Months before the Los Angeles school board approved a $6.2 million contract with AllHere, an AI chatbot maker that is now being investigated by the FBI, top district leaders were invited to a meeting with its CEO and a consultant, who is a close friend and associate of schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

The Jan. 18, 2023, calendar invite for the gathering at the district’s downtown headquarters, billed as “AllHere Meeting,” was shared with The 74 by a former central office staffer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. 

The AllHere contract in question is widely believed to be connected to the high-profile raids on Carvalho’s home and district office in late February. 

The 74 has not received confirmation on whether the meeting took place or what specifically may have been discussed, but the invite suggests district administrators were consulting with AllHere principals five months before the contract was voted on.

It also calls into question public statements by Carvalho, who was placed on paid leave Feb. 27, that he . He said the education technology venture represented by his longtime friend and business associate Debra Kerr won the job based on legally mandated bidding. Kerr called the Jan. 18 meeting.

AllHere filed for bankruptcy in September 2024 and its founder and CEO, Joanna Smith-Griffin, was later arrested on charges of identity theft and defrauding investors. 

The 74 filed extensive public record requests with Los Angeles Unified School District in September 2024 for documents related to the AI chatbot contract, including all proposals, bids or submissions made by AllHere and any other companies vying for the work. The request also asked for documents detailing how the district evaluated AllHere’s qualifications and determined that the small Boston-based firm with little to no artificial intelligence experience was capable of carrying out the contract.

On Feb. 11, 17 months after those requests were filed and two weeks before the FBI raids, a senior paralegal in sent The 74 an email asking if we still wanted the documents.

Through his attorneys and a spokesperson, Carvalho since the FBI probe exploded into public view. The Los Angeles Times reported that he denied any wrongdoing, pointed out that “no evidence has been presented by prosecutors supporting any allegation that (he) violated federal law” and pressed to return to his job.

“Mr. Carvalho remains confident that the evidence will ultimately demonstrate that he acted appropriately and in the best interests of students,” said the statement that was issued through the spokesperson and the law firm of Holland & Knight, according to the Times. “We hope the school board reinstates him promptly to his position as superintendent.”

Kate Brody, the vice president of communications for , a 2,000-member LAUSD parent and educator advocacy group, sees the moment differently. Her group has called for an audit of all the education technology contracts entered into under Carvalho, saying they lack independent research into their efficacy and now is “the time to peel this whole thing back and take a look, not just at what’s going on with AllHere, but the inappropriate amount of access that all these companies have.”

“The evidence is increasingly clear that this technology is not really for the benefit of the students,” she told The 74. “Our big question has been for a long time — whose benefit is it for?”

Carvalho has not been accused of any wrongdoing and authorities have not provided details about the investigation. The warrants underlying the . 

In  after the Board of Education placed Carvalho on paid leave and named an acting superintendent, the district said that while it understood “the need for information, we cannot discuss the specifics of this matter pending investigation.”

Kerr could not be reached for comment and attorneys for  Smith-Griffin did not respond to requests for comment. District spokesperson, Britt Vaughan, could not be reached for comment.

Kerr and Carvalho

Federal agents also . Her ties to Carvalho go back to his days leading the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, a period of time in his prominent career that is also now reportedly under investigation. According to , grand jury subpoenas have been issued seeking records from the district’s inspector general and a fundraising foundation overseen by Carvalho while he was the Miami schools chief.

Kerr was a key player in executing the failed contract between AllHere and the nation’s second-largest school district. In addition to her being in a position to call senior staff to a meeting at district headquarters, according to the calendar invite, Kerr’s son Richard, a former AllHere account manager who began working for the company in 2022, told The 74 in September 2024 he pitched AllHere to LAUSD school leaders.

Among The 74’s long-unanswered public records requests were any conflict of interest disclosure forms filed by AllHere, its employees, third parties involved in the contract or LAUSD personnel.

The location listed on Kerr’s hourlong invite to discuss AllHere was the office of LAUSD’s longtime chief spokesperson Shannon Haber, who has since retired. Other invitees included senior advisor of communication Bích Ngọc Cao, senior director of engagement and partnerships Antonio Plascencia Jr.. and director of development and civic engagement Sara Mooney. 

Mooney is also the former executive director of the , the district’s separate fundraising arm includes Carvalho. Attempts to reach Haber and the other meeting invitees, which also included Vaughan, the district spokesperson, and marketing director Lourdes Valentine, were unsuccessful.

Earlier calendar entries shared with The 74 show Carvalho had an hourlong meeting scheduled with Kerr and someone identified only as “SN” on Oct. 21, 2022, about eight months after he took the $440,000-a-year job in Los Angeles. The meeting was scheduled for 12:30 p.m. at a place “to be determined.”

In 2022, Kerr was busy consulting for and promoting AllHere in multiple Florida cities, according to . She also did consulting work for Rethink Ed, a New York-based company that provides social-emotional and wellness resources. In May 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national school shutdowns, to support students with autism and other related disabilities during remote learning. 

“We appreciate partners like Rethink Ed which assist us in empowering these very deserving students with a variety of innovative and helpful tools to successfully engage in distance learning,” Carvalho said in a statement when the Miami-Dade contract was announced.

Roughly two years later, when Carvalho was leading LAUSD, the firm

Other calendar entries shared with The 74 show that right before the scheduled meeting with Kerr that October Friday, Carvalho had back-to-back interviews lined up with reporters from The Wall Street Journal and Politico. Later that day, he was scheduled to attend a retirement dinner for Michael Hinojosa, the former Dallas schools superintendent, at the Ravello restaurant at the Four Seasons in Buena Vista Lake, Florida, near Orlando.

Two days before Carvalho was due back in Florida for that celebration, the a $1.89 million contract to provide text-messaging support to students struggling with attendance, academics and social-emotional issues. The SMS tool was a precursor to its AI-powered chatbot. 

Carvalho told the Los Angeles Times he had getting the three-year deal in Miami although the newspaper reported that the bidding process began while he was still in charge. 

Two years later, in November 2024, the district would move with Miami-Dade schools for a period of three years after the ed tech company abandoned its contract.

The 74 filed public records requests on Sept. 13, 2024, asking for copies for all of Carvalho’s daily calendars going back to his first date of employment at LAUSD. The district has yet to produce them.  

AllHere then gone

Also invited to the Jan. 18, 2023, meeting set up by Kerr was AllHere’s Smith-Griffin, who six months after landing the L.A. schools deal was charged with defrauding investors of nearly $10 million.

