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 ����Ӱ�� 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. 

����Ӱ�� 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. 

����Ӱ�� 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 ����Ӱ�� 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 ����Ӱ��. “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 ����Ӱ�� in September 2024 he pitched AllHere to LAUSD school leaders.

Among ����Ӱ��’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 ����Ӱ�� 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 ����Ӱ�� 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.

����Ӱ�� 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 ����Ӱ�� 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 ����Ӱ�� 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

After a four-hour closed session on Thursday, the Los Angeles Unified School District board recessed without announcing a decision on whether Superintendent Alberto Carvalho may be placed on leave a day after the FBI raided his residence and the district’s downtown Los Angeles headquarters.

The session will continue on Friday at 12:30 p.m.

Carvalho’s employment was the single item addressed during the closed-door special board meeting. Only a few members of the community spoke during public comment, and the room remained largely empty and quiet.

Board members were not available for interviews, and Carvalho wasn’t seen.

“The District continues normal operations across all schools and offices. We are grateful to our dedicated employees, families, and students for their steady focus and commitment to our school communities,” the district board wrote in a  released shortly after Thursday’s closed session ended.

The federal investigation involves financial matters related to Carvalho himself, rather than the district, the Los Angeles Times reported.

If the board decides to place Carvalho on leave, it remains unclear who the board might appoint as interim superintendent.

Several districts have picked associate superintendents to serve as interim after placing their superintendents on leave amid active investigations.

As of 8 p.m. Thursday, Carvalho has not made any public comment. Further information on Wednesday’s raids has not been released.

“We expect LAUSD to provide full transparency and clear communication to educators, school staff, and the public,” United Teachers Los Angeles, the district teachers union, said in a statement to EdSource.

“UTLA educators and our school communities have long raised concerns about LAUSD rapidly increasing spending on education tech and outside contractors, while investment in classrooms and educators has declined.”

A critical time for the district

LAUSD’s leadership shakeup comes at a critical time, as the district navigates budget challenges, potential strikes and the impacts of federal actions.

“We feel that this moment really calls for clear, strong leadership,” said Nicolle Fefferman, a longtime LAUSD educator and cofounder of the Facebook advocacy group Parents Supporting Teachers. “And we want our elected school board members to make certain that that is what they are prioritizing.”

Fall out with AllHere

Media reports so far have connected Wednesday’s raids with the company AllHere Education, which LAUSD entered into a $6.2 million professional services contract on July 1, 2023. Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where Carvalho previously served as superintendent, had also  with the company in the fall of 2022.

Los Angeles Unified initiated the  of its chatbot Ed, which was developed by AllHere, in March 2024. It was  to serve as a “personal assistant” for students — capable of reminding them about assignments and exams, and informing them about cafeteria menus and bus schedules.

But three months later, the company’s founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin left the company. Most employees were furloughed, and Smith-Griffin was arrested in November 2024 and charged with securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

In July 2024, Carvalho announced a  to conduct a review of what went wrong with the rollout. But its progress and outcomes don’t appear to have been publicly disclosed.

The home searched by the FBI in Southwest Ranches, Florida, in Broward County, is reportedly the residence of Debra Kerr, who is listed as an AllHere contractor in records related to the company’s bankruptcy case and who has ties with Carvalho from his time as superintendent in Florida. Her son, Richard Kerr, is a former employee of the now-defunct AI company who told ����Ӱ�� in 2024 that he pitched LAUSD on AllHere.

Parents Supporting Teachers is calling for the district to place Carvalho on administrative leave.

“It’s always been this lingering worry and this example of a theme of the lack of transparency and accountability that we recognize in the district,” Fefferman said.

A storied past

In January 2025, the same parent group called for Carvalho’s removal following a “chaotic and dangerous scramble for families and staff” in the wake of the Palisades Fire.

Carvalho’s contract was  in October, maintaining a salary of $440,000.

After serving as superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools for 14 years, Carvalho took over as LAUSD’s leader in 2022. His start at the district began as students returned to physical classrooms from virtual learning due to Covid-19. As a result of the pandemic, he has focused on reducing chronic absenteeism and curbing pandemic learning losses.

