The prompt asked for an approach to the first ninety days of stakeholder engagement. This is that approach in full: who is in each session, what method each week uses, who owns it, and what each phase has to produce before the next one starts.
Three commitments that shape everything below
- Evidence before purchase. Any procurement in this window follows the readiness baseline rather than preceding it. If we lead with tools we will have bought something before we know what we need. When the evidence says buy, we buy well.
- Labor partners and families in week two, not week ten. The sequencing is the design.
- Existing staff time and existing convenings. No new headcount is proposed. Board Goal 4 is to maximize human and operational resources, and the county's fiscal environment does not permit anything else.
Phase one, days 1 to 30: Reflect and Learn Discover
The purpose of phase one is to be able to say, with evidence, where this organization actually is. Nothing in this phase is a decision. The methods are the ones any human-centered design team would recognize: frame the challenge, interview, immerse, look at the extremes as well as the mainstream, then find the themes.
| Week | What happens | Method | Owner | Artifact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Charter confirmed with the Senior Leadership Team: scope, authority, what the body does not do, the two-year staggered-term structure. Seats confirmed across the seven named divisions plus Business Services and the Data and Impact Center of Excellence. Opening communication in English and Spanish. | Frame the challenge | Coordinator with ITS leadership | One-page charter. The design challenge in one sentence: who, what change, in what context, with what constraint. |
| Week 2 | Labor partners: a working session, not a briefing, on what would have to be true for members to trust an AI initiative and what must be negotiated rather than announced. Families: through the parent advisory structures that already exist, interpreted, at times families can attend. Students: through the student board members and the monthly student experience panels SDCOE already runs. | Interviews and listening sessions | Coordinator with Communications and Equity | Session notes in the participants' own words. The first entries in the stakeholder feedback system. |
| Week 3 | Listening sessions in all nine divisions, including classified staff, who use these tools and are almost never asked. An honest inventory of the AI already in use at SDCOE. Not an audit for discipline. An inventory, because the tools are in use whether or not they were authorized. | Immersion in each division. Extremes and mainstreams. | Coordinator with each division lead | Division-by-division inventory. The two ends of every audience named, so the design serves both. |
| Week 4 | Readiness survey against the three levels of the divide: connection and devices, recurring cost, educator capability. A short scan of what districts are already doing, so we build on the ones that are ahead. Themes drawn from everything heard. | Find themes. Download the learning. | Coordinator with the Data and Impact Center of Excellence | Readiness Baseline. Where SDCOE and the county stand on all three levels, what AI is already in use, and what staff, labor, families, and students said. |
Phase one deliverable
Readiness Baseline. One document that states where SDCOE and the county stand on all three levels, what AI is already in use, and what staff, labor, families, and students said. Everything in phases two and three is measured against it. It is also the first report to ITS leadership, and the first data in the engagement dashboard.
Phase two, days 31 to 60: Design and Align Prototype
The purpose of phase two is that people build the thing they will have to live under. This is co-creation as SDCOE defines it, which is centering those most affected as design partners rather than as an audience. Everything here is a first version, built to be tested.
- Co-design studios, not briefings. One per division. Each produces two artifacts: the three tasks in that division where AI would help most, and the three places it must never be used.
- Draft guardrails built on the CDE model policy released in June 2026, adapted for county-office context. We do not write our own from scratch and we do not duplicate CDE. We localize.
- Role-based capability map. The 201 and 301 material, defined per role rather than generically, because a program specialist, an HR analyst, and a classroom teacher do not need the same thing. This is the outline of the professional learning, onboarding resources, and toolkits the role is asked to deliver.
- Industry and higher-education roundtable. Employers and university partners in this county, describing what changed in their work in the last eighteen months. This informs pathways, and it informs what we tell students is coming.
- Communities of practice seeded from the studios, so the people who designed a guardrail keep meeting after it is written.
- Accessibility and language review of every artifact before it goes out, to Section 508 and WCAG, in English and Spanish.
Phase two deliverable
Draft Guidance and Capability Map. A guardrails document districts can adopt or adapt, and a role-based map of what 201 and 301 capability actually means at SDCOE. Both marked as drafts on purpose, with the evidence they rest on attached.
Phase three, days 61 to 90: Develop and Refine Iterate and scale
The purpose of phase three is proof. Small, real, and measured, including the parts that do not work.
- Three pilots in three different divisions. Deliberately small, deliberately unglamorous, and chosen because they touch a task someone does every week.