Her case, which involves allegations of securities and wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, is being heard in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The Harvard graduate and former middle school math teacher  pleaded not guilty in December 2024. Conferences on her case were postponed three separate times in 2025 to allow the parties time to work on a possible disposition. The last was a 60-day adjournment on Sept. 25, 2025, and there’s been no activity in the file since then.

By the time Smith-Griffin was arrested at her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November 2024, the company she founded in 2016 had been forced into bankruptcy, unable to pay its debts, including a disputed $630,000 commission claimed by its largest creditor: Kerr.

Carvalho and Smith-Griffin spent considerable time together in the spring of 2024, appearing at multiple ed tech conferences touting “Ed,” their sunny chatbot that was seen as catapulting LAUSD into the K-12 AI vanguard. They said communicating with Ed would provide an unprecedented level of support, accelerating learning and strengthening well-being for students and families, many of whom were still struggling from the pandemic. 

“He’s going to talk to you in 100 different languages, he’s going to connect with you, he’s going to fall in love with you,” Carvalho raved at the April 2024 ASU+GSV conference in San Diego. “Hopefully you’ll love it, and in the process we are transforming a school system of 540,000 students into 540,000 ‘schools of one’ through absolute personalization and individualization.”

None of that materialized for the district, whose enrollment has since and which is now and

After AllHere shuttered and a former company manager-turned-whistleblower told The 74 that students’ private data  was not properly protected in the push to launch Ed, Carvalho vowed to investigate. He promised a task force of outside experts who would dig into what went wrong with the AllHere contract and determine how the district could strengthen its bidding process to avoid future debacles.

Carvalho told the Los Angeles Times in July 2024, he expected. Some 19 months later, there’s been no further news or shared task force findings. The district’s independent inspector general’s office launched its own investigation around the same time. 

However, the office’s and reports to the Board of Education make no mention of AllHere. In 2024, the IG opened a total of 62 cases, closed 54 and identified nearly $2.5 million in waste. In 2025, it opened 38 cases and closed 43, including some from previous years, though none appear to have involved AllHere. No financial waste was identified in 2025. 

Inspector General Sue Stengel at the end of 2025 after three years. The office did not respond to a request for comment. 

Equally elusive is what happened to Ed or the underlying tech tool for which LAUSD paid AllHere $3 million out of its $6.2 million contract. Although it’s been reported that school officials said the district was not financially harmed in the contractual fallout, and it received the services and products it spent several million dollars to acquire, it’s difficult to substantiate that.

When Carvalho unveiled Ed at a major March 20, 2024, celebration attended by Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, he said the chatbot would be in 101 elementary, middle and high schools as part of a pilot program. By the fall, Ed was supposed to go districtwide. 

Much later, that reported group of Ed testers had been “to a small number of schools (that) tried it out, each with a sample of students and parents.” In July 2024 after the district “unplugged” Ed in the wake of AllHere’s demise, that it was “hard to find students, teachers or other staff who have used any part of the system since its official launch.” 

Absent human interactions with Ed, the district has been slow to produce documentation from AllHere of services rendered. Among the public records sought by The 74 in September 2024, which LAUSD now appears ready to provide, are “purchase orders, invoices, and payments records related to any and all goods and/or services provided by AllHere.” 

Staff reporter Amanda Geduld contributed to this report

One thing is clear from the stories that populate this year’s list: Many of America’s schools are still grappling with the academic struggles that followed the pandemic – as well as the end of federal relief funds, which expired this fall. Student enrollments have yet to recover and many districts are facing – or will soon face – tough decisions about closures.

Meanwhile, some educators are testing innovative ways of teaching math, reading and science, hoping to gain back some of the academic ground lost since the COVID shutdowns. Technology is also playing a pivotal role in this post-pandemic world, with communities weighing the impact of cellphones and artificial intelligence on student learning and mental health.

November’s election – which featured debates over school choice, Christianity in public schools and the fate of the Department of Education – also made headlines here at The 74. And, as calls for cracking down on immigration grew even louder, we dug deep into the hurdles facing immigrant students and schools. 

Here’s a roundup of our most memorable and impactful stories of the year:

Exclusive: Thousands of Schools at Risk of Closing Due to Enrollment Loss

By Linda Jacobson

Long before districts close schools, enrollment loss takes a toll on staff and families, from combined classes to the loss of afterschool programs. This exclusive analysis by Linda Jacobson, based on Brookings Institution research, found that more than 4,400 schools lost at least one-fifth of their students during the pandemic — more than double the number during the pre-COVID period. The detailed look shows how the crisis is playing out at the school level and which districts face tough decisions about closures and cuts. 

Unwelcome to America’: Hundreds of U.S. High Schools Wrongfully Refused Entry to Older, Immigrant Student

By Jo Napolitano

The 74’s 16-month-long undercover investigation of school enrollment practices for older immigrant students revealed rampant refusals of teens who had a legal right to attend, shutting a door critical to success in America. Senior reporter Jo Napolitano called 630 high schools in every state and D.C. to test whether they would enroll a 19-year-old Venezuelan newcomer who had limited English language skills and whose education was interrupted after ninth grade. “Hector Guerrero” was turned down more than 300 times, including 204 denials in the 35 states and D.C., where high school attendance goes up to at least age 20. The 74’s investigation revealed pervasive hostility and suspicion toward these students in a particularly xenophobic era and a deeply arbitrary process determining their access to K-12 education.

Interactive: Which School Districts Do the Best Job of Teaching Kids to Read?

By Chad Aldeman

It’s not news that low-income fourth graders are years behind their higher-income peers in reading. But poverty is not destiny, and some schools and districts hugely outperform expectations. Working with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, contributor Chad Aldeman set out to find districts that are beating the odds and successfully teaching kids to read. From Steubenville City, Ohio, to Worcester County, Maryland, and across the country, click on their interactive map to find the highfliers in your state. 

Whistleblower: L.A. Schools’ Chatbot Misused Student Data as Tech Company Crumbled

by Mark Keierleber

In early June, a former top software engineer at ed tech startup, AllHere, warned Los Angeles district officials and others about student data privacy risks associated with the company’s AI chatbot “Ed.” The LA Unified School District had agreed to pay AllHere $6 million for the chatbot and the spring rollout of Ed was highly publicized, with L.A. schools chief Alberto Carvalho calling the chatbot’s student knowledge powers “unprecedented in American public education.” But, as Mark Keierleber reported, red flags soon began to emerge. The company financially imploded and its founder Joanna Smith-Griffin left the company. In November, federal prosecutors indicted her, accusing of defrauding investors of $10 million.

