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Ninety minutes with two people who have spent a combined fifty years inside Montessori and early years settings, on what actually changes when the admin stops eating the evening. This is the written recap. The full recording sits at the top of this page.
What we covered
Every head of school in the room was already using AI in some form, mostly without a policy and mostly without telling anyone. The session was less about whether to adopt and more about where it helps, where it quietly erodes the prepared environment, and what a leader should decide before their staff decide for them.
- Where the hours actually go in a week, measured rather than guessed
- The three jobs leaders hand over first, and why two of them are the wrong ones
- What to write down as policy before September
- How families react when they find out, which is not how most leaders expect
Where the hours actually go
Tim opened with the observation that most schools cannot answer a simple question: how many hours a week does a guide spend on documentation rather than on children. When schools do measure it, the number lands somewhere between six and eleven hours, and almost none of it is the observation itself. It is the transcription, the formatting, the chasing, and the second copy that goes to the parent.
The work that exhausts people is rarely the work they trained for. It is the work that sits either side of it.
That distinction matters, because it tells you what is safe to automate. Nobody in the session wanted a machine writing observations. Several wanted a machine turning an observation already written into the four formats the school has to produce anyway.
3 things leaders tried first
Lara ran through what she sees most often when she walks into a setting that has started experimenting, in the order they usually happen.
- Parent newsletters. The easiest win and the least risky. The tone needs editing every time, but the blank page problem disappears.
- Policy drafting. Useful for structure, dangerous for content. Two schools in the room had found regulatory detail that was confidently wrong.
- Observation write-ups. The one most leaders reach for third and the one both speakers were most cautious about, for reasons that took up the next twenty minutes.
The pattern is consistent: leaders start with the thing that feels safest to them rather than the thing that would save the most time. Newsletters take a guide forty minutes a month. Assessment cycles take days.
The parent update problem
Parent communication came up more than any other topic. Families now expect a level of visibility that did not exist five years ago, and staff are absorbing that expectation in their own time. Lara made the point that the problem is not the volume of updates but the inconsistency: one room sends photographs daily, the room next door sends a paragraph on Fridays, and the family with children in both rooms notices.
Consistency is a systems problem rather than an effort problem, which is why it does not respond to asking people to try harder.
What changes when the admin stops eating the evening
Both speakers were careful here. Nobody claimed that time saved on documentation automatically becomes time with children. It becomes time, and what happens to it depends entirely on whether the school has decided in advance what that time is for.
The schools that had done this well had written it down: two of the recovered hours go to classroom observation, one goes to mentoring, and the rest goes home with the person who earned it. The schools that had not written it down found the hours quietly filled with more meetings.
Questions from the room
The questions ran long, and three came up repeatedly enough to answer here.
Do we have to tell parents? Both speakers said yes, and said it early rather than after a family asks. The schools that disclosed first reported almost no friction. The one school that was asked before it had disclosed spent a term rebuilding trust.
What about the children's data? This is the question that decides your vendor, not your policy. If you cannot get a straight answer about where observations are stored and who can read them, that is the answer.
Will this replace guides? No, and Tim was blunt that the question itself signals a school looking at cost rather than quality. The settings that improve are the ones that reinvest the time.
What to do on Monday
The session closed with three actions small enough to start immediately.
- Measure one week. Ask every guide to log documentation time for five days. The number will surprise the leadership team more than it surprises the staff.
- Write one page of policy. What tools are permitted, what may never be entered into them, and who to ask. One page, not ten.
- Tell families before they ask. A paragraph in the next newsletter is enough.
If you want the operational side of this in more depth, the whitepaper library covers enrollment, staffing and compliance in long form.