For parents and guardians

What Stairs is, in plain words.

STAIRS is a student-written set of rules about using AI on schoolwork. Your child hasn’t stumbled onto a product, a subscription, or a service that reports on them. This page is what you actually need to know.

What your child is signing

Five sentences your child is making to themselves about how they’ll use AI on schoolwork. It’s worth reading the full pledge, but the core is: understand what the task is meant to teach you, try it yourself first, use AI to sharpen your own work rather than replace it, and be able to explain every line of what you turn in.

What STAIRS is not

Not a service. There’s nothing to pay for. Nothing is sold.
Not an enforcement tool. We don’t report your child to their school. We don’t have any relationship with their school unless your child tells their school.
Not a detection tool. We don’t look at your child’s homework or AI chats.
Not a social network. There’s no feed, no friends list, no public profile.
Not run by a company. It was started by a group of students.

What happens with your child’s information

Nothing — we don’t collect any. When your child clicks “I will sign the pledge,” we add one to a counter and, if they picked them, one to a coarse bucket for their region and school level. No name, no email, no IP address, no device identifier. The privacy notice is the full account.

If you have any concern about this page or the counter, email hello@stairspledge.org.

What you can do yourself

The most useful thing a parent can do is ask the same question a teacher would: “Walk me through paragraph three of your essay. Just the thinking, not the words on the page.” If they can, they’ve done the work. If they can’t, AI did it for them. You don’t need to know anything about AI to ask that question.

Why this matters

If this feels sudden, it is. The Stanford AI Index 2026 reports that roughly four in five U.S. high school and college students now use AI for schoolwork — about double the 2023 figure — and only 6% of teachers say their school’s AI policy is clear.

A few studies have started to show what a lot of parents already suspect. An MIT study in 2025 measured brain activity of students writing essays with and without ChatGPT: the ones using the AI engaged less, felt less ownership of their work, and couldn’t quote their own sentences back. A 2025 Microsoft study found the more confident people were in the AI, the less they thought for themselves while using it. The risk isn’t that your child cheats. It’s that they stop noticing when AI is doing the part of the work their school intended them to do.

If you want to talk to someone

Email hello@stairspledge.org. We’re students, so we may be slow to reply during exams, but we do reply.