But despite LAUSD’s  in standardized test scores and efforts to improve student attendance, his time as the district’s leader has been riddled with controversies — from alleged  of arts funding to a  of cyberattacks and data breaches.

More recently, he has also received praise and backlash for  the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. And last month, the district was  for allegedly discriminating against white students, which the U.S. Department of Justice recently sought to join.

“It is our hope that the investigation resolves quickly so that the school district can focus on its core mission of educating our children. While we understand the importance of full cooperation with any investigation, we also cannot overlook or undermine the work that Superintendent Carvalho has led to support our students, educators, and the district as a whole,” said Evelyn Aleman, the organizer of the parent group Our Voice/Nuestra Voz.

“Education is the foundation that builds stability and lifts families out of poverty— we must stay focused on that mission and our students’ success.”

The FBI raided the office and home of Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on Wednesday morning, a move that shocked the Los Angeles and state education communities.

U.S. Justice Department officials said judicially approved search warrants were executed at the district headquarters in downtown Los Angeles and Carvalho’s San Pedro residence, according to published reports. A residence in Southwest Ranches, Florida, was also searched.

Federal officials said nothing Wednesday about a possible investigation. Carvalho was the superintendent of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida for 14 years before taking the job in Los Angeles in 2022.

Carvalho has not made any public statements as of 6 p.m. Wednesday.

In a , Los Angeles Unified officials said, “We have been informed of law enforcement activity at Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters and at the home of the Superintendent. The District is cooperating with the investigation and we do not have further information at this time.”

A source familiar with the school district, who spoke to EdSource on the condition of anonymity, said the raids involved a failed artificial intelligence company, AllHere, that the district contracted with for a chatbot called Ed meant to aid students.

 have also reported that the raids and possible investigation centered on the district’s relationship with AllHere.

LAUSD entered into a $6.2 million professional services contract with AllHere to begin on July 1, 2023, for an initial two-year term. The contract had three one-year renewal options, according to district documents. District investigators began a probe a year later after learning the chatbot put students’ personal information at risk, ����Ӱ�� reported at the time.

The company has also contracted with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, but Carvalho has denied involvement in that contract, the Los Angeles Times reported.

LAUSD began its rollout of Ed, the chatbot, in March 2024, with initial implementation set to begin with  that the district had identified as being its lowest-performing. District board members, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass were in attendance at the inauguration of Ed, along with partners from various universities and businesses.

Three months later, Joanna Smith-Griffin, AllHere’s founder and CEO, left the company, and most employees were furloughed. In Nov. 2024, Smith-Griffin was  in North Carolina and  in New York with securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Her case remains open.

Carvalho was hailed as a rising leader ushering in a new era for Los Angeles Unified when he took over the district. He was reappointed last year and is paid more than $440,000 in salary, with his contract set to expire in 2030.

Carvalho “is the leading urban superintendent in the nation,” Dean Pedro A. Noguera of USC’s Rossier School of Education said on Wednesday. “He is a proven leader. If Carvalho’s career is over, “the timing for the district is terrible” as it goes through layoffs and a fiscal crisis, Noguera said.

Los Angeles Unified and Carvalho have been repeatedly in the crosshairs of the federal administration during Trump’s second term.

The U.S. Department of Justice recently sought to join  filed by the 1776 Project Foundation, which sued the district in January, claiming discrimination against its white students.

 singles out LAUSD’s Predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian, or other Non-Anglo program, which was established to curtail the effects of school segregation.

“Students attending non-PHBAO schools are denied and directly blocked from these benefits because of the racial composition of their school attendance zone, which detrimentally impacts the quality of the educational experience and directly damages these students,” the lawsuit alleges.

Carvalho has also maintained outspoken support of immigrant students and families, including those who are undocumented. He has  that he migrated from Portugal to the United States as an undocumented teenager. LAUSD passed a resolution in the 2016-17 school year declaring itself a sanctuary district, and the board reaffirmed that status in a resolution passed late 2024.

