Jamiylah Jones wants to show the world of education how they can leverage AI for good so schools can better meet the needs of their students and staff.
By Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photography by Miranda Schloat
White Plains resident Jamiylah Jones, Ed.D., founder and owner of Creative Transformations, LLC, remembers the exact moment when she used AI for the first time.
It was November 30, 2022, the same day ChatGPT was launched. “I was in my office and a girl came in and said, ‘Ms. Jones, can you write a recommendation letter for me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it.’”
Jones, who was the head of a private school in Queens at the time, was constantly juggling dozens of tasks at any given moment. Writing a recommendation letter was important, but it was the kind of to-do list item that could all too easily slip to the bottom of her priorities in the day-to-day triage of administrative work. Initially, Jones thought she’d pull some past recommendation letters she’d written for promising students and “try to just map it to her.” But, she says, “The girl was special to me. In my heart, I just couldn’t write a generic letter for her.”
Jones wondered whether ChatGPT might be able to help. “I thought, you know, what am I going to do? I’m going to go to ChatGPT, because it had just come out, and I said, ‘I want to write this letter of recommendation; can you help me write it?’” Jones input key details: “This girl did this. She was that. She overcame this, you know, and it did it.” ChatGPT “was a little slow back then,” Jones remembers, but it produced a workable draft that she could revise, saving her considerable time. She knew right away: AI was a “game changer,” especially for busy school administrators. “This is going to make life easier for us,” she remembers thinking.
The recommendation letter wasn’t perfect. “I still had to iterate on it; I still had to do work on it.” But that work took her about 10 minutes, instead of what she estimated would have been three or four hours had she written the recommendation letter from scratch. In that moment, Jones saw what AI could do for education.
Leading the way
It didn’t take long for Jones to begin using ChatGPT for other time-consuming administrative tasks. Researching and assisting with writing grant proposals was one task for which AI seemed particularly well-suited. Every student received free lunch, but maintaining that service meant applying for funding, including grants, regularly. Many of the grant applications “asked questions that seemed technical and complex,” she recalls, obliging her, for example, to pick stoves and refrigerators that would best meet the needs of her students. Jones was an education expert, not a commercial appliances expert. She didn’t really know how to go about choosing the best stove or refrigerator for her school. She decided to input the questions she couldn’t easily answer into ChatGPT. Within seconds, she learned a lot.
Jones says she understood early on that leveraging ChatGPT or other AI services wasn’t about cheating or outsourcing a task. Instead, it was about leveraging technology just like any other tool or resource. If AI could help her submit stronger grant applications and make smarter decisions by gathering key information she didn’t necessarily have access to, why wouldn’t she use it? “I started to see value in it,” she says.
Making a pivot
Jones continued in her role as a school administrator until she resigned in 2024. She’d planned to lean “into cooking, cleaning and decorating,” she remembers, “but no one would let me just relax. They wouldn’t let me stay home. Schools were calling me to do work for them.” They needed help with many aspects of school administration, and chief among them was figuring out how to manage the burgeoning challenges AI presented. AI was starting to assert its presence in classrooms, and many teachers were nervous, maybe even terrified by what they viewed as the potential threats this tool might have on student learning. Jones felt sure that AI could be harnessed for good in the classroom, but she wasn’t entirely sure what that looked like—yet.
In the lapse between when Jones resigned from the private school and colleagues started calling her, she continued experimenting with AI. She was aware of its potential dangers, including cognitive erosion, but she also couldn’t shake the certainty she felt that AI could actually benefit schools, students and staff. Then, one Sunday morning, Jones had another pivotal moment in her AI journey that she remembers with absolute clarity. Jones was lying in bed, scrolling through posts from a woman she followed on LinkedIn. “She kept posting about how AI was going to change their approach to teaching. She’s like, ‘We’ll need to redesign activities and we’ll need to redesign learning paths.’” Jones resonated with that message. “It was right up my alley because I love instruction,” she explains. And suddenly, Jones had her “AI lightbulb” moment. “I just jumped up, and I said, ‘I’m going to teach the world of education how to leverage AI to solve our problems.’”
Teaching the teachers
By March 2025, Jones decided to create a course for teachers on how to use AI effectively. She understood that many faculty and staff were resistant to embracing AI, but she also sensed that the head-in-the-sand approach simply wasn’t going to work. She knew AI was here to stay, and the early adopters who could harness its power and use it to benefit students could leverage a powerful tool that might help everyone. She began to create videos on her YouTube channel—hundreds of them—and then she started writing a 13-book series for K-12 teachers titled “Teaching AI With Confidence.” “I know the world of education is not going to know how to deal with this,” she remembers thinking, “so I’m like, let me be at the forefront and a forerunner with this.”
Because Jones had built a thick Rolodex and impeccable credibility over the course of her career, she was able to reach many educators quickly. “I was sharing it with the schools I was working with, and they were really excited about it,” she recalls of her videos and other materials. As she listened to faculty and staff, she heard the same concerns and resistance repeated over and over again. The number one complaint? Students were using AI to cheat, at worst, or to take the lazy route, at best.
“You know why they’re cheating?” Jones challenged them. “Because we have to pivot.” Jones kept beating the same drum: Don’t dismiss AI, and don’t throw away what you have. “Take what you have, redesign it, and I will show you how to do it with AI,” Jones would tell them.
Above all, Jones considers herself a realist. She knows kids are going to use AI, even if the adults in their lives tell them not to. Her goal is to support teachers so they can help their students learn how to use AI in a way that preserves—and maybe even deepens—their critical thinking skills.
Jones has uploaded over 500 videos to her YouTube channel, which has more than 2,000 subscribers. “I think I just made my first-year anniversary [of videos],” she says. “Every day I drop a video. I won’t stop.”
