EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been updated to clarify language about educator response.

The individualized education program (IEP) process generates a big stack of papers, full of terminology that parents may not understand. In response, some parents have begun using artificial intelligence to better understand IEPs and prepare for teacher meetings. Kimberly Morris, who taught pre-K through the 2025-26 school year, saw this firsthand.

Morris would set school goals in the IEP, “and some parents would then utilize AI as a way to create a home goal,” she says. 

Morris, who is now a curriculum and instruction specialist supporting early childhood learning at Unlocking Children’s Potential of Central Florida, didn’t mind that parents were using AI to align home efforts with school goals. But as the conversation around AI use transparency grows in classrooms, some wonder whether parents should disclose if they used AI to prepare for an IEP meeting.

How Parents Use AI

Concerned parents might use AI in several ways during the IEP process, says Elizabeth Laird, director of equity and civic technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “A parent might turn to AI to learn more about the process and what their rights are, what their child’s rights are,” she notes.

Laird thinks that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “AI can play a role in democratizing access to information about the process itself, as well as being a starting point for thinking about what types of accommodations parents may want to ask about,” she reasons.

For many parents, “just because you’re a parent of a child with a disability doesn’t mean you automatically understand all of these things related to your child’s IEP,” says Olivia Coleman, an assistant professor in the School of Teacher Education at theUniversity of Central Florida. “They’re using it to translate the jargon, any acronyms. It’s helping them to draft questions.”

Parents are putting their child’s IEP into AI models “and then having it put it into plain language, like, ’What is this thing and what does it mean?’” says Coleman, who is also a co-principal investigator at the Center for Innovation, Design, and Digital Learning.

Morris, the curriculum and instruction specialist, sees an upside to parents using AI in IEP meetings. “They can become more of a team member alongside the teacher, occupational therapist, physical therapist and speech therapist,” she says.

But there are risks. For example, when a parent’s AI-generated contribution to the meeting sprawls to 20 or 30 pages, “it’s going to take a teacher the majority of their day just to read through a request,” says Phyllis Wolfram, executive director of the Council of Administrators of Special Education. “It will slow down the process.”

“AI is not an IEP expert,” Laird adds, noting that the AI’s outputs can be inaccurate. With that in mind, she counsels teachers and parents to reflect together on the AI’s findings. A key aspect of the IEP process, she notes, “is its emphasis on bringing different subject matters together to collaborate, to identify what is the best path forward for an individual child.”

Here’s where federal law enters the picture. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) provides privacy protections for parents regarding their children’s education while the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) offers additional privacy protections for students receiving special education.

With FERPA and IDEA as the legal backdrop, parents should not put identifiable personal data like medical diagnoses and legal documents into AI. The tool could potentially train on that data, which risks that information becoming publicly visible. The data also may be at risk of being exposed in a security breach, if the AI provider gets hacked. 

Should Parents Disclose?

Some argue that parents need to be candid about their AI use for that collaboration to be effective. Some parents were upfront about AI when meeting with Morris. “When I would report on a goal, they also had input and would say, ‘Hey, I created something at home and I used AI for that.’ I thought that was really cool, that parents stepped out of their own mindset to think about how to incorporate those goals at home,” she says.

Even if parents don’t disclose, teachers and others could spot AI-generated text. “Right now, the information that parents are providing to school districts regarding their IEP meetings is much lengthier, and it carries some legal jargon that doesn’t typically come from parents,” Wolfram says. “Most educators will know when they’ve received something written by AI.”

If teachers do want parents to disclose AI usage, they can make a strong case for that, Laird believes. After all, in schools across the country, “parents are demanding from their school to know whether and how AI is being used,” she says. 

The key is to avoid being defensive if AI is being used in the IEP meeting, says Coleman. “We don’t want to pit anyone in the IEP team against each other. We want to work together.” For the IEP process to meet its intent, she adds, participants need to trust each other, and “transparency builds trust.”

Parents might consider using AI for a number of reasons as they prep for an IEP meeting:

• To summarize IEP documents

• To verify their rights against local state guidelines

• To translate unfamiliar jargon or bridge a language gap

• To formulate proposed goals

• To generate questions to help guide the process

In all these cases, educators say they’d prefer parents disclose their AI use, so that everyone can align in what is supposed to be a collaborative process. Parents should also double-check with local and state rules to make sure they are allowed to use AI with their IEPs.

Crafting a Response

Morris counsels teachers to assume that some parents will use AI. “I have created the IEP and I know my role and goals as well as those for the student and parents,” she says. How the family responds is up to them, “and I’ve always kept an open relationship with the parents that I have worked with,” she adds.

In the spirit of collaboration, teachers can model appropriate transparency and disclosure etiquette with parents. “We can’t make disclosure mandatory, but we can practice it and set an example,” Coleman argues. “Teachers can say up front, ‘We’re not against AI use, but we’d really appreciate you also being transparent, and this is why.’ We want to make sure we’re all on the same page,” she says.

With trust in place, Wolfram notes, the teacher can talk openly about the AI outputs a parent brings to a meeting. “The educator can say, ‘Let’s talk about those recommendations. Do you see those as different from what we’re already doing? And if so, let’s talk about why you think that’s needed,’” she says.

The AI discussion requires some finesse, but Morris thinks it’s worth the effort. “I want parents to be advocates, and to understand exactly what is being told to them on their child’s IEP,” she says.