Vetting AI tools for schools: Alberta’s guidance, explained and answered

Every AI company wants to be in classrooms. Very few publish their answers to the questions school boards are told to ask. As an Alberta company building an AI tutor, we read the guidance the way a restaurant should read the health code: not as an obstacle, but as the standard to be measured against. Here’s what it says, why it’s good policy, and our own answers.

What ASBA’s AI Policy Guidance is

The AI Policy Guidance⁠ (opens in a new tab) is a document from the Alberta School Boards Association (ASBA) that helps Alberta’s elected school boards write their own policies for AI in K-12 education. ASBA released version 1.0 in September 2024. Alberta’s boards set their own policies, so rather than dictating rules, it gives them principles, practical guidelines and a checklist for reviewing what they have.

It’s a serious piece of work. Its principles come from a team of University of Alberta researchers (Adams and colleagues, 2023), whose review built on guidelines from UNESCO, UNICEF and the Institute for Ethical AI in Education. Its practical guidance draws on TeachAI and the OECD. The result takes AI’s benefits for learning seriously and treats the risks as things to manage on purpose, not wish away.

ASBA has also built for the long term: in April 2024 it set up an Innovation and Artificial Intelligence Committee of its directors and member trustees to keep advising boards as the technology changes. For anyone building AI for classrooms, those are the people whose questions you should be able to answer.

What it asks school boards to do

In short, it asks boards to build AI literacy for staff and students, involve their communities, update academic integrity policies, ensure fair access so AI doesn’t widen the digital divide, and put structure behind all of it: a responsible-AI committee, an inventory of the AI tools in use, informed humans in the loop, cybersecurity that accounts for AI, and privacy that complies with Alberta’s public-sector privacy law (the guidance names FOIP; since June 11, 2025, that law is the Protection of Privacy Act).

Two ideas stand out. First, it treats AI as a socio-technical system: you can’t judge the technology apart from the people and setting around it. A tutoring tool isn’t just a model; it’s a model plus a child, a family, a teacher and a set of incentives. Second, it insists on tools that suit children’s ages, noting that most free generative AI systems weren’t designed for children: ChatGPT’s terms of use don’t allow users under 13, and require parental permission under 18.

The vetting questions, and why they’re the right ones

At the heart of the guidance is vetting. ASBA recommends that boards check every AI tool against criteria they set, make the results available to their communities, and keep a pre-approved “safe list” of reviewed tools, so teachers can pick technology that has already been checked. Here is what the review covers, in plain words.

Area	What a board wants to know
Data privacy	What’s collected, where it goes, who can see it, and whether its handling complies with privacy law
Age	Was it designed for children? What are its age rules, and how does it handle parental consent?
Academic integrity	Does it support learning, or produce answers a student can copy?
Fair access	Can every student use it, whatever their family’s income or their accessibility needs?
Bias	Has the company considered and tested how the system might treat different students differently?
Security	Is it protected, including against newer attacks aimed at AI?
Transparency	Will the company show its work, and can the results be shared with parents and staff?

ASBA also names cost and environmental impact. If you’re a parent, notice that these are the questions you’d want to ask about any app your child uses; the board’s process just writes them down. And if you sell AI tools, the message is blunt: if you can’t answer these in writing, you shouldn’t be in a classroom.

Our answers: MapleMind against the checklist

MapleMind is a Canadian AI tutor for Grades 1 to 12 in every province, in math, science, English, French and social studies, with step-by-step homework help, practice and provincial exam prep. We’re an Edmonton company, so this guidance describes our home ground.

Area	Our answer
Data privacy	Built in Canada for Canada’s privacy law. Our AI provider processes students’ work under a signed data processing agreement and doesn’t use it to train its models. We don’t sell personal information, and there are no ads. Parents can export or delete their child’s data. The tutor runs on OpenAI in the United States.
Age	Built for K-12 from the start: an age step for every new account, and verified parental consent for children under the age of consent, with the parent holding the account.
Academic integrity	Guided mode, on from the start, teaches the idea and works a similar example instead of answering the assigned question. A student on their own account can turn it off; on an account a parent holds, only the parent can, or let the student choose.
Fair access	A free plan that renews every day, the full app in any browser (nothing to install on school devices), and the app and the tutor in 14 languages, including many that Alberta’s newcomer families speak at home.
Bias	Addressed by design, not yet measured: the tutor follows the curriculum and shows its reasoning step by step. It marks practice quizzes and exams, but nothing it decides is binding: no school grade, ranking or placement comes from it. We haven’t formally tested it for bias, and we don’t claim we have.
Security	Our own full security review in July 2026, its release-blocking findings fixed and checked, and protections against attempts to misuse the tutor. We haven’t had an independent audit or penetration testing, and we don’t claim one.
Transparency	This table: we publish our answers rather than wait to be asked. Our privacy policy⁠ (opens in a new tab) and terms are public, and we’re glad to walk any board, committee or parent through the details.

The free plan’s day is 4 learning activities and 30 tutor messages, and children under 13 (14 in Québec) need a parent’s verified consent.

What we’re still working on

Vetting only works if companies are honest about what isn’t finished, so here’s ours. We haven’t completed a formal accessibility (WCAG) audit of the app: it supports larger text and 14 languages, but an audit is different from good intentions. Our approach to bias is by design (the curriculum, visible reasoning, nothing binding) rather than a published testing framework. And school boards now work under Alberta’s Protection of Privacy Act, which replaced FOIP’s privacy rules on June 11, 2025. It’s a different law from the private-sector law we’re built on, so working with a board would mean preparing its privacy impact assessment together with that board.

We publish this list on purpose. The guidance asks boards to make their assessments available; the least a company can do is start by assessing itself in public. Boards can ask us about a pilot.

What parents can take from this

You don’t need a policy committee to use ASBA’s thinking at home. Before your child uses any AI tool, four questions cover most of the ground:

1. Who is it for? Check the age rules. If a tool’s own terms say 13 and over, the company is telling you it wasn’t built for your ten-year-old.
2. What happens to my child’s data? Look for plain answers about what’s collected, shared and deleted, and be wary if you can’t find any.
3. Does it teach, or just answer? A tool that hands over finished answers is a shortcut. A tool that explains, checks understanding and works examples is a tutor. More in our guide to AI homework help and cheating.
4. What does the company admit it hasn’t done yet? Every honest company has an “in progress” list. If one claims everything is perfect, that’s marketing, not confidence.

Alberta’s boards are asking the right questions. The more parents ask the same ones, the better every tool in this space will have to become, ours included. For the national picture, see our guide to Canada’s AI for All strategy.

Sources

1. Alberta School Boards Association, Artificial Intelligence Policy Guidance, v1.0⁠ (opens in a new tab), September 13, 2024. Checked October 30, 2026.
2. Alberta School Boards Association, ASBA Releases Artificial Intelligence Policy Guidance for K-12 Education⁠ (opens in a new tab), September 17, 2024. Checked October 30, 2026.
3. Business View Magazine, Alberta School Boards Association⁠ (opens in a new tab), October 31, 2024. Checked October 30, 2026.
4. Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, Protection of Privacy Act (POPA) Overview⁠ (opens in a new tab). Checked October 30, 2026.

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