EdSource reporter Emma Gallegos and data journalist Daniel J. Willis contributed to this report.

Inhale. Exhale. 

If you’re reading this, that means you’ve made it through 2024. (Congrats!) But don’t get too comfortable, because in 2025, the student safety and well-being beat is in for some major changes.

With Donald Trump’s second inauguration just weeks away, I figured I’d take a moment to highlight the defining developments in the School (in)Security universe over the last year — and how the landscape could evolve over the next 365 days.

1. The first-of-its-kind sentencing of a school shooter’s parents

Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first in U.S. history to be sentenced on criminal charges stemming from a mass school shooting perpetuated by their child. Each was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter. 

• Prosecutors accused the Crumbleys of ignoring warning signs that their son had a desire for violence when they gave him the gun he used to kill four classmates and injure seven others. | 
• In Georgia, the father of a 14-year-old accused of carrying out a mass shooting that left four dead was arrested on murder charges. Authorities alleged the father “knowingly allowed” the teenager to possess the gun that was used to carry out the attack. 
• Parents not liable in Santa Fe: The parents of a former student accused of killing 10 people at his Texas high school in 2018 were sued for negligence, but a jury found them not responsible. |  
• The big picture: I wrote a deep dive into the history of holding parents accountable for their kids’ bad behavior — and why the Crumbley case was unprecedented. | 

2. An Apology from Big Tech — and a failed bid for new online safety rules

Amid heightened concerns over social media’s impact on youth mental health, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg did something this year that perhaps nobody saw coming: He apologized. | 

• The apology to parents who say their kids suffered, or died, because of their social media use came during a heated Senate hearing where lawmakers accused Big Tech of failing to prevent youth suicides and child sexual exploitation. It was part of a larger panic over teens’ TikTok addictions. | 
• Despite the outcry, a federal effort to implement new online safety rules for children has faltered again. And again. And again. | , , 

3. Did somebody say TikTok?

The Supreme Court is set to hear 11th-hour arguments about whether the government’s effort to ban the Chinese social media app violates the First Amendment. Justices will hear the case Jan. 10, nine days before the prohibition is set to go into effect. | 

• Claiming it posed a surveillance threat from the Chinese government, President Joe Biden signed a law in April to ban the enormously popular video-streaming app in the U.S. unless parent company ByteDance relinquished ownership. | 

4. Scrutiny of AI’s role in student well-being

Try going 10 seconds without reading something about artificial intelligence. I dare you. As emerging AI tools promise — or threaten — to disrupt K-12 education as we know it, they’ve also been oversold, misused and unevenly supervised. 

• The Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with Evolv Technology, the maker of an AI-powered security screening system used in some 800 schools, after accusing the company of making false claims about its ability to detect weapons and keep kids safe. | 
• Joanna Smith-Griffin, the founder and former CEO of the once-celebrated education technology company AllHere, was indicted on charges she defrauded investors of nearly $10 million as the maker of AI chatbots for schools fell into bankruptcy. | 
  • Why you should care: AllHere had only a few customers, court records reveal, before it was hired to build a buzzy, $6 million chatbot for the Los Angeles school district. A former-employee-turned-whistleblower told me the overwhelmed startup took shortcuts that put students’ privacy at risk. | 
• In a first-of-its-kind criminal case, two teenage boys were arrested in Florida and accused of creating AI-generated nude images of middle school classmates without their consent. | 
• ‘Distrust, detection & discipline’: As students increasingly turned to generative AI like ChatGPT for help with assignments, educators said they lacked clear instructions on how to thwart tech-assisted cheating. | 

5. School-based police officers under fire

The Department of Justice released a scathing report on the police response to the 2022 school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. “Cascading failures” defined a slow police response, the report stated, and officers acted with “no urgency” to confront the gunman. | 

• A harrowing investigation found that predatory school resource officers have routinely used their position and authority to meet and groom students. | 
• Impact, baby! In response to the article, the department issued guidance urging that school police be trained on setting appropriate boundaries with children. | 

