(A Radio Iowa report) –  The North Polk Community School District in central Iowa is the latest place where administrators are investigating AI-generated “deepfake” videos of school staff. The videos, which are made to look like they could be real, were uploaded to TikTok and showed North Polk staff members in what the district calls “inappropriate contexts.”

Coy Marquardt, executive director of Iowa State Education Association, says kids need to learn about digital safety. “It’s all our joint responsibility to educate our students to be good citizens, to be compassionate individuals,” Marquardt says, “and to not do things like this that will harm others, so we can have welcoming schools.”

The North Polk superintendent is asking parents to be aware of their kids’ tech use. Concerning posts can be screenshotted and reported to the district. Lisa Remy, executive director of School Administrators of Iowa, says this new type of case may fall under a district’s existing policies.

Remy says, “For any type of bullying and harassment, if something happens outside of school, but it then impacts what’s happening in school, then school administrators can continue to enforce the policies that they have in place.”

North Polk district officials say all threats to safety are viewed with the highest level of seriousness and that necessary actions in the deepfakes case have been taken.