Heather Daniel of Edison Township Public Schools talks AI tools
Heather Daniel is the Director of Communications and Policy at Edison Township Public Schools in Edison, New Jersey. She has over 30 years of educational experience in both teaching and administration. She has also worked in the tech sector as a search engine consultant in linguistics and semantics. She was awarded the New Jersey Public Relations Association 2024 School Communicator of the Year and serves on the New Jersey School Public Relations State Advisory Committee.
In this interview, Daniel discusses her experience with AI technology in education, why AI tools are transforming community engagement in her district, and how AI is integral for optimal strategic planning in schools.
You have experience with the strategic planning process at several districts, both with and without AI tools. What are the significant differences you see AI making in strategic planning?
Strategic planning has always been about setting measurable goals, ensuring our actions drive meaningful progress, and providing us and our community with a clear roadmap for a district’s future. A well-structured strategic plan guides district decision-making and drives initiatives aligned with its identified priorities so you don’t drift off course.
Traditionally, data collection and analysis lag behind decision-making in developing and executing the plan. When this happens, there are gaps in accountability and a limited collective stakeholder voice.
Using AI, we can avoid these issues. We can engage additional stakeholders through multiple engagement channels and better analyze trends and voices. AI enables leaders to remain adaptive and responsive to district needs in real time.
In my experience, AI tools help eliminate data silos, inconsistent feedback loops, and an inability to visualize progress as it happens. They increase stakeholder input, streamline analysis, and offer predictive insights that help leaders proactively address challenges before they escalate.
The ability to harness AI for real-time engagement and decision-making has been a game changer in executing strategic plans by increasing effectiveness, agility, efficiency, and impact.
How are you using AI tools to engage the Edison community, and why has it been transformational for your district?
Edison Township Public Schools is one of the largest and most diverse districts in New Jersey, serving over 17,000 students and a multilingual community. In my work, I’ve found that AI enhances, rather than replaces, traditional engagement methods like in-person focus groups and meetings—which remain essential to relationship building, communication, and trust. At Edison, AI has improved our community engagement by extending our communication platforms to be even more accessible, inclusive, and responsive.
One of the most impactful ways we’ve integrated AI is through multilingual AI chatbots and surveys, which provide real-time, on-demand support to families in their preferred language. It’s been especially valuable in our district, where multiple languages are spoken, to ensure that all our families have equal access to information, resources, and support regardless of language barriers. We use AI-driven surveys to gather continuous feedback across multiple languages, ensuring that every voice is heard and represented in district decision-making.
Additionally, we use AI-driven sentiment analysis tools to track real-time feedback from our stakeholders. I’ve found that using traditional surveys can limit participation and delay insights, but with AI, we’re able to continuously collect, analyze, and act on people’s input in a way that is both immediate and data-driven. It’s strengthened our ability to respond to community concerns, refine district initiatives, and enhance transparency in our decision-making.
I’ve also used AI during webinars, replacing the traditional Zoom chat with AI-powered sentiment tracking and interactive engagement tools. During webinars, we can gather and analyze live participant feedback, surface their key concerns, and adapt our live discussions to ensure our webinars are more interactive and aligned with what our participants want.
I’ve experienced how AI can help bridge the gap between the district and the community. We use it to streamline communication, analyze data, enhance accessibility, and improve continuous engagement so that we can develop a more connected, informed, and empowered community. AI has shifted our engagement from passive to interactive, dynamic, and responsive.
Tell us about your Ed.D. dissertation.
My dissertation's primary focus is on the role of generative AI in leadership implementation of strategic plans in K 12 school districts. Strategic planning is a critical function of educational leadership, but many districts struggle with execution because of time constraints, administrative workload, and the challenge of maintaining accountability over time.
AI is an emerging field, and so is the research surrounding it. Much of the existing research is concentrated in the private sector or higher education or focused on AI’s instructional applications and implications for students. My dissertation seeks to fill a critical gap by focusing on AI’s role in administrative functionality and efficiency—specifically, how AI can enhance strategic planning, decision-making, and leadership operations in K-12 education.
My research explores how AI-driven tools—like AI-powered surveys and real-time engagement platforms like ThoughtExchange—support district leaders in making data-driven decisions while fostering greater efficiency, transparency, and stakeholder engagement. A key focus is evaluating the barriers leaders face in adopting AI technologies and identifying the factors contributing to successful implementation. Through my study, I aim to determine how AI enhances real-time data collection, stakeholder input, and progress monitoring, ultimately improving the efficacy and accountability of strategic plan execution.
Research and the overall process are inherently iterative, so I’m sure the focus of my dissertation will continue to be refined over time based on emerging insights and the dynamic, rapidly evolving applications of AI in educational leadership.
From the participant's point of view, how does AI improve engagement and positively impact district strategic planning?
As I mentioned earlier, AI enhances traditional community engagement, like in-person focus groups and meetings, which are very important to the strategic planning process. By incorporating AI tools, participants have a better opportunity for personalized engagement, and the district gets an analysis of their feedback as they provide it.
