Pinecrest Academy Cadence is a tuition-free public charter school in Henderson, NV, serving approximately 2,300 students in Kindergarten through 12th grade. Part of the Pinecrest Academies of Nevada network, the school is known for its rigorous college-preparatory curriculum and strong STEM programming, and has embraced the evolving role of AI in education.
Active teachers
Assignments created
Jump in ELA scores
Writing is a fundamental priority for Pinecrest Cadence. Across every grade level and subject area, students are expected to write daily.
Their curriculum is built around the five pillars of the National Reading Panel: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension; and the development of writing is central to the growth across these skills. Students keep academic notebooks, submit daily journal entries, and are assessed quarterly on their writing through school-wide structured assessments.
It’s an extensive amount of writing. And for the teachers responsible for grading it, it was becoming unsustainable.
With large class sizes, teachers were becoming the bottlenecks. Providing meaningful, individualized feedback on every assignment required extensive hours, hours that those teachers simply didn’t have.
The constraint wasn’t just grading, it was also availability. In a room of thirty students working through a difficult assignment, a teacher can only be in one place at a time.
Kathryn Rosenberg
Instructional Coach
Then, in 2022, a second challenge arrived: Artificial intelligence.
Overnight, teachers started noticing patterns among their students’ writing. A voice wasn’t theirs, known ability didn’t match output, and essays without a single spelling or grammatical error became the norm.
But spotting it and proving it were different problems. Trying to identify AI generated work meant pasting sentences into a search engine. Maintaining academic integrity required students to draft on paper or work in a single document, allowing teachers to manually track revision history.
These were time consuming processes that not only made teachers’ jobs more difficult, but students still quickly learned to work around them.
Grace Lange
HS English Teacher
In July 2024, the school adopted their AI Policy, built on a single principle: AI should support student thinking, not replace it. Their policy welcomes AI as a collaborative partner in the different stages of work, but the substance of the work needs to reflect the student’s own original thought and analysis.
Pinecrest Cadence needed a solution that could serve both objectives at once: one that gave teachers back time without replacing the human judgement at the center of good feedback and help enforce appropriate AI use rather than policing it.
This need is what led them to TrueMark.
Pinecrest did not need another tool added to the writing process. They needed a central environment for writing where teachers could monitor how work developed, assist students, and determine the appropriate level of support.
TrueMark became that environment: all writing in one workspace, with the supports around it set by the teacher who assigned it.
But it was three key capabilities that truly proved TrueMark’s effectiveness for Pinecrest.
TrueMark’s AI grading streamlined a process that teachers had been doing manually for hours: evaluate student writing against a rubric they uploaded, surface gaps against that scoring criteria, and generate structured feedback.
Now teachers had a starting point. Each essay came back with an initial score from the AI based on their rubric, and from there the teacher took over to review and make edits before pushing out the final grade and feedback.
Grace Lange
HS English Teacher
Pinecrest’s policy allowed AI while students were drafting, which raised a question: which AI, and what did acceptable collaboration look like? A student stuck on a paragraph at nine at night was going to look for help. The copilot gave teachers a version of that they could shape.
Teachers switch on the copilot assignment by assignment. It answers students’ questions with questions of its own and sends them back to the text instead of writing for them. Pinecrest’s teachers found that this changed both how help reached students and which students reached for it.
Grace Lange
HS English Teacher
Because those AI interactions are visible to teachers, Pinecrest could see the copilot closing different gaps for different students: from honors students using it to fine-tune word choice and pressure-test a paragraph to on-level students using it to simply understand what a question was asking in the first place.
TrueMark’s suite of integrity tools gave teachers controls that aligned directly with Pinecrest Cadence’s AI policy.
Depending on the assignment, teachers are able to enforce different integrity expectations. On formative work, AI support stays on. On critical summative assessments, teachers enforce guardrails with disable-paste and lockdown mode.
When integrity questions arise, TrueMark’s version history and patented keystroke-playback allow teachers to see exactly how the writing unfolded, where suspicious behavior was flagged in real time, and have a grounded conversation with students about how the work came together.
Pinecrest’s AI policy guarantees students accused of misuse the right to show evidence of their work process. TrueMark is what makes that promise practical to keep.
TrueMark launched at Pinecrest Cadence in October 2025 in an initial small pilot focused on only two grade levels. From there adoption rapidly spread, moving teacher to teacher into Language Arts, Science, Social Studies and STEAM classrooms across both elementary and secondary grades.
In its first year with TrueMark, Pinecrest Cadence saw an 18% jump in ELA scores. That result is a testament to the dedication of Pinecrest Cadence’s teachers.
What TrueMark changed was how their time was spent: Freed from hours of manual grading and investigating integrity cases, teachers put that time back into the work that moves writing forward: coaching students through revision, addressing individual areas for improvement surfaced in TrueMark, and returning feedback while the assignment was still fresh.
Bridgett Bates
HS English Teacher
Writing assignments at Pinecrest used to happen in a dozen places at once. Workbooks, notebooks, paper packets, and whatever was online that week. TrueMark helped consolidate that.
Grace Lange
HS English Teacher
For Pinecrest Cadence, the first year partnering with TrueMark laid the foundation. Pinecrest’s longer-term vision is to make AI literacy part of how the school teaches — building teachers’ fluency with AI and preparing students to use these tools thoughtfully in college and in their professional lives.
TrueMark is proud to support this vision, enabling Pinecrest’s teachers to teach with AI on their own terms and partnering with them to shape the future of classroom AI.