Ohio high school students win national AI competition with teacher communication system
Two students from Heartland Christian School in Columbiana, Ohio have been named state champions in the 2026 Presidential AI Challenge, a K-12 competition launched under Executive Order 14277 to advance AI education.
Evan Stambaugh and Brody Conaway built a production-ready system that automates personalized parent communications using Google's Gemini large language model. The system generates individualized emails to families based on classroom data without requiring additional work from teachers.
The problem they solved
Teachers spend an estimated two to three hours weekly writing personalized messages to parents. Generic mass communications, meanwhile, leave families without meaningful insight into their child's progress. The gap between classroom and home remains a persistent challenge in K-12 education.
Rather than building a prototype or demo, the students engineered a system ready for actual use. The architecture uses advanced AI concepts including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), vector database embeddings for semantic search, and context engineering to manage what information the AI processes.
What makes this different
The team demonstrated skill in building reusable workflow modules that can be swapped and scaled as new tools emerge. The same system architecture can power individualized progress reports, differentiated learning plans, and adaptive student activities.
Elijah Stambaugh, Chief Academic Officer at HCS and supervisor of the project, said the framework lays groundwork for an "educator operating system" where AI amplifies teacher expertise rather than replacing it.
What happens next
The team advances to the East Central Regional Competition on April 13, with regional winners announced April 16. National champions will be announced in June, with the possibility of representing Ohio in Washington, D.C.
"Three months before this project, these students had never built anything with AI," Stambaugh said. "They didn't just learn to use AI tools - they learned the math and science behind how AI works, then applied it to solve a real problem in their own community."
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