One of the most powerful tools for this is ThoughtExchange. It’s really been a game changer for engagement in my work, whether I’m using an Exchange, survey, Interview, or Deep Dive. The platform gives participants an experience that deeply and predictively improves our questions for a more individual and responsive experience. This personalized engagement style allows for more quality responses, avoids any potential group polarization, and ensures we consider all our community voices in decisions.
An AI tool like ThoughtExchange has removed barriers like language accessibility and time constraints for our participants. It’s helped us ensure that we’re not just collecting our community’s feedback, but we’re actively using it to inform our decision-making, enhancing our transparency and accountability.
How can AI improve school districts' engagement with parents and the broader community?
AI enhances community engagement by making district communication more immediate, inclusive, and interactive. Traditionally, we’ve relied on emails, newsletters, and in-person meetings, which can be one-directional and time-restrictive. AI shifts this dynamic by enabling communication that better meets the needs of parents and the broader community by meeting them where they’re at.
For example, ThoughtExchange elevates our engagement initiatives by allowing us to offer our stakeholders interactive Exchanges, get instant sentiment analysis, and surface deeper community insights. Whether through surveys, interviews, or open-ended discussions, ThoughtExchange’s AI helps me easily identify concerns and surface common themes. It helps me ensure we’re considering all voices, especially those who may not usually come to meetings.
In my work, AI isn’t replacing traditional methods. It seamlessly integrates with them to expand Edison’s community voice and participation. It shifts our engagement from reactive to proactive. It enables parents and community members to actively participate in our decision-making.
It’s helping us build more trust and encourage collaboration between the district and the community.
From a leadership perspective, why would you advocate for using AI tools for strategic planning?
As a leader, I’ve seen firsthand how AI tools make strategic planning more dynamic and responsive. Instead of static reports, periodic check-ins, and manual data analysis, which can lead to delays, inconsistencies, and missed opportunities for course correction, they’ve enhanced our efficiency. For me, AI has transformed the strategic planning process by providing real-time insights, predictive analytics, and automated data integration. It’s allowed our leadership team to continuously track progress and adjust our plans as needed.
One of the biggest challenges in strategic planning is ensuring ongoing, meaningful stakeholder engagement and data analysis. ThoughtExchange has been invaluable for me in gathering real-time input from the diverse voices in our community. It’s helped us remove barriers to participation and surface key themes that we may otherwise miss.
Another key advantage of AI is its ability to objectively analyze community feedback, helping to remove bias in the evaluation process. Our personal filters can still impact how we evaluate our community data, but AI analysis removes that human issue.
What advice would you give to other school districts considering AI tools for strategic planning and engagement?
Start with a clear purpose. Prioritize your community’s trust. And approach the implementation phase as an ongoing, iterative process. AI is a powerful tool, but using it successfully depends on thoughtful integration and continuous evaluation.
Some specifics:
- Define your goals: AI should enhance your existing processes, not replace your decision-making. Identify the specific challenges in your strategic planning and engagement that AI can help address—things like improving stakeholder feedback, streamlining data analysis, or enhancing progress monitoring.
- Prioritize stakeholder trust and transparency: Communicate how decisions are made to help stakeholders feel their input directly influences district priorities. Use AI tools like ThoughtExchange to remove barriers to participation and ensure diverse voices are heard.
- Use AI to enhance, not replace, traditional engagement: In-person meetings, focus groups, and relationship-building initiatives should remain foundational. Any AI tools you use should complement these efforts by expanding accessibility and enabling real-time data collection.
- Evaluate, adapt, and iterate: AI isn’t a one-time implementation; it’s an evolving tool. Make sure you regularly assess its impact and adjust your outcomes-based strategies—and stay flexible because technology is always advancing.
In your opinion, how will AI change school district communications over the next five years?
I think of it this way: at one point, the internet and search engines were optional tools, but now they’re an integral part of our daily lives. I think AI is going to follow the same path, evolving from something unknown and cautiously adopted to something we use instinctively on a daily basis.
I worked in internet search query development and annotation and was a technology staff developer, so I’ve seen this transformation firsthand. When search engines first emerged, there was a ton of hesitation, skepticism, and resistance. People questioned their accuracy and reliability and didn’t believe they could truly replace how we were used to finding information. Now, we don’t think twice about using them. We “Google” everything. Google has become our “Kleenex,” a household name embedded in how we operate, shaping how we seek knowledge, solve problems, and interact with the world. I see a lot of similarities in the story of AI. Right now, I think much of the hesitation concerns adapting to change and establishing ways to reliably integrate AI into our human experience.
AI is already more widely adopted in business, healthcare, and finance—education is only beginning to tap into its full potential. Over the next five years, I see AI becoming essential to school district communications.
The key will be how we implement AI. It’s not a replacement for human connection—it’s a tool to enhance it. Over time, AI will feel less like a new technology and more like a natural extension of how we communicate in education. It’s going to be an intuitive part of district operations, ensuring communication is more personalized, transparent, and responsive to the needs of our students, staff, and the broader community.