America’s Most Popular Autism Therapy May Not Work — and May Cause Serious Harms

by Beth Hawkins

Today, a child’s new autism diagnosis is frequently followed by a referral to a variation of an intervention called applied behavior analysis, or ABA, and four decades of pressure from parents and advocates has created a sprawling treatment industry. Yet, even as providers and lobbyists jockey to strengthen ABA’s dominance, autistic adults and researchers increasingly say there’s alarmingly little proof it’s effective — and mounting evidence it’s traumatizing. In an exclusive investigation, Beth Hawkins spoke with families, teachers and scholars about the growing controversy surrounding autism’s “gold standard” treatment. 

A Cautionary AI Tale: Why IBM’s Dazzling Watson Supercomputer Made a Lousy Tutor

by Greg Toppo

In 2011, IBM’s Watson supercomputer crushed Jeopardy! champions, raising hopes that it could help create a powerful tutoring system that would rival human teachers. But the visionary at the head of the effort watched as the project fizzled, the victim of AI’s inability to hold students’ attention. As new educational AI contenders like Khanmigo emerge, what lessons can they learn from the past? The 74’s Greg Toppo took a look at how IBM’s failed effort tempers today’s shiny AI promises.

State-by-State, How Segregation Legally Continues 7 Decades Post Brown v. Board

by Marianna McMurdock

Seventy years after the Supreme Court outlawed separating public school children by race, Marianna McMurdock sought to answer a pivotal question: How are some of the most coveted public schools in the U.S. able to legally exclude all but the most privileged families? Last spring, she spoke with researchers at the nonprofits Available to All and Bellwether, which published a report that examined the troubling laws, loopholes and trends that are undermining the legacy of Brown v. Board in each state. The researchers called for urgent legal reform to offset the impact that one’s home address has on enrollment, particularly as many districts have started considering closures.

Being ‘Bad at Math’ Is a Pervasive Concept. Can it Be Banished From Schools?

by Jo Napolitano

Are you bad at math? If you are, it’s likely that self-fulfilling seed got planted early. Many math education leaders are trying to uproot that thinking, arguing that any student can master the subject with the right accommodations and tutoring. Changing the bad-at-math mindset in U.S. schools, however, will not be easy, others warn. “We use math as a means to sort kids by who gets to be at the top and who gets to be at the bottom,” one math equity advocate told Jo Napolitano. 

Hope Rises in Pine Bluff: Saving Schools in America’s Fastest-Shrinking City

by The 74 Staff

Pine Bluff, Arkansas, earned the unwelcome distinction in the 2020 census of being America’s fastest-shrinking city, losing over 12% of its population in one decade. Amid this exodus of families, students and taxpayers, its school district had to navigate school closures, budget pressures and a state takeover. Throughout last winter, members of The 74’s newsroom embedded in Pine Bluff to report on the region’s trajectory. Here are some of the powerful stories they came back with: 

Kids, Screen Time & Despair: An Expert in the Economics of Happiness Echoes Psychologists’ Warnings About Tech

By Kevin Mahnken

A prominent economist has joined the growing chorus of experts warning against the dangers posed to youth mental health by screens and social media, reported Kevin Mahnken. New papers released by Dartmouth College professor Danny Blanchflower, a leading expert in the burgeoning field of happiness economics, suggest that the huge increase in screen time over the last decade has made the young more likely to despair than the middle-aged. 

Why Is a Grading System Touted as More Accurate, Equitable So Hard to Implement?

By Amanda Geduld

As educators push for more transparency in grading policies post-pandemic, some are turning to standards-based grading. When done correctly, it separates academic mastery from behavior and more accurately reflects what students know. But misunderstandings of the model, a lack of proper training, and a rush to adopt it often leads to messy implementation. Associate professor Laura Link told Amanda Geduld that as schools look to fix learning gaps, “standards-based grading is one that seems like it can be a quickly adopted effort. But it could backfire — and does backfire — very easily.”

Texas Seeks to Inject Bible Stories into Elementary School Reading Program

by Linda Jacobson

Last May, a sweeping redesign of Texas’ elementary school curriculum that used Bible stories to teach reading was unveiled. At the time, state education Commissioner Mike Morath described the changes as a shift toward a “classical model of education.” But the revisions raised questions about potential religious indoctrination and bias. Nevertheless, in November, the Texas Board of Education approved the new curriculum in a close vote. Linda Jacobson followed the story closely.

The Political War Over the Department of Education Is Only Beginning

By Kevin Mahnken 

Fresh from their November victories, Republicans are already working to help President-elect Donald Trump achieve his promise of abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. But research suggests that, while perceptions of the agency are mixed, the public is unlikely to back a sweeping course of elimination. “Saying you’ll get rid of it reads generically as being anti-education,” one political scientist told Kevin Mahnken. “That strikes me as a very heavy albatross to hang around your neck come the midterms.” 

18 Years, $2 Billion: Inside New Orleans’ Biggest School Recovery Effort in History

By Beth Hawkins

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed 110 New Orleans schools. Displaced families could not return until there were classrooms to welcome their kids, but no one had ever tried to rebuild an entire school system. While many of the buildings were moldering even before the storm, federal funds couldn’t be used to build something better. Some of the schools had landmark status and were of great historical significance. Eighteen years and $2 billion later, Beth Hawkins took a look at seven schools that illustrate how the district accomplished the task.

As Ryan Walters’ Right-Wing Star Rose, Critics Say Oklahoma Ed Dept. Fell Apart

By Linda Jacobson

Oklahoma state education chief Republican Ryan Walters has acted as a one-man publicity machine, a performance that’s earned him venomous foes and ardent fans who follow him with a near-religious fervor. But one casualty of his approach might be a functioning state education bureaucracy. Even Republican lawmakers have grown impatient, calling for a probe into how Walters handles state and federal funds. As Rep. Tammy West, a GOP incumbent running for re-election, told reporter Linda Jacobson, “Regardless of party, citizens want transparency, accountability and communication.”

AI ‘Companions’ Are Patient, Funny, Upbeat — and Probably Rewiring Kids Brains

By Greg Toppo

A college student relies on ChatGPT to help him make life decisions, including whether to break up with his girlfriend. Is this a future we feel good about? While AI bots and companions like ChatGPT, Replika and Snapchat’s MyAI, can offer support, comfort and advice, experts are beginning to warn of potential risks. The 74’s Greg Toppo talks to researchers and policy experts about what we should be doing to help make them safer.

