Oxford High School launches Mississippi’s first high school AI course

Oxford High School put Mississippi’s first public high school artificial intelligence course into the hands of students, giving Lafayette County teenagers a class built around how AI works, how it fails, and how it can strengthen their own thinking instead of replace it.

The district announced Introduction to Artificial Intelligence I and II on Aug. 11, 2025, and said Thomas Harrington was the first teacher in Mississippi to offer a high school AI course. Oxford High School developed the class with EdgeTheory, an AI-powered narrative intelligence company based in Mississippi, in a collaboration the district described as first of its kind in the state. The curriculum centers on AI basics and ethics, with students learning to use the technology as a tool for their own writing, problem-solving and analysis.

Superintendent Bradley Roberson has framed the course as part of a wider district response to a technology that is already changing school and work. The Oxford School District has created an artificial intelligence handbook and is assembling a committee to set expectations for how teachers and students should use AI across the district, not just inside one classroom. That effort fits the district’s stated mission to empower students to become “confident and creative builders of the future” and its vision to be “a bold, innovative, continually improving district.”

The classroom work has already moved beyond abstract discussion. Student Mary Bea Green said the class expanded her thinking about what she could accomplish. Guy Frugé described a lesson in which students developed AI prompts for prosthetic limbs through 3D printing, a project that tied a fast-moving technology to practical problem-solving and the kind of hands-on work employers and colleges increasingly value.

The timing matters in Oxford, where the high school’s Career Pathways building opened with a ribbon-cutting and community open house on July 28, 2025. That building, along with the district’s career and college-prep focus, gives the AI course a direct place in the pipeline from classroom to workforce. Nationally, the U.S. Department of Education issued guidance in July 2025 encouraging responsible AI use that can enhance teaching and learning without replacing educators, while ISTE has been promoting AI literacy and ethics training for teachers and students. Oxford’s new course placed Lafayette County students inside that larger shift, with local guardrails and local expectations shaping how the next generation learns to use the technology.