It took Stacey Morris' son one day of school to notice something was off. "Mom, did you know that we live in Venecky?" he joked on the drive home. Then she opened the new student agenda he had carried out of Farnsley Middle School in Louisville.
Inside was a map of the United States with the state names badly mangled. Kentucky was labeled "Venecky." Louisiana was "Lookoong." Alabama was "Alotome," Illinois was "Vitoiis," and South Carolina was "Sorth Cuanto." Even Arizona came out as "Arizone." The map was only the start. Morris found errors throughout the booklet, including a distorted periodic table and phases of the moon that were impossible to read.
For Morris, the problem is accountability, because these are not free. Families pay a $10 instructional fee each year for the agendas, and she questioned whether the pages had been generated by artificial intelligence and handed out without anyone checking them. "You're making us pay for something you used AI for? That's kind of silly, in my opinion," she said. She emailed the principal on the first day of school and said she never got a response.
The garbled words and warped diagrams are exactly the kind of output a text-to-image or chatbot tool produces when it fakes a map or a chart (AI slop), which is why parents landed on AI as the likely culprit and why the story spread. Jefferson County Public Schools has not confirmed who or what created the pages, so that remains a suspicion rather than a finding.
The district did move once it was flagged. After a parent complained and WDRB asked about it, a JCPS communications officer said the district had spoken with the school and that it was contacting families. That same Wednesday, Farnsley administrators emailed teachers warning of a "LOT of mistakes" on pages 19 through 36, and instructed them to have students tear those pages out before taking the agendas home and to keep the removed pages. The principal emailed parents about the "inaccurate information." Morris was not satisfied. "This is not a misprint," she said. "Someone did not look at what they were handing out to the students."
Farnsley Middle enrolls about 919 students and is part of Jefferson County Public Schools, the largest district in Kentucky. That scale is what makes the open question matter: WDRB said it asked JCPS who printed the agendas and whether they went to other schools, and those questions were unanswered as of its report. Morris is left wondering whether Farnsley was the only school that got the error-filled booklets, or whether other families simply have not opened theirs yet.
The episode is a small, almost comic version of a problem schools are wrestling with in far higher-stakes forms: AI tools produce work that looks finished and is quietly wrong, and someone still has to check it. We have written about that risk in schools before, from AI search results that misinform students to the scramble over district AI policies. A planner that relabels Kentucky is easy to laugh at. It is also a $10 reminder that the last step, a human actually reading the thing, is the one that was skipped.
Sources
WDRB: 'Venecky' instead of Kentucky: JCPS middle school parents suspect agendas are AI-generated
Gizmodo: Which AI chatbot did this school use to make such a ridiculous map?
School enrollment figures from allk12's analysis of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data, 2024-25.
