At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a selective magnet school outside Washington, D.C., the Wi-Fi blocks ChatGPT, Claude and similar AI tools during the school day. One of its seniors, 17-year-old Navya Tuteja, still built an AI startup — not to get around homework, but to help people who are often overlooked by the job market. Her story, featured by Fortune in September 2026, is a useful counterpoint to the debate about whether schools should ban AI.

The Spark: A Personal Motivation

Tuteja’s motivation is personal. Her mother is hard of hearing, and growing up she saw how invisible disabilities shape everyday life — and how rarely workplaces account for them. She noticed that job postings usually leave out the day-to-day realities that matter most to neurodivergent candidates and people with invisible disabilities: whether remote work is possible, how predictable the schedule is, what the work environment is like.

What Raaha Does

Her answer is Raaha, a free AI platform that lets neurodivergent job seekers check a listing for fit before they apply. Raaha pulls together relevant information from a job posting and produces a customized “job fit” score. According to Fortune, the platform has more than 1,000 users and covers over 20,000 job listings. Tuteja wrote the core scoring algorithm herself and used AI tools mainly for design and routine coding tasks. Raaha is free for job seekers; her long-term idea is that employers and workforce organizations would pay to use or improve their listings.

More Than One Project

Raaha is not her only project. Tuteja founded the nonprofit Empower InvisAbilities, which runs STEM workshops for neurodivergent students and works with schools on inclusion, and she wrote a children’s book about a neurodivergent girl named Iris. She also built Legible, a tool that translates special-education paperwork such as IEPs and 504 plans into plain language for families, and has pitched a transparency standard she calls “Traceable Accessibility” to state senators and discussed it with the U.S. Department of Education.

What She Thinks About AI Bans

Tuteja does not dismiss her school’s restrictions. She credits the ban with protecting her from over-reliance on AI and with building study discipline she still relies on. But she does not see bans as the long-term answer: AI in schools should “a hundred percent” be regulated, she told Fortune, but “I don’t think banning it is the solution.”

Lessons for Students

Her path offers a few lessons for students. Start from a real problem you understand, not from the technology. Use AI as a tool for the parts it is good at — design, boilerplate, research — while keeping the core thinking your own. And remember that the most valuable AI projects are often not about saving time on schoolwork, but about solving problems for people the market overlooks.

What Comes Next

As schools move from blanket bans toward clearer rules for AI use, students like Tuteja show what responsible use can look like: disciplined learning without shortcuts in class, and ambitious building outside it. Raaha and Legible are still early-stage projects, but they already reach real users.

Conclusion: Turning Obstacles into Opportunities

Navya Tuteja’s school blocked ChatGPT — and she built an AI tool anyway, for people with invisible disabilities looking for work. Her story suggests that the question for schools is not whether students will use AI, but whether they learn to use it thoughtfully and for purposes that matter.

Sources: Fortune, 27 Sep 2026; Technical.ly: student-built AI for neurodivergent job seekers