I sent the following handwritten letter to the ASBO International Executive Director today.
March 22, 2026
Dear Mr. Rowan,
I had every intention of responding to your invitation to “join
the AI user community” via email, but I have hope that my taking the time and
care to write by hand may make you take notice. I realize there is a certain
irony to that hope, given the topic.
As an ASBO member who is not a school business official, who
works with school boards on school finance issues here in Massachusetts, I have
found these past years of increasing hype on AI use in school finance not only
deeply distressing, but entirely contrary to the values the profession of
school business officials are defined by.
In both my ten years on my local school board and the now
eleven years I have served in my current role, it is the unimpeachable
integrity of the school business official on which our school board members
depend to make their decisions on school finances. I note “integrity” is even
the first principle to which the ASBO Board holds itself, a principle which speaks
of the “ethical responsibility” with which they “uphold trust.”
How then is it that ASBO has and continues to advocate for
members to use a system founded in intellectual property theft? One cannot use generative
AI systems without using the uncited works of millions, work they did not assent
to the use of.
Where is the integrity in using work that is inaccurate?
Every week brings another several stories of generative AI results being no
better than guessing (in fact, we might guess better). This has in some cases deadly
results. While we can hope this is not the case in school finance, results that
are incorrect can, as we both know, be catastrophic.
Notably for school finance, it was recently brought to my
attention that Microsoft itself recommends against using its Copilot function
in Excel for any task “with legal, regulatory, or compliance implications.”
(You can find that on the Copilot support page.) I think you and I would agree
that this is everything within a school business office.
I do not know how school boards can trust what they are
given by their school finance officers given
such warnings within the very systems on which they operate, unless the board
members know they are not being used.
I could go on at length about the the many other ways this
push violates the core principles of school finance (that vast waste of
resources; the horrific impacts on our students, particularly those most vulnerable;
its use to kill schoolgirls in Iran; and the list goes on), but the loss of
integrity in school finance, the undermining of the trust that is core to the function
of the school business official, is the item to which I most wish to draw your
attention.
Please end this undermining of this crucial trust.
Thank you for your attention,
Tracy A. Novick
