Baltimore City Public Schools sign on to ChatGPT for Teachers

Even teachers use ChatGPT to get homework done a little faster.

Baltimore City Public Schools is part of a new wave of school systems partnering with OpenAI to give educators access to ChatGPT for Teachers, a free tool used by over 300,000 educators and staff across 30 states. Baltimore is the only Maryland school district among the tool’s newly added partners, totaling 55 additional school systems.

OpenAI did not provide a full list of participating school districts.

Baltimore City school officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The district’s guidance on academic artificial intelligence says the “transformative capabilities of Generative AI presents exciting opportunities in education, prompting us to explore its potential benefits, limitations and responsible use.”

ChatGPT, operated by OpenAI, is a popular generative artificial intelligence tool. That means it creates new content by studying existing data in response to prompts. Such tools have faced criticism from those who say they reduce critical thinking and harm the environment.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teachers in 2025 “to give educators a secure place to explore AI, understand where it is useful, and help shape how it should be used in education,” according to the AI research and deployment company.

Educators use ChatGPT to save time on adapting lesson plans, communicating with families, preparing materials for substitute teachers and other administrative tasks “so they can spend more attention on students,” according to OpenAI. Teachers have asked the tool for help with things like report cards and teacher-evaluation materials.

The chatbot seems to be creeping into classrooms, too: According to OpenAI, “Chicago educators described using ChatGPT to simulate science experiments, support student animation projects, and analyze more than 200 novels for gaps in representation.”

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT for Teachers was designed with privacy and security controls so that school districts can comply with student privacy laws. The organization has a national data privacy agreement through the Student Data Privacy Consortium that covers 16 states, but Maryland isn’t among them. Data shared in ChatGPT for Teachers “is not used to train our models by default,” according to the company.

School districts get access to ChatGPT for Teachers, which is set to remain free through June 2028, alongside hands-on training on how to use it. The tool is only available to administrators, faculty and educators, and “feedback from districts helps OpenAI understand what educators and administrators need next.”

“Our work continues to be guided by the belief that AI should support learning, not shortcut it, and educators should remain in control of how AI shapes classroom experiences,” a news release from OpenAI reads.

According to the company, 60% of teachers report using an AI tool to save hours each week.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.