Picture a teacher during last period. A student walks up holding a phone, clearly upset, and says, “You need to see this.” On the screen is a picture of a classmate. It looks real, but it never happened. Someone made it with a free app in about two minutes.
What does that teacher do in the next sixty seconds?
For most districts, honestly, we don’t know. That’s the problem.
This summer the EdWeek Research Center surveyed 852 educators across the country about AI-generated fake images and video, the stuff we’ve started calling deepfakes. Here’s the full article. A few numbers stood out to me:
And on the student side, a 2024 survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that one in four K-12 students know someone who has been shown in a nonconsensual, sexually explicit deepfake.
That gap between what kids are dealing with and what staff are ready for is pretty wide.
I hear “that’s a Seattle thing” sometimes. I don’t buy it. The tools are free. All you need is a phone and a photo, and every one of our staff and students has photos on Facebook, Instagram, or the school website. In a small Montana town where everybody knows everybody, a fake image probably travels faster, not slower.
Some of these fakes are sexual and aimed at girls. Others are fake video or audio of a principal or teacher saying something ugly. Both kinds can wreck a reputation before anyone figures out it’s fake.
This is the part I want superintendents to really hear: a deepfake isn’t just a discipline issue.
In 2025 the Montana Legislature passed HB 82, which brings AI-generated sexual images of minors under the state’s child sexual abuse material laws. It also passed SB 413, which makes it a crime to share explicit synthetic media of an identifiable person without their consent. Federal law now makes it a crime to publish nonconsensual explicit images of minors too.
So think about that teacher again. The most natural, well-meaning response is “send that to me so I can show the principal.” Now an explicit AI image of a student is sitting on a teacher’s personal phone. That puts a good educator in a position nobody wants to be in, and it happens because nobody told them what to do instead.
One more point from the article that stuck with me. Kristin Woelfel at the Center for Democracy and Technology said the harm to a victim “is ultimately the same, whether it’s real or fake.” So the first hour shouldn’t be spent proving it’s fake. It should be spent stopping the spread and taking care of the kid.
First: check what your policies actually say. You probably don’t need a brand-new policy. CDT recommends adding specific language to the policies you already have on bullying, harassment, and acceptable technology use. The test is simple: do the words “AI-generated” or “synthetic” appear anywhere? If not, a staff member could reasonably think this isn’t covered. MTSBA’s AI policy language and OPI’s AI guidance from October 2025 are good starting points.
Second: write a one-page response plan. Who gets told first. Who calls parents. When law enforcement gets involved. How you support the student who was targeted. And one rule in big letters: staff do NOT collect, screenshot, or forward the image. They report it and let the right people handle it.
Third: train your staff. This doesn’t have to be a full PD day. Twenty minutes at a staff meeting covering what a deepfake is and what the plan says would put you ahead of most districts in the country.
Fourth: tell students plainly. Kids need to hear, in normal language, that making or sharing one of these can mean expulsion and criminal charges. A lot of them honestly think it’s a prank.
Policy and training are the core of this, but your systems should back them up. Do you know how your content filter handles “nudify” and face-swap sites on district devices and networks? Are your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 settings set up so administrators and law enforcement can work from district records instead of copies passed around on personal phones? Do you know which devices are where, and who’s using them?
That’s the kind of work K12 Montana does every day with districts across the state, and we’re happy to walk through it with you. For the instructional side (AI literacy for students, classroom guidance, help for teachers), Montana Digital Academy’s Frontier Learning Lab is the best resource in the state.
Ask three of your teachers what they’d do if a student showed them a fake explicit image of a classmate tomorrow. Just ask, no pressure.
If you get three different answers... you’ve found your next staff meeting topic.