- Measured against the phase-one baseline, not against enthusiasm. Engagement metrics and key performance indicators defined with the Data and Impact Center of Excellence, reported on a dashboard ITS leadership can read without translation.
- Publish what did not work. A task force that only reports wins stops being believed, and the credibility of this body is the asset the whole program runs on.
- Board-ready recommendation to the Senior Leadership Team, in language that can go to the County Superintendent and the County Board without rewriting.
- Year-one plan with named owners, sequencing, and honest cost, built on existing staff time. Where the evidence supports a purchase, the recommendation says so, with the data-privacy and contract questions answered first.
- A public convening at the end of the window, in person and virtual, with interpretation and accessibility accommodations, where the recommendation is presented to the people who shaped it.
Phase three deliverable
Board-Ready Recommendation. Plus the one page a superintendent can actually use, which is the real test of whether ninety days were well spent.
Where the posted responsibilities live in the ninety days
The classification lists what this role does. Each duty has a home in the plan above.
| Responsibility in the classification | Where it lives |
|---|---|
| Coordinate the North Star AI Task Force: convene, agendas, decisions, action items, policy and framework revision | Week 1 charter; every phase gate; the guardrails draft in phase two |
| Communities of practice, advisory councils, focus groups, listening sessions | Weeks 2 and 3; communities of practice seeded from the phase-two studios |
| Professional learning, onboarding resources, toolkits, workshops | The role-based capability map in phase two; the pilots in phase three |
| External outreach to families, students, community organizations, higher education, business, labor | Week 2 by design; the industry and higher-education roundtable in phase two; the public convening in phase three |
| Communications materials: newsletters, webpages, briefings, talking points, video, media response | Opening communication in week 1, in two languages; the phase reports; the deepfake response protocol drafted with Communications in phase two |
| Stakeholder feedback system: surveys, interviews, public comment, synthesized into recommendations | Opened in week 2, fed every week, synthesized in the Readiness Baseline and the final recommendation |
| Collaboration across ITS, Innovation, Communications, Equity, Student Services, Legal, HR | The seats at the table, plus Business Services and the Data and Impact Center of Excellence |
| Monitor state, federal, and national guidance | The district and guidance scan in week 4; guardrails built on the CDE model policy |
| Events: summits, forums, convenings, accessibility and translation | Interpreted sessions throughout; the phase-three public convening |
| Engagement metrics, KPIs, dashboards, reports to leadership and the Board | Defined with the Data and Impact Center of Excellence in week 4; reported at each phase gate; the board-ready recommendation |
| Budgets, grants, contracts, memoranda of understanding | Business Services at the table from week 1; honest cost in the year-one plan; contract and data-privacy questions answered before any purchase is recommended |
Why these phase names
Reflect and Learn, Design and Align, and Develop and Refine are the three phases of SDCOE's own 2026-27 LCAP Development Series. That is deliberate. This ninety-day window sits inside the LCAP development cycle, which means that if the task force delivers on time, districts can write AI access, AI literacy, and professional learning into three-year plans with funding attached, rather than bolting them on afterward. If the window is missed, the next clean opportunity is three years out.
How success is measured
No new scorecard. Four outcomes SDCOE already reports:
| Outcome | What it measures | Why this body moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Desired Outcome 1 | Staff who strongly agree they belong at SDCOE and that it builds trust | How this work is done determines whether it builds trust or spends it |
| Desired Outcome 2 | Staff who can access professional growth, co-creation, and cross-division collaboration | This is nearly a definition of the task force. It is the primary measure. |
| Desired Outcome 3 | Families and partners who say SDCOE co-creates with them | Families are engaged in week two, and the guidance is built with them |
| Desired Outcome 7 | County LEAs improving on the College and Career Indicator | The industry roundtable feeds pathway design directly |
What this body does not do
- It advises. Purchasing decisions stay with the divisions and processes that own them, better informed.
- It does not police. Districts are independent, and a county office that behaves like a regulator loses the influence that makes it useful.
- It does not duplicate CDE. It localizes CDE for a county where one district is 46 percent English learners and another is 3 percent.
- It does not survive on one person. Staggered terms exist because an initiative that cannot survive a change of leadership is not an initiative.
What comes out of it
Two hubs and one pathway: a Leadership Hub for administrators and board members, a Teachers Hub for teachers, coaches, and students, each moving people from knowing, to literacy, to building with AI, to seeding and scaling what works across the county. The events, the proof-of-practice measures, and the direction we can go are on the main brief.