to shut Grammarly down. She said many other schools nationwide have also disabled Grammarly for similar reasons.
Sophomore Tytus Jacewitz said he used Grammarly for sentence structure and small errors such as punctuation and grammar.
“It was very helpful for all the assignments I had to do writing in,” Jacewitz said.
He said because so many people had Grammarly, many people could have used it to cheat.
“It saw your screen. It saw what you were doing, it knew what you were doing, so you could use it to help you with other things, maybe, AI writing [an] assignment, [or] you could ask it for answers,” Jacewitz said.
Vomhof said Grammarly wasn’t disabled due to students using it to cheat.
“We’re not anti AI, and we’re actively working to figure out how to integrate AI into learning experiences,” Vomhof said.