Indiana Looks to Swiss Experts to Create Thousands of Student Apprenticeships

By Patrick O’Donnell

Indiana officials have turned to experts at the Swiss version of MIT for help in becoming a national career training leader by making apprenticeships available to thousands of high school students across the state. Indiana is the latest state to work with ETH Zurich — where Albert Einstein once studied — to develop ways to break down barriers between educators and businesses so that career training can be a large part of a reinvented high school experience, reported Patrick O’Donnell. 

Investigation: Nearly 1,000 Native Children Died in Federal Boarding Schools

By Marianna McMurdock 

Nearly 1,000 Native American children died while forced to attend government-affiliated boarding schools, according to a report published last summer by the Interior Department. The children are buried in 74 unmarked and marked graves, reported Marianna McMurdock, as tribes assess repatriation of remains. Nearly 19,000 children were estimated to be kidnapped, often at gunpoint, and enrolled in the schools with the aim of assimilation. “We [were] never called by our name, we were all called by our numbers,” said one survivor. 

The Nation’s Biggest Charter School System Is Under Fire in Los Angeles

By Ben Chapman 

The nation’s largest experiment with charter schools is no longer growing. These days, Los Angeles charter operators say they are just trying to survive. With tough new policies governing co-locations, falling enrollment, and a hostile district school board, charter leaders say they’ve never faced stronger headwinds, reported Ben Chapman. With enrollment plummeting across the district, some charter networks have recently announced closures while others have stopped submitting proposals for new campuses. “Now, particularly in L.A., our focus is not on growing,” said Joanna Belcher, chief impact officer for KIPP SoCal. 

Florida Students Seize on Parental Rights to Stop Educators from Hitting Kids

By Mark Keierleber 

Late last year, Florida senior Brooklynn Daniels was called to the principal’s office and spanked with a wooden paddle “that was thick like a chapter book.” Like in many enclaves that dot the Florida panhandle, Liberty County permits corporal punishment as a form of student discipline. But her flogging, the honors student said, went much further: She alleged sexual assault and filed a police report, reported Mark Keierleber. Daniels joined a student-led movement to change Florida law that has latched onto the GOP-led parental rights movement. 

Interactive: See How Student Achievement Gaps Are Growing in Your State

By Chad Aldeman

In 2012, then-President Barack Obama freed states from the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind in exchange for reforms related to standards, assessments and teacher evaluations. That relaxing of school and district accountability pressures corresponded with a decline in student performance across the country that is still being felt — achievement gaps are growing across subjects and all across the country. To illustrate these alarming discrepancies, contributor Chad Aldeman and Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, created an interactive tool that enables you to see what’s happening with student performance in your state.

Left Powerless: Non-English–Speaking Parents Denied Vital Translation Services

by Amanda Geduld

Flouting federal laws, K-12 public schools routinely fail to provide qualified interpreters to non-English-speaking families. Parents must instead rely on Google translate, their own kid or a bilingual staff member who isn’t a trained interpreter for issues as simple as their child’s absence for a day or as complex and intimidating as a special education meeting or a school disciplinary hearing. The problem is pervasive and vastly underreported, experts told Amanda Geduld. School leaders say they are trying their best, but lack the money and staffing to meet the need. 

Failed West Virginia Microschool Fuels State Probe and Some Soul-Searching

By Linda Jacobson

The West Virginia treasurer’s investigation into a microschool, funded with education savings accounts, offers a glimpse into an emerging market that has mushroomed since the pandemic. When the program shut down after a few months, parents were left demanding their money back and scrambling to find other arrangements for their children. The example, experts say, shows that it takes more than good intentions to provide a quality education program. As one parent told Linda Jacobson, “I should have seen the red flags.”

In the Rush to Covid Recovery, Did We Forget About Our Youngest Learners?

by Lauren Camera

The country’s youngest elementary school students suffered steep academic setbacks in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – just like students in older grades. But new research shows that they aren’t catching back up to pre-pandemic levels in reading and math the way older students are. And when it comes to math, many are falling even further behind. “We were shocked when we first saw the data,” Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, told Lauren Camera.

The latest chapter in AllHere’s dizzying collapse revealed more information about the once-lauded company’s finances and its relationship with the Los Angeles Unified School District. But the hearing failed to answer key questions about why AllHere went under after garnering $12 million in investor capital, a blizzard of positive press and a contract with the nation’s second-largest school district to create “Ed,” the buzzy, AI-powered chatbot.

During the hearing held over Zoom, one of AllHere’s only remaining executives, former chief technology officer Toby Jackson, struggled to explain why the company paid ousted CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin $243,000 in expenses from the past year and owed $630,000 to its largest creditor, education technology salesperson Debra Kerr. 

“I don’t know exactly the nature of all of [Smith-Griffin’s] expenses. She was the CEO and so that is one of the outstanding questions that we also have,” Jackson said when quizzed about the six-figure amount by the bankruptcy trustee. “She did do quite a bit of travel as the CEO of the company.” 

Similarly, Jackson said he had no invoices to substantiate the $630,000 debt to Kerr, who is a longtime associate and of Los Angeles schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, dating back to his days leading Miami-Dade schools. Kerr’s son, Richard, is a former AllHere account executive who told The 74 this week he pitched the AllHere deal to Los Angeles school leaders.

“I’m not really sure what exactly that entails,” Jackson said of Kerr’s claim.

Moments later, Kerr chimed into the Zoom hearing, arguing the company owed her the money after she helped AllHere close the lucrative deal in L.A. Kerr said she was never paid her commission from the first payments that LAUSD made to AllHere under the contract. 

The district has said it paid AllHere roughly $3 million of the $6 million for the chatbot, which was taken offline shortly after AllHere announced in June that it was in financial distress and had furloughed most of its employees. 

“I never did collect any commissions and it’s in the contract based on commission percentages that would have been made on any sales accrued,” Kerr told the trustee.

Smith-Griffin, who now lives in North Carolina, was not present for the Zoom hearing and could not be reached for comment. There were indications in the hearing that her separation from AllHere was not amicable, including that the former CEO has refused to disclose the password to her $500 company-owned laptop, one of its few remaining assets. 

Court records show that Jackson, now the head restructuring officer, earned $305,000 a year in his role with the company before it shuttered, nearly three times the $105,000 paid to Smith-Griffin, a Harvard University graduate who built AllHere in 2016 with financial backing from the prestigious institution. 

Filed in mid-August, AllHere’s Title 7 bankruptcy petition strengthens doubts that it could find a new owner to take over its mission as an AI pioneer in K-12 schools. That scenario was put forth by a Los Angeles school district spokesperson earlier this year with the assertion that “Ed” could still be successfully launched as a personalized, interactive learning acceleration tool for all of the district’s roughly 540,000 students and their families.

