The Input-Readiness Gate Your AI Intake Form Is Missing

Add one item to your district's AI tool intake form: can the students this tool targets type well enough to use it? Answer it before a license is approved. Privacy and rostering have gates. Input readiness does not. Meta Typing Club drafted the seven-item wording below.

TL;DR: Conversational AI tools assume typed input. District vetting workflows score the vendor and stop there. One gate in your form's instructional-review stage closes the gap.

What your intake form already checks

Pull up your district's 2026 software request form. Its privacy questions trace to the 1EdTech TrustEd Apps Data Privacy Rubric and its five scored areas. Its AI questions, if any, trace to the Future of Privacy Forum's April 2024 checklist for vetting generative AI tools. San Francisco Unified routes each request through curriculum, technology, special education and legal on a three-month minimum.

None of the three asks whether the child at the screen can produce a sentence.

The rubrics we reviewed evaluate the vendor, and the district workflows route the paperwork. Neither evaluates the student who has to operate the tool.

The gate, word for word

Paste this into the instructional section of your request form. A tool needing no typed composition stops at item 2; everything else takes five answers.

1. Grade bands this request serves: ____
2. Does student use require composing original typed text longer than one sentence? Yes / No. If No, skip to item 7.
3. Keyboarding instruction for these grade bands at the requesting school: (a) on a schedule, (b) informal, (c) none.
4. Most recent measured typing rate for these students, with the date. If never measured, write "not measured."
5. Requesting teacher's estimate: what share of these students can type a three-sentence answer without hunting for keys? ____%
6. Instructional reviewer, when item 3 is (c) or item 4 reads "not measured": name the input-support plan shipping with the license, scheduled keyboarding practice or a dictation accommodation.
7. Reviewer decision: approve if item 2 is No, or if item 3 is (a) and either item 4 meets your state's grade-level expectation or item 5 reads 60% or higher. Otherwise approve with the item 6 plan; return the request if items 3 to 5 are blank.

Someone will move to delete item 5 as subjective. Keep it: it is the only number most districts have. The 60% line is ours, so move it where your board can defend it.

Where the gate sits in the sequence

Instructional review, ahead of privacy and legal. A tool a second-grade class cannot operate should not reach your counsel's queue.

Stage	Owner	Input-readiness gate
1. Request submitted	Teacher or principal	Items 1 to 5 completed
2. Instructional review	Curriculum and digital learning	Gate decided here
3. Privacy and security review	Technology, legal	No change to your current review
4. Contract and purchase	Procurement	Support plan attached
5. Renewal review	Digital learning	Support plan delivered?

The gate is a routing decision, not a veto: its usual output is approval with an input-support plan attached to the license.

What a passing answer looks like

Meta Typing Club looked for a published words-per-minute floor for AI tool use and found none, so any vendor's number, ours included, is an opinion. State pages tend to name a mastery level instead of a rate. The Utah State Board of Education's keyboarding page introduces home row in K-2 and expects touch proficiency by the end of grade 5, scored on four mastery levels by a timed test, with no rate attached. So item 4's threshold is your state's expectation where one exists, and item 5's estimate where it does not. Never infer item 3 from that expectation: what a state expects and what a building schedules is the gap this gate exists to find.

Borrow your own state's keyboarding expectation as the threshold: a benchmark your state already publishes is one nobody has to defend at a board meeting.

The objection worth taking seriously

Dictation makes this moot, the argument goes. For a student with a documented need, speech-to-text is the accommodation and no gate should slow it down. For a kindergartner, voice is the better interface, and this checklist should never block an early-grades pilot. That much of the objection wins.

Where it stops winning is the room, and the test. Put twenty-two children on shared Chromebooks and voice input becomes twenty-two people talking at once, and dictation is not on offer during state testing anyway: the Kentucky Department of Education states its summative assessments are online in grades 3 through 8, 10 and 11, with extended response items. ISTE's indicator 1.1.d asks students to use current technologies effectively without naming the keyboard. Districts set that floor, or nobody does.

Key takeaways

• The vetting rubrics we read score the vendor, never student operability.
• Seven items in the form you already use close the gap, no new process.
• Put the gate ahead of a privacy review that can run three months.
• Your state's grade-level keyboarding expectation is item 4's threshold.
• Utah expects touch proficiency by grade 5; K-2 requests need a support plan.

Questions district leaders ask about this gate

Won't this add weeks to an already slow approval queue?

One review cycle, not weeks: the answers arrive with the request and the reviewer picks one of three outcomes. Be honest with your committee though. In the first year most requests will trigger item 6, so the cost is front-loaded, not zero.

Who answers item 4 when we have never measured typing?

Write "not measured" and the request routes to item 6. That is a valid answer. When item 4 comes back empty on most requests, you have a finding for your task force.

Does this apply to teacher-facing AI tools?

No. Item 2 routes them straight through. The gate covers tools that put a child in front of a text box.

Are you telling me to buy a typing platform first?

We sell one, so weigh this accordingly. The gate works with no purchase: a teacher-led home row routine satisfies item 6. It will not accept an empty line.

How do I add this without reopening our AI guidance draft?

The intake form belongs to digital learning and changes without a board vote. Add the seven items as a block and tell your task force at the next meeting.

Start with the form you already have

Your AI guidance document needs committee time and a board vote; the intake form does not. Put the question where the license is granted: can the students this tool targets type well enough to use it, and what ships with the license if they cannot. Edit the form this month, then read item 4 on the next ten requests. If it comes back empty district-wide, structured keyboarding practice with classes and per-student progress is what Meta Typing Club builds, and our teacher walkthroughs are open before you talk to us.