NYN Special Correspondent :
This fall, districts and schools across the United States are confronting a new federal requirement: AI literacy is now part of K-12 education. Most are still forming committees and asking where to begin.
Dr. Jamiylah Jones began two years ago.
Dr. Jones is the co-founder of Elhaam Academy, a K-12 private school in Queens, and the author of Teaching AI With Confidence, a 13-book AI literacy curriculum, one book for every grade from kindergarten through twelfth. Each book holds 32 lessons plus culminating activities: a full school year of week-by-week plans written for working teachers, with grade-level progressions, facilitator scripts, and train-the-trainer support. The series is available on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and e-book at amazon.com/dp/B0FTHX59WY. Dr. Jones wrote it in response to the federal mandate, after years of watching schools ask the same question in her workshops: what does AI literacy actually look like on a Tuesday morning in a real classroom?
And while American districts and schools deliberate, schools abroad are moving. This month Dr. Jones is a speaker at GESS, the Global Educational Supplies and Solutions conference in Riyadh, where Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 agenda has made AI in education a national priority. In October, the Global Association of Islamic Schools brings her to Jakarta. She has spoken at more than 20 events this year, internationally and locally, from Ghana and Canada to New Jersey’s statewide education technology conference.
The career behind those invitations runs through New York classrooms. Dr. Jones started in 2001 as a biology teacher and department chair in the Bronx public schools. She spent nine years leading a health-themed career and technical education school in the Bronx, then took the work overseas: principal of an international school in Saudi Arabia, then head of a bilingual American school in Kuwait, leading its boys and girls schools to a single standard. In 2016 she returned to Queens for an eight-year run as head of school at a private school there, growing it from an elementary school into a 3K-12 institution with five divisions and enrollment up more than 300 percent.
In 2019 she founded Creative Transformations, an education consulting company that partners with schools worldwide to build the capacity and systems needed to lead, teach, and innovate in the age of AI (creativetransformations.consulting). The company is a New York State certified woman- and minority-owned business (MWBE). Two years ago she left school leadership to do that work full time. Today she works as a coach and consultant to the schools implementing AI, alongside their leaders and teachers. The company’s flagship Responsible AI Program for Schools takes districts and schools from readiness assessment through governance, training, and classroom implementation, with workshops and coaching built into that work. This fall she is also working with cohorts of educators on how to implement AI literacy in their classrooms.
The company is based in Westchester County, but the majority of her work takes place in New York City. The proof site sits in Queens: Elhaam Academy, the K-12 Islamic school she co-founded in 2024, where AI is taught intentionally at every grade level and her lessons are already in classrooms. Educators from other institutions are watching what Elhaam is building and asking how they can build it too.
Dr. Jones also builds the tools herself. TaskFixer AI, launched in October 2025, responds to the academic integrity crisis generative AI created, reshaping assessment at the moment student work can no longer be taken on faith. ILM Fusion, launched in December 2025, is an AI training and delivery system designed for Islamic schools. Her pitch of TaskFixer AI at the Element 46 accelerator’s June demo day was well received.
She publishes daily: a weekly podcast, “What’s Your AI Problem?”, a weekly newsletter, and a YouTube library of hundreds of free training videos. She also runs a free community for school leaders and educators who want to lead with AI, with free resources. A companion to the book series, rebuilding the same lessons with Islamic integration for schools like Elhaam, publishes this fall.
Northern Westchester Magazine features Dr. Jones in its September/October issue. Her first rule of teaching has not changed since the Bronx: “Kids do not care what you know until they know you care.”
For districts and schools still staring at the mandate, her answer is simple. The curriculum already exists, and it was written by someone who spent 25 years in the schools it is meant for.
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