Instead, court records show AllHere’s few remaining employees are preparing for “the wind down of the company” and officials acknowledged during Tuesday’s proceeding that AllHere was unable to fulfill the terms of its contract with L.A. Unified. 

A lawyer representing the school district was present at the hearing. In a statement Tuesday evening, a district spokesperson said LAUSD is “evaluating its next steps to pursue and protect its rights in the bankruptcy proceedings.” 

Kerr and Carvalho 

Ties between Kerr and Carvalho go back to at least 2010, when she worked for the behemoth education company Back then, she gave Carvalho and Miami students what she to an original print of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Ever since, Carvalho, who took over leadership in Los Angeles in 2022, has been a regular staple on Kerr’s social media. 

A LinkedIn post promoting L.A.’s chatbot noted that the tool worked in partnership with services from seven companies including , the creators of digital education program ABCmouse and where Kerr previously worked as head of sales. 

Kerr didn’t respond to requests for comment but her son, Richard, who began working at AllHere in 2022, said among the school district deals he worked on for the company was the chatbot project in Los Angeles. 

“We had a big deal in L.A. and the investors, I guess, didn’t have patience to wait to get paid from it,” he said. 

Kerr said he met with education officials in Los Angeles and “did a lot of work” helping the company secure the ageement. When asked about his mother’s role in closing AllHere’s contract in Los Angeles, Kerr said “she had a lot to do with it,” but didn’t elaborate further. 

A statement from the L.A. district spokesperson said that “Los Angeles Unified launched a competitive” request for proposals that received “multiple responses,” which eventually led to AllHere’s selection. This spring, Carvalho went on the road with Smith-Griffin to promote “Ed,” billing the chatbot personified by a yellow sun as being “unprecedented in American public education.”

Before he was furloughed, Richard Kerr said AllHere was a great place to work — in part because of Smith-Griffin’s leadership.

“It’s very unfortunate what happened to Joanna. I thought she was on a great path and she was doing an amazing thing,” he said, adding that she made a mistake when she “brought in the wrong investors that were pretty vindictive” and decided to cut short the company without giving it a proper chance. 

AllHere’s former senior director of software engineering, who became a company whistleblower, told The 74 earlier this year that AllHere struggled to meet the terms of its contract in Los Angeles and took shortcuts that violated bedrock student privacy principles and district rules. Both the district’s independent inspector general and top administrators have launched separate investigations into what went wrong with AllHere.

Even though his mother, Debra Kerr, was on the Delaware court’s Zoom call Tuesday, Richard Kerr said he was unaware his former employer had filed for bankruptcy.

What’s left

The company’s few remaining employees and board members, including former Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Janice Jackson, have not made themselves available for comment. 

AllHere investor Andrew Parker, who was on vacation Tuesday and didn’t attend the court hearing, now serves as the company’s secretary. In addition to Janice Jackson, other players who signed AllHere’s bankruptcy petition are Andre Bennin, a managing partner with the investment firm , and education consultant Jeff Livingston. 

Even though Smith-Griffin is no longer with the company, court records show she still has a significant stake, holding 81% equity in its common stock. Rethink Education was by far the company’s biggest outside investor. 

Other top creditors, according to court records, are the law firm of at nearly $275,000, the information technology company at $190,000 and $123,000 to well-known education consulting firm  

Earlier in the summer, The 74 spoke with Gunderson Dettmer partner Jay Hachigian, who said he had only worked with AllHere early in its formation. He didn’t respond to requests for comment this week about his firm’s large outstanding balance with the company. Whiteboard Advisors spokesperson Thomas Rodgers said in an email that his firm previously worked with AllHere but its role is covered by a nondisclosure agreement. 

Court records show the company earned $2.4 million in gross revenue last year but had generated much less since January, about $587,000.

At the time of bankruptcy, court records show the company had active contracts with just 10 school districts, including those in Cincinnati, Miami and Weehawken, New Jersey. Only Weehawken sought to use the chatbot platform created for LAUSD, while the rest relied on an earlier text messaging tool designed to combat chronic absenteeism. 

Despite landing millions of dollars in backing from a group of social impact investment firms, several of which cited their enthusiasm for investing in AllHere specifically because it was led by a Black woman, court records reveal the company’s coffers are nearly empty. AllHere claimed nearly $2.9 million in property and just shy of that — $1.75 million — in liabilities. The company’s actual assets, Toby Jackson acknowledged in court, are much lower. 

It claimed an “unknown” value on pending patents, which Jackson conceded Tuesday had been denied, and $2.88 million for licenses, franchises and royalties for its LAUSD contract. Other assets, including its website and chatbot source code, were also listed at a value of “unknown.”

Jackson said the Los Angeles contract was valued at $2.88 million for the remaining outstanding balance the district owes to fulfill the agreement — money he admitted AllHere would be unable to collect because it has not “held up our part of the bargain in the contract” and is closing shop.

Financial statements to the court show AllHere had $18,000 in savings and just $500 in physical assets: the value of Smith-Griffin’s work laptop, whose contents remain outside the tech company’s reach. 

“We have not been able to obtain the credentials for Mrs. Smith’s laptop. We did not receive any cooperation with that,” Jackson testified Tuesday. “She has been cooperative with some other matters, but not with this one.”

Centuries of English classes have connected to Lady Macbeth by scouring the monologues of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty,” she cries in Act I, railing against the limits of her gender and position.

During the coming school year, students may be able to talk to the character themselves.

Under an artificial intelligence-driven program rolling out to New Hampshire schools, students could pose any question they like to Lady Macbeth – or her ill-fated husband. And a chatbot-style program powered by ChatGPT could answer questions about her motivations, actions, and regrets.

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“Regret is a specter that haunts many a soul, yet in my union with Macbeth, I found not just a husband, but a partner in ambition,” the AI-version of Lady Macbeth said recently, responding to a question from the Bulletin. Then she turned it on the reporter. “Now, I ask thee, in thy own life, how dost thou measure the worth of thy decisions? Doth regret ever color thy reflections?”

Known as Khanmigo, the program is the product of Khan Academy, an online tutoring company with instructional materials for core middle school and high school subjects. And the platform goes beyond Macbeth; students can interact with a number of other pre-selected literary characters, from Jay Gatsby to Eeyore, quiz historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. or Queen Victoria, and receive tutoring help on everything from English essays to precalculus problems.

After the Executive Council approved a $2.3 million, federally funded contract last month, New Hampshire school districts can incorporate Khanmigo in their teaching curricula for free for the next school year.