And she didn’t stop at videos or books, either. “I know the teacher; it will take more for teachers to make a pivot, so why don’t we just create tools for them that will make it easier?” Jones, ever the student herself, began taking a vibe coding class and learned app development so she could design an app for teachers that would address their AI concerns. During this time, she applied for and was accepted into the spring 2026 cohort of Element 46, Westchester County’s official accelerator.
“What I was trying to do was give teachers a place where they can go and upload their old lesson plans and assignments, or if they wanted to create something new, [the app would help make it] less cheatable, because it’s not just looking for an outcome.” Instead, Jones’s app, along with her videos and books, was teaching teachers how to design a lesson plan “where you have to surface the kids’ thinking and process—not just the outcome.” Jones believes “Did they get the answer?” is an old-school approach. HOW they got to the answer—that’s the value to unlock in the age of AI.
Jones’s YouTube videos and a recently launched newsletter, which already has 725+ subscribers, are free. She’s got her finger on the pulse of emerging ethical and moral issues related to AI in schools, and she’s producing content that, for example, responds to topics that are trending in the news. One of her recent posts, she says, addressed the emerging issue of AI detectors, which teachers use in an attempt to identify when AI is used in assignments. But these detectors are imperfect, she says. “My whole post to educators was that there’s like a six or 10 percent chance this could be wrong,” she explains. “So what happens when the AI detector is wrong?”
And, Jones points out, pegging a student as an AI “cheater” can have lifelong implications if added to their permanent record. “What did you just do to this kid and their family?” she asks. “You can potentially ruin their life.” All of her work seeks to hold educators’ hands so they can navigate AI ethically and ensure that kids aren’t wrongly accused of using AI in a way that undermines their education.
“We’re trained to kind of be punitive, and I will admit that,” she confesses. “But this is a whole new world. So that’s my goal and my job: to say we cannot operate the same way that we’ve been operating. It’s not going to work; you’re going to keep banging your head against the wall. And that’s insanity.”
Making a difference
For schools that want to partner with her, Jones offers an à la carte-style menu of services; administrators can pick and choose the supports they need. While she does work locally, her reach extends far beyond Westchester. “I’m all over the place,” she says, laughing. From New York City to Virginia, Nigeria to Ghana, and Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, Jones is a sought-after consultant and speaker. No matter where she goes, her message is the same: “We’ve got to use AI for good. Don’t be afraid of it because, at the end of the day, the kids are using it.”
One of the strategies she shares with educators is using what she refers to as a “flipped classroom” model. Rather than trying to keep AI out of an assignment, actually “send the student home with instructions that say, ‘Prompt your AI to give you three different argumentative essays on certain topics.’” Then, she says, the student is expected to come back to class and share with their teacher and peers. “Which was the best one and why? What made it strong for you?” Jones says teaching kids these kinds of evaluation skills actually builds their critical thinking muscles. They’re not just trying to arrive at a predetermined answer. The student returns to the classroom with a “working knowledge” of what an argumentative essay is. “And then, if you want them to work right there with pen and paper, that’s fine. But then, also, go through the process: What was your prompt? What made this a good prompt?” And how can you write an argumentative essay that is even stronger?
Jones says that every academic entity and every teacher needs to develop an AI vision for the next school year. “This vision has to be reviewed every 30 to 45 days, right? Because everything is changing, and you have to be prepared to redo this process next school year; it’s not static.” The goal, she insists, is to teach students how to use AI responsibly. “That’s our job. Because if we don’t, we’re going to get AI slop that’s not their work; it’s the cognitive erosion.”
Jones’s enthusiasm for AI in schools isn’t unrestricted, though; she knows that faculty, staff and students’ families also have to be aware of how kids are using AI for non-academic purposes, especially for emotional support. One area of AI use that occupies much of her thought and work these days is AI chatbot companions. For kids who are bullied or who struggle socially, Jones says she can understand the appeal of a chatbot companion. Kids, she says, will say, “It always listens to me; it doesn’t judge; it doesn’t roll its eyes; it’s private, right?” This is why she’s begun facilitating workshops for parents along with a friend who is a mental health counselor. “We need to be aware of the risks,” she says. “We need to have relationships with kids; we need to create spaces for kids—whether at home or in school—for them to really be able to come talk to humans. So that, to me, is something that’s near and dear to me.”
As she reflects on her decades of life and work, as well as her current and future focus, Jones says that what drives her in every lane she finds herself is “just thinking about how to do good for the world. That’s all I’ve ever done,” she says. “Every job I’ve gone into, I said to myself, ‘I need to do good for these kids. I need to do good for my teachers.’ We need to be the best for them.” She believes that for the most part, people want to work with and learn from someone who demonstrates empathy, so she attempts to reassure them. “I say, ‘Look, I know there’s some bad to this, but we’re going to leverage this for good. We’re going to leverage this so we can do our jobs better and better meet the needs of our students.’ People just resonate with that. I’m just 100 percent myself, authentically myself, and I want everybody else to be themselves, too.”
This article was edited by Isabella Aranda Garcia and fact-checked by Virna Sandler. Photography was captured with Canon optics and edited in Adobe Creative Suite.
This article was published in the September/October 2026 edition of Connect to Northern Westchester.
Julie Schwietert Collazo
Julie Schwietert Collazo is a writer, editor, fact-checker, and translator. She is also author of the travel guidebooks MOON New York State and the forthcoming MOON Hudson Valley and the Catskills.
Miranda Schloat
Miranda is a junior at Lynn University in Boca Raton and is studying to be a photographer. She is inspired by the world around her and enjoys taking photos that emit color and emotion. Miranda loves to explore nature and capture its beauty and grace, resulting in images that are full of life and wonder.