6. A small school cybersecurity grant program attracted massive interest

As schools and libraries nationwide fell victim to a surge of cyberattacks, the Federal Communications Commission rolled out a $200 million pilot program in a bid to stop the hackers. Illuminating the scale of the problem, demand far exceeded the available federal funds: The commission received more than 2,700 applications for some $3.7 billion in requests. | 

7. The Trump effect comes back into focus

• After Trump faced backlash for his family separation immigration policy in his first term, the president-elect has floated the idea of deporting all members of mixed-status families — a policy with the potential to affect millions of households with at least one U.S.-born child. |   
• The incoming president has pledged to impose wide-ranging restrictions on transgender students and roll back Biden-era civil rights protections. | 

Emotional Support

Editor Bev Weintraub’s party animal Marz rang in the new year with something a little stronger than catnip.

Federal prosecutors have of the once-celebrated education technology company AllHere, accusing her of defrauding investors of nearly $10 million as the startup that made AI chatbots for schools fell into bankruptcy.

Joanna Smith-Griffin, a Forbes “30 Under 30” recipient and Harvard graduate, was arrested at her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, Tuesday on allegations of securities and wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. 

The 33-year-old former educator’s arrest is the latest chapter in the downfall of “Ed,” a buzzy, $6 million AI chatbot that Smith-Griffin’s company was tapped to build for the Los Angeles Unified School District before the project was halted and the company shuttered. L.A. schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and Smith-Griffin appeared together at several events earlier this year to promote the chatbot, an ed tech innovation Carvalho said was “unprecedented in American public education.”

The indictment by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed in Manhattan federal court accuses Smith-Griffin of defrauding investors and using company funds for a down payment on her North Carolina house and to pay for . 

Smith-Griffin “orchestrated a deliberate and calculated scheme to deceive investors” in the company she founded through a Harvard University startup incubator in 2016 to provide a tech-driven solution to student absences. She inflated “the company’s financials to secure millions of dollars under false pretenses,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a media release. “The law does not turn a blind eye to those who allegedly distort financial realities for personal gain.” 

Smith-Griffin is being represented by Eric Brignac, an assistant public defender with the Federal Public Defender’s Office. Brignac, who is based out of Raleigh, did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement to ����Ӱ��, an L.A. schools spokesperson portrayed the district, by far AllHere’s biggest customer, as one of many taken in by Smith-Griffin. Previously, the school district and its inspector general’s office opened separate inquiries into the school system’s work with AllHere.

“The indictment and the allegations represent, if true, a disturbing and disappointing house of cards that deceived and victimized many across the country,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “We will continue to assert and protect our rights.”

Between 2017 and June 2024, prosecutors allege, Smith-Griffin used her control over AllHere’s bank accounts to transfer at least $600,000 in company funds to her personal account, generally using PayPal and Zelle to make repeat wire transfers under $10,000. 

Federal prosecutors said the fraud scheme began as early as November 2020, when Smith-Griffin allegedly began to misrepresent to her investors the company’s revenue, customer base and cash on hand. In the spring of 2021, she told investors AllHere had generated some $3.7 million in revenue in the previous year, including through contracts with the New York City and Atlanta school districts. In reality, federal prosecutors allege, the company had only generated $11,000 — and contracts with the two major urban school systems didn’t exist. 

Key AllHere funders include the venture firms Rethink Education, Spero Ventures and Potencia Ventures. Their representatives  didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

When investors and an outside accountant accidentally discovered the discrepancies between the company’s actual financials and its claim to backers, Smith-Griffin masqueraded as a financial consultant to perpetuate the scheme, prosecutors allege. She was accused of creating a fake email address for the phony outside consultant, which she used to send fraudulent documents to her largest investor. 

Though one of the firm’s biggest investors “recruited high profile” education leaders to the company’s board of directors, including former Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson, the indictment notes that Smith-Griffin “exercised exclusive control” over AllHere’s communications with investors, board members, customers and outside vendors.