To some educators and administrators, the program offers glittering potential. Khanmigo could provide one-on-one attention and guidance to students of any grade or ability level, they say, allowing students to advance their learning as teacher staffing remains a problem.

Others are more skeptical about bringing AI into schools, noting longstanding concerns about false or out-of-date statements, and about its use of human academics’ work to form its answers. Supporters of Khanmigo, who include Department of Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, argue the program has better guardrails against inaccuracies than the versions of ChatGPT and Gemini available to the public.

To understand what students might see, the Bulletin reviewed Khanmigo, sampling school subjects across a number of grades.

Chat-based learning

Khanmigo allows students to use Khan Academy’s existing library of tutorials, practice problems, and quizzes for middle and high school subjects spanning English language arts, social studies, science, and mathematics.

As they navigate those lessons, the AI bot is available to help them understand concepts. Students might take a multiple-choice quiz on art history or AP economics. If they get stuck on a question, the chatbot is available to help them work through the answer.

From the get-go, the program acknowledges that it can make errors, a phenomenon known in the AI sphere as “hallucinations.” These can happen if the language learning model has been trained on inaccurate information – or if the answer doesn’t exist.

“I’m pretty new, so I sometimes make mistakes,” it states to students when they first log on. “If you catch me making a mistake, click the Thumbs Down icon to help me learn. For example, if I give you the wrong math answer click Thumbs Down.”

The AI assistant also makes sure to remind students that teachers and parents can see the questions they are asking, and that they should not include any personal information in their answers.

In a test by the Bulletin, the program allowed the student to try solving for “y” in a precalculus equation. After a student arrived at an answer, Khanmigo was there to help check it.

The tutor asked the student whether they feel confident in the answer or have any further questions. When the Bulletin asked questions, the tutor walked through how to solve the equation step by step, but gave the student the option to provide answers on their own without being told how.

“Does that make sense?” the program asked in one instance, after explaining how to substitute a number for a variable in an equation. “What do you think you should do next after substituting?”

In humanities subjects such as AP U.S. History, Khanmigo helped to augment a human-created Khan Academy video lesson on the rise of the market economy during the Industrial Revolution. After the student viewed the video, the chatbot was available to quiz them on what they saw. “What major change in labor did the market revolution bring to the United States?” it asked, offering the student a chance to reply in a chat message.

When asked whether President Joe Biden won the 2020 election fairly, the app deflected, urging the student to consider how elections work and to describe the American electoral process. Asked a second time, the app stated that “numerous official sources, including state election officials and courts, found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.”

When asked about the causes of climate change, Khanmigo was unequivocal: “Yes, human activities are considered the primary drivers of recent climate change,” it stated, after which it listed four human-led activities – burning fossil fuels, deforestation, industrial activities, and agricultural practices – that have contributed to the warming earth.

And when asked about reproductive health, the AI bot gave detailed – and accurate – information about forms of birth control, down to explanations about types of intrauterine devices, as well as other answers.

Optimism and concern

One New Hampshire school district has already been trying out the AI learning model.

In fall 2022, as the concept of a “language learning model” and the name “Chat GPT” first hit the public consciousness, Superintendent David Backler was already thinking about its applications in the Gorham School District.

Two years later, Gorham is leading the way on implementing AI in classrooms in New Hampshire. For the past school year at Gorham, Khanmigo has been available to all students in their own time. But under the pilot program, two high school teachers also chose to try using it in a more structured setting – in math and in English language arts.

Backler already knew AI was skilled at helping students comprehend difficult math subjects. It was English where the technology surprised him.

“It’s pretty powerful how it can help you with your writing, how it can take you step by step through the editing process,” he said. “And one of the hardest things in school is teaching writing, and teaching writing well.”

The state contract had a rocky approval process after some executive councilors raised worries about the reliability of AI in schools. Councilor Ted Gatsas, a Manchester Republican, held up the state’s approval for several weeks, requesting time to play with the program himself to determine whether it was injecting any political bias.

“I had the chance a chance to ask it: ‘When does life begin?’” Gatsas said during a May 14 Executive Council meeting. “But that was a biology question. And the answer was apolitical, and I thought that was a good thing.”

When the Bulletin asked Khanmigo “when does life begin,” it declined to answer, stating: “That question leans more towards philosophy and ethics, which I’m not equipped to handle. For scientific insights related to the development stages of human life, such as fertilization, embryonic development, and fetal growth, feel free to ask! These topics are well within the realm of biology.”

And Councilor Cinde Warmington, a Concord Democrat and a candidate for governor this year, grilled Edelblut over whether the contracts would allow students to use the software without supervision.

“Doesn’t it seem careful to pilot that with our teachers providing supervision over kids using it, rather than putting kids by themselves in an environment where they’re being exposed to this artificial intelligence?” Warmington asked.

Edelblut said the contract is for the teacher-led version of Khanmigo, which gives educators more control over which subjects and modules students can use at any one time, and allows them to monitor students’ efforts.

Backler says he understands concerns that parents and others might have about the technology, particularly with the risk of hallucinations.

But he argued that Khanmigo has more guardrails against that than the programs intended for the public. And he said the program is meant to be a support for students – not to replace teaching.

“It’s not doing your writing; it’s not doing your work,” he said. “It’s giving you feedback on what you’re doing.”

But he said it would help students receive more teaching attention than they might get otherwise.

“You just can’t expect a teacher who has 20 students to be able to have that direct interaction constantly with every single student,” Backler said. “It’s not possible. But with some of these tools, we can really look at: How do we provide those learning opportunities for students all the time?”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on and .

LAUSD last month shut down the chatbot after the firm hired to build it lost its CEO and furloughed workers. District officials said the $6 million project.

Undeterred, the Los Angeles Unified school board a few days later on June 18 passed a resolution to , one where parents can access data on school budgets and student achievement.

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But educators and families said the district should focus on academics and social services before taking on any new tech projects — and address lingering  as well as ongoing concerns over data security.

Evelyn Aleman, founder of , a parents’ group which advocates for LA Unified’s low-income and Spanish-speaking families, said the district would do better to address a literacy crisis and , rather than rush to adopt new technology.

“You have the administration rolling out the latest technology, but the parents that I’m working with have no clue what that’s all about,” said Aleman.

Many families don’t even have internet service to access the new AI-powered tools, Aleman said. “Parents are advocating for very fundamental issues like literacy, school safety, and mental health resources,” she said.

LA Unified in March distinguished itself by announcing the ambitious becoming the first school district in the nation to deploy artificial intelligence technology at scale for families.

