As someone who has had direct interaction with Kylie Lindquist, assistant principal for Curriculum & Instruction at RBHS, I take major issue with her statement in the article titled, “Is AI doing harm to local students?” published on March 4. In the article she states, “We recently just talked about AI in terms of when we started giving calculators to kids, so, so long ago. That was like everyone thinking, ‘But they’re not going to be able to do math in their head. We’re giving them calculators and that’s going to cripple them.’ And it was the same thing when we gave kids computers.” My issue is it’s clear that Ms. Lindquist, in a position of great power at the high school, is not educating herself about the dangers of AI and, what’s worse, she thinks that computers haven’t had an impact on learning. A simple search reveals that, “The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents” (https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z-less-cognitively-capable-parents-first-time-cellphone-bans-standardized-test-scores).
It is deeply concerning that our leading educators aren’t educating themselves on the real impacts of AI and tech in school and are thinking of it in such a glib way. Sadly, I’m not surprised by her statement — when I spoke with her about my disdain for the flipped classroom model, her responses were similarly uneducated and irresponsible.
While I didn’t grow up with technology in my hand, I sure did have a calculator in my D96 and D208 schools and I sure can’t do math in my head.
Nicole Cavaliere