The indictment adds further uncertainty around the AI chatbot the company created for and launched with such fanfare earlier this year with Los Angeles schools, the country’s second-largest district.

As K-12 school systems nationwide rush to inject artificial intelligence into their teaching practices, the L.A. chatbot has of what could go wrong. On Tuesday, the U.S. Education Department on ways schools can harness AI while ensuring they don’t have a discriminatory impact on vulnerable and underserved students. 

In April, Smith-Griffin and Carvalho unveiled the chatbot together at the influential ASU+GSV ed tech conference in San Diego. Carvalho said Ed was the nation’s first AI-enabled “personal assistant” and would drive academic improvement while providing Los Angeles’s roughly 540,00 students and their families with a trove of helpful information upon request.

Signs of turmoil emerged in June, when ����Ӱ�� first reported that Smith-Griffin was out of a job as AllHere furloughed a majority of its staff due to its “current financial position.” A statement from the L.A. district said the company had been put up for sale. 

The company then filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in August. At a bankruptcy hearing in September, Toby Jackson, one of AllHere’s only remaining employees and its former chief technology officer, struggled to explain why the company had paid Smith-Griffin $243,000 in expenses in the past year alone. 

“That is one of the outstanding questions that we also have,” said Jackson, who said that Smith-Griffin “did do quite a bit of travel as the CEO of the company.”  

Jackson did not respond to a request for comment.

����Ӱ�� first reported the possible criminal charges in early October, when Delaware court documents related to AllHere’s bankruptcy case revealed a grand jury subpoena by federal prosecutors. Even before the company laid off employees and announced its financial woes, a former employee-turned-whistleblower told ����Ӱ�� that AllHere had struggled to produce a “proper product” for the L.A. district and took shortcuts that ran afoul of school district policies and bedrock student data privacy principles. 

By the time AllHere went bankrupt earlier this year, it never had more than 31 customers total — less than a third the number Smith-Griffin told investors she had by early 2021. By the time the company collapsed this year, only three of AllHere’s customers generated more than $100,000 in revenue. 

In total, the felony charges carry a 42-year prison sentence for Smith-Griffin, who began her  career working in a Boston charter school as a teacher and family engagement director.

“Her alleged actions impacted the potential for improved learning environments across major school districts by selfishly prioritizing personal expenses,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge James Dennehy said in the release. “The FBI will ensure that any individual exploiting the promise of education opportunities for our city’s children will be taught a lesson.” 

The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York served the grand jury subpoena in early September to the court-appointed trustee managing the liquidation of AllHere’s assets to pay off its creditors, according to records filed with a federal court in Delaware. A federal grand jury subpoena indicates that AllHere or someone associated with the company is the target of a federal criminal investigation by the Department of Justice.  

Attorney Stephanie Wickouski, a partner at the New York-based firm Locke Lord, told ����Ӱ�� the subpoena means that federal prosecutors “have a reason to commence a criminal investigation and that’s certainly an exceptional circumstance.” 

“There are a fair amount of investigations that involve bankruptcy cases and a lot of them are for conduct that occurred prior to the bankruptcy,” said Wickouski, the author ofon bankruptcy fraud and white-collar crime. 

In an order approved on Monday, the bankruptcy trustee agreed to provide documents to federal prosecutors on the condition that certain sensitive information remain confidential “in the best interests of” the company’s value. Federal prosecutors can use the records “as needed or as required by law in connection with its investigation and/or any resulting criminal proceeding,” the order notes.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment and the target of the federal inquiry remains unclear — as do any allegations of criminal wrongdoing. But Wickouski said the court-appointed trustee is in the best position to provide information about AllHere’s assets, business dealings and financial transactions. The “most likely scenario,” she said, is that “the company and its principals” are the target of the investigation.

On the same day as a Sept. 11 bankruptcy hearing, trustee George Miller said he had “discovered assets” at AllHere and changed its Chapter 7 bankruptcy case from one without any monetary value to one where creditors could recoup some of the money they’re owed. The court gave AllHere creditors 90 days to submit proof of claims to “assets from which a dividend might possibly be paid.” 

The “discovered assets” would appear to contradict statements by Toby Jackson, the company’s former chief technology officer and one of its only remaining executives, at the hearing that the company was effectively broke, citing one of its only assets as a $500 company laptop used by ousted CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin. Jackson noted that the company couldn’t access the laptop’s contents because Smith-Griffin had refused to share the password. AllHere listed more than $1.75 million in itemized liabilities, bankruptcy records show.

Neither Jackson, AllHere’s Delaware bankruptcy attorney, Joseph Mulvihill; trustee Miller nor his lawyer, Ricardo Palacio, responded to requests for comments. Smith-Griffin, a former Boston educator and family engagement counselor who went on to create digital tools to combat chronic absenteeism, has not spoken publicly or responded to requests for comments since her company’s sudden financial collapse this spring.

At the hearing last month, Jackson struggled to answer Miller’s questions about why AllHere paid Smith-Griffin $243,000 in expenses between September 2023 and June 2024 and owed $630,000 to its largest creditor — an education technology salesperson with longstanding ties to Los Angeles schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. The Florida-based salesperson, Debra Kerr, said during the meeting she was never paid commission for her work closing the lucrative AllHere deal in L.A. Kerr’s son, Richard, is a former AllHere account executive who told ����Ӱ�� he pitched the company to Los Angeles school leaders.

The school district “has not received any requests to date” from federal prosecutors, a district spokesperson said in a statement Monday to ����Ӱ��. Los Angeles Unified School District’s independent inspector general in July launched an investigation into allegations first reported by ����Ӱ�� that its much-celebrated and now-unplugged AI chatbot named “Ed” exposed students’ personal data in violation of school district policy and standard industry security practices.

Carvalho later announced that he would form to determine what went wrong with the district’s relationship with AllHere and how it could move forward incorporating AI into the nation’s second-largest school system. Carvalho and Smith-Griffin made joint appearances at ed tech conferences throughout the spring touting the capabilities of “Ed,” an animated sun they said could interact individually with and accelerate the learning for some 540,000 students and their families.

Several other creditors listed in AllHere’s bankruptcy case have ties to Carvalho, including the communications firm of his former spokesperson when he was superintendent in Miami and the Foundation for New Education Initiatives, a Florida-based in 2008. The foundation came under scrutiny in 2020 after the for-profit company K12, Inc., now known as Stride, Inc., gave the district-run entity a $1.57 million donation just a day before the school board voted to stop using its online learning platform. The donation gave an appearance of impropriety, by the Miami-Dade inspector general found, but there were “no actual violations.”

In the case of AllHere, the subpoena to the bankruptcy trustee suggests that federal prosecutors are likely “in a fairly early stage” of their investigation, attorney Wickouski said. Any indictments that could follow, she said, won’t likely be announced for months. 

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 ����Ӱ�� 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 ����Ӱ�� 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, ����Ӱ�� 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.”

At the time, principals with Boston Impact Initiative were finalizing the firm’s annual impact assessment of AllHere, a 2016 startup that offered a tech-driven solution to chronic student absences. Officials with the were left with an impression that was, it turns out, far from reality. 

“There were conversations with the company and it was doing really well,” CEO Betty Francisco told ����Ӱ�� in a brief telephone conversation earlier this month.  

AllHere was actually on the verge of collapse and now, Francisco is questioning whether her firm may have been played. 

“We are trying to also understand what happened,” she said of the news that the company, the recipient of some $12 million in investor capital and much praise for being an AI education innovator, was in serious straits. Last month, a majority of its staff were furloughed, AllHere announced ; the ambitious AI chatbot that it built for the Los Angeles Unified School District was unplugged and its founder and chief executive officer, Joanna Smith-Griffin, was out of a job. 

Francisco said her firm was a minor player in AllHere’s venture capital fundraising and that the larger, institutional investors were now working with the company “to figure out the plan.” 

What that plan might be — and what necessitated it in the first place — remains a mystery. In the month since ����Ӱ�� first reported on the company’s downfall, key figures in AllHere’s rise have gone underground. ����Ӱ�� sought comments from more than a dozen company officials, including its founder, investors at prominent venture capital firms and members of its board of directors. None, aside from Francisco, would speak publicly about the company. 

It’s a major shift for AllHere’s backers, many of whom work at impact investment firms that fund startups through a social justice lens. These figures were once outspoken about AllHere and their shared place in the race to inject AI into schools. Among those who have gone silent is Andrew Parker of the firm , whose fundraising efforts landed him a seat on AllHere’s board of directors. In a 2021 blog post, he to chronic absenteeism, one of the pandemic’s most lasting impacts, as a profound innovation in the way schools communicate with parents. The company, he boasted, was a smart bet. 

“Being this primary conduit of communication is a terrific business opportunity, and it’s how AllHere will thrive in the years to come,” wrote Parker, who declined to comment for this story.

AllHere’s latest financial woes aren’t the first time that Smith-Griffin felt the pressure of a company mission gone wrong. Shortly after Boston-based AllHere emerged from a startup incubator at Harvard University, where Smith-Griffin was enrolled, its technological approach to bolster student attendance fell flat. 

“The first iteration of AllHere failed spectacularly,” Smith-Griffin, a former Boston charter school teacher and family engagement director, said in a 2017 interview on . “And it was one of the best things that could have happened to us.” 

In response to those early startup woes, Smith-Griffin changed course. She ditched her initial idea of using data to create lists for teachers of the students most likely to become chronically absent — a service that educators told her wasn’t much help — and pivoted to an automated text messaging service that sent personally tailored “nudges” to parents in the guise of a friendly chatbot. 

The $6 million chatbot that it would eventually build for L.A. schools — an animated sun named “Ed” meant to interact individually with and accelerate the learning of some 540,000 students — was in a different class entirely. AllHere, according to a former employee-turned-whistleblower, put students’ personal information at risk by taking shortcuts to meet the school district’s ambitious demands.

Meanwhile, AllHere’s investors publicly touted that it was the infusion of cash and leadership from altruistically inclined impact firms that transformed the company from one with an under-baked product to an AI innovator in the K-12 space. An examination of these firms’ outsized role suggests that AllHere’s venture-influenced embrace of artificial intelligence may have led it to fail once again — this time on a much grander scale. 

‘Disturbed by the allegations’ 

Reached by phone, four members of the company’s board of directors — including several with extensive and well-known education policy credentials — declined to comment for this story. In fact, much of the information about AllHere’s unraveling has been filtered through an unusual channel: The school district it left in a lurch. 

It was an L.A. Unified district spokesperson who first told news outlets that Smith-Griffin was no longer with AllHere and that the company was up for sale. Smith-Griffin, who records show lives in North Carolina, couldn’t be reached for comment. 

Investigators with the district’s independent inspector general’s office have launched an inquiry into the former AllHere executive’s claims that the company misused L.A. students’ personal data and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho last week proposed a task force to find out what went wrong. The inquiry, Carvalho said, will dig into the district’s procurement process and claims the chatbot handled students’ personal information in ways that violated district policy and basic data privacy principles. 

“I’m disturbed by the allegations,” Carvalho with the Los Angeles Times while speaking simultaneously on AllHere’s behalf. 

“We’ve had — our team has had — conversations with the company about those allegations,” Carvalho said. “The company has denied those allegations.” 

The task force, an LAUSD spokesperson said in a statement, will create a framework for the district to “continue leveraging technology responsibly.” AllHere, which has been paid about $3 million so far, won the five-year contract after a competitive bidding process, the spokesperson said, and was selected “because it was most aligned” with the district’s vision for the chatbot and “was an established educational technology company focused on personalized and interactive AI solutions to improve student attendance.” 

‘A truly amazing board’

After the pandemic shuttered in-person learning nationally and student absences surged to unprecedented highs, Rethink Education, an ed tech-focused impact investment firm that provided early capital to AllHere, saw an opening. A by Impact Capital Managers says that