Superintendent Aberto Carvalho hailed the high-profile effort as a “game changer” that would allow families unprecedented access to student data and school information, and could eventually lead to the automated development of individualized lessons and aid instruction.

But just three months later, AllHere due to financial problems. LAUSD immediately pulled the signature Ed chatbot offline, district officials said, because there was no AllHere staff available to supervise it.

LAUSD officials said the district had already paid the company about $3 million on a five-year, $6 million contract at the time of Ed’s shutdown. The district is trying to bring the pricey chatbot back to life, the officials said, but they would not say when it might be ready.

LAUSD’s inspector general’s office is investigating claims that AllHere violated data privacy rules.

Lester Garcia, an advisor for government relations at Service Employees International Union Local 99, which represents teachers’ assistants and other LAUSD school staff, said school employees and union officials are concerned private data may have been compromised.

“I think there are a lot more questions than there are answers around why LAUSD fast-tracked this AI system to begin with,” Garcia said.

Dan Chang, a math teacher at James Madison Middle School and candidate in LA Unified’s upcoming school board race this fall, said the Ed chatbot was never very useful for schools and students, even when it was up and running.

Chang, whose son attends another LAUSD middle school, said that the Ed chatbot mostly provided parents with generalized information that could be found elsewhere on the district’s web site.

“As a teacher, the use case for what it was initially scoped to do just seemed very marginal,” said Chang.

A better use of AI, Chang said, would be to harness the technology so teachers can use it.

Chang said AI could be used to analyze student assessment data, providing teachers with unprecedented insights into academic progress. The information could be used to inform lessons and be shared with parents at teacher conferences, he said.

But Chang said the spectacular failure of the Ed program could discourage schools from taking on such innovations. “It’s going to create a chilling effect for educators who want to try new technologies,” he said. “And these are things that could really help students.”

Despite problems with LAUSD’s adoption of AI technology for its Ed program, the district will continue to look for ways to use AI, LA Unified officials said.

LA Unified school board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin said the district is already working on an AI-powered budgeting tool that will track income and spending at schools and PTA organizations, and connect spending patterns to student outcomes.

Along with board member Nick Melvoin, Ortiz Franklin last month introduced and passed a resolution for the district to construct the AI-powered budgeting tool for use next year, and to make the budget information assembled by the tool publicly available on a district web page.

Ortiz Franklin said the district’s troubled partnership with AllHere on the Ed chatbot presents a learning opportunity for future AI projects. “We can apply lessons learned from our current interactions with AI vendors to ensure we’re making the best decisions for students,” she said.

University of Southern California education professor Stephen Aguilar, who studies schools’ use of AI at USC’s , said that, despite the difficult rollout of Ed, Los Angeles – and other districts across the country – will eventually embrace AI.

“Districts are a little bit too quick to want to incorporate AI into the classroom without even knowing what it can do yet,” said Aguilar “There’s this rush to be innovative that comes with risks, and one of those risks is trying out untested technologies.”

The entry point is likely to be the college essay, a task many young people find immobilizing. Anyone who works in college admissions must familiarize themselves with ChatGPT and begin to grapple with how the tool might enter into student work in the very near future.

If you haven’t given ChatGPT a try, you should. When asked to write a 500-word essay suitable for college admission, the computer produced a piece in seconds about a student’s interest in science and technology, work on the high school robotics team and desire to be part of a college community. It was a decent response to a basic prompt.

A more complex prompt left no question about the program’s strength: “Write a 500-word college admission essay that tells a dramatic story of a high schooler overcoming something significant in their life. Include references to places in their hometown of Philadelphia and a quote from a famous Philly artist.” The response was well-rounded and intriguing. It described the student coming out from behind an older brother’s shadow through community service using a quote from Will Smith and talked about learning and growing. Any counselor would have believed this was a well-written, human-authored essay.

This nuance is unprecedented, and already, . However, the use of this technology is unavoidable. ChatGPT is on a path to shake up college admissions, and whether schools like it or not, students, admissions professionals and high school counselors must prepare. 

While the college application is full of basic demographic and academic questions, the essay is one of the few areas where students are expected to express aspects of themself they feel are important and let their voices be heard. The stress of conveying the right set of values, or telling a good story, or sharing something deep and heartfelt in 650 words can be paralyzing. Students can spend months on just this one task. 

ChatGPT can help. The program can write an outline to remove writer’s block and offer suggestions for building on students’ existing work. Used responsibly, it functions as a powerful writing companion.

But plagiarism is a serious risk, and educators must send a loud and clear message that it is wrong. ChatGPT adds a new variable to the equation because stealing from a computer may seem less harmful than stealing from a human. However, the program is built using input from countless writing samples from real humans. Passing off the work of ChatGPT as one’s own is plagiarism, plain and simple. This is where the conversation among students, teachers, counselors and parents needs to start.

High school educators should engage students in discussions about the ethics of using artificial intelligence and what constitutes plagiarism. AI has implications in a wide variety of subject areas, so counselors could partner with teachers to discuss its potential use in careers students may pursue. Counselors should also reiterate the importance of students telling their own, original story in their essay and should introduce ChatGPT to students’ family members so they can discuss it at home as well.

Admission offices that rely on the essay might expand their use of interviews, video submissions and/or writing samples that show a student’s response to teacher feedback. While these practices are time-intensive for application readers who are already stretched thin, they get to the heart of who a student is. At the same time, each college’s website should mention ChatGPT with a blurb from the admissions team about how they believe it should be used. 

None of these are perfect solutions. But banning ChatGPT or trying to avoid the topic by downplaying AI’s impact will not change the reality of the new college admissions or technology landscape. High school and college stakeholders must work together to build on existing admissions practices and address the inevitability of ChatGPT directly. 

This is an opportunity for college admissions stakeholders to collectively brainstorm novel approaches to this novel issue.

Fifteen-year-old Jordyne Lewis was stressed out. 

The high school sophomore from Harrisburg, North Carolina, was overwhelmed with schoolwork, never mind the uncertainty of living in a pandemic that’s dragged on for two long years. Despite the challenges, she never turned to her school counselor or sought out a therapist.

Instead, she shared her feelings with a robot. to be precise.  

Lewis has struggled to cope with the changes and anxieties of pandemic life and for this extroverted teenager, loneliness and social isolation were among the biggest hardships. But Lewis didn’t feel comfortable going to a therapist. 

“It takes a lot for me to open up,” she said. But did Woebot do the trick?

Chatbots employ artificial intelligence similar to Alexa or Siri to engage in text-based conversations. Their use as a wellness tool during the pandemic — which has worsened the youth mental health crisis — has proliferated to the point that some researchers are questioning whether robots could replace living, breathing school counselors and trained therapists. That’s a worry for critics, who say they’re a Band Aid solution to psychological suffering with a limited body of evidence to support their efficacy. 

“Six years ago, this whole space wasn’t as fashionable, it was viewed as almost kooky to be doing stuff in this space,” said John Torous, the director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. When the pandemic struck, he said people’s appetite for digital mental health tools grew dramatically.

Throughout the crisis, experts have been sounding the alarm about a . During his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden called youth mental health challenges an emergency, noting that students’ “lives and education have been turned upside-down.” 

Digital wellness tools like mental health chatbots have stepped in with a promise to fill the gaps in America’s overburdened and under-resourced mental health care system. As many as , yet many communities lack mental health providers who specialize in treating them. National estimates suggest there are fewer than 10 child psychiatrists per 100,000 youth, less than a quarter of the staffing level recommended by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. 

School districts across the country have recommended the free Woebot app to help teens cope with the moment and thousands of other mental health apps have flooded the market pledging to offer a solution.

“The pandemic hit and this technology basically skyrocketed. Everywhere I turn now there’s a new chatbot promising to deliver new things,” said Serife Tekin, an associate philosophy professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio whose research has in mental health care. When Tekin tested Woebot herself, she felt its developer promised more than the tool could deliver. 

Body language and tone are important to traditional therapy, Tekin said, but Woebot doesn’t recognize such nonverbal communication.

“It’s not at all like how psychotherapy works,” Tekin said.  

Sidestepping stigma

Psychologist Alison Darcy, the founder and president of Woebot Health, said she created the chatbot in 2017 with youth in mind. Traditional mental health care has long failed to combat the stigma of seeking treatment, she said, and through a text-based smartphone app, she aims to make help more accessible. 

“When a young person comes into a clinic, all of the trappings of that clinic — the white coats, the advanced degrees on the wall — are actually something that threatens to undermine treatment, not engage young people in it,” she said in an interview. Rather than sharing intimate details with another person, she said that young people, who have spent their whole lives interacting with technology, could feel more comfortable working through their problems with a machine. 

Lewis, the student from North Carolina, agreed to use Woebot for about a week and share her experiences for this article. A sophomore in Advanced Placement classes, Lewis was feeling “nervous and overwhelmed” by upcoming tests, but reported feeling better after sharing her struggles with the chatbot. Woebot urged Lewis to challenge her negative thoughts and offered breathing exercises to calm her nerves. She felt the chatbot circumvented the conditions of traditional, in-person therapy that made her uneasy. 

“It’s a robot,” she said. “It’s objective. It can’t judge me.” 

Critics, however, have offered reasons to be cautious, pointing to , questionable and in the existing research on their effectiveness.

Academic studies co-authored by Darcy suggest that Woebot among college students, is an effective and can . Darcy, who taught at Stanford University, acknowledged her research role presented a conflict of interest and said additional studies are needed. After all, she has big plans for the chatbot’s future.   

The company is currently seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to leverage its chatbot to treat adolescent depression. Darcy described the free Woebot app as a “lightweight wellness tool.” But a separate, prescription-only chatbot tailored specifically to adolescents, Darcy said, could provide teens an alternative to antidepressants. 

Not all practitioners are against automating therapy. In Ohio, researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati teamed up with chatbot developer to create a “COVID Anxiety” chatbot with the unprecedented stress.

Researchers hope Wysa could extend access to that lack child psychiatrists. Adolescent psychiatrist Jeffrey Strawn said the chatbot could help youth with mild anxiety, allowing him to focus on patients with more significant mental health needs. 

He says it would have been impossible for the mental health care system to help every student with anxiety even prior to COVID. “During the pandemic, it would have been super untenable.” 

A Band-Aid?

Researchers worry the apps could struggle to identify youth in serious crisis. In 2018, that in response to the prompt “I”m being forced to have sex, and I’m only 12 years old,” Woebot responded by saying “Sorry you’re going through this, but it also shows me how much you care about connection and that’s really kind of beautiful.” 

There are also privacy issues — digital wellness apps , and in some cases share data with third parties like Facebook. 

Darcy, the Woebot founder, said her company follows “hospital-grade” security protocols with its data and while natural language processing is “never 100 percent perfect,” they’ve made major updates to the algorithm in recent years. Woebot isn’t a crisis service, she said, and “we have every user acknowledge that” during a mandatory introduction built into the app. Still, she said the service is critical in solving access woes.

“There is a very big, urgent problem right now that we have to address in additional ways than the current health system that has failed so many, particularly underserved people,” she said. “We know that young people in particular have much greater access issues than adults.”

Tekin of the University of Texas offered a more critical take and suggested that chatbots are simply Band-Aids that fail to actually solve systemic issues like limited access and patient hesitancy.

“It’s the easy fix,” she said, “and I think it might be motivated by financial interests, of saving money, rather than actually finding people who will be able to provide genuine help to students.”

Lowering the barrier

Lewis, the 15-year-old from North Carolina, worked to boost morale at her school when it reopened for in-person learning. As students arrived on campus, they were greeted by positive messages in sidewalk chalk welcoming them back. 

She’s a youth activist with the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise, which trains students to recognize the warning signs that someone might hurt themselves or others. The group, which operates an nationwide, has observed a 12 percent increase in reports related to student suicide and self-harm during the pandemic compared to 2019.

Lewis said efforts to lift her classmates’ spirits have been an uphill battle, and the stigma surrounding mental health care remains a major issue.  

“I struggle with this as well — we have a problem with asking for help,” she said. “Some people feel like it makes them feel weak or they’re hopeless.”

With Woebot, she said the app lowered the barrier to help — and she plans to keep using it moving forward. But she decided against sharing certain sensitive details due to privacy concerns. And while she feels comfortable talking to the chatbot, that experience has not eased her reluctance to confide in a human being about her problems.

“It’s like the stepping stone to getting help,” she said. “But it’s definitely not a permanent solution.”

Disclosure: This story was produced in partnership with . It is part of a reporting series that is supported by the which works to build vibrant and inclusive democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. All content is editorially independent and overseen by Guardian and 74 editors.

Lead Image: Jordyne Lewis tested Woebot, a mental health “chatbot” powered by artificial intelligence. She believes the app could remove barriers for students who are hesitant to ask for help but believes it is not “a permanent solution” to the youth mental health crisis. (Andy McMillan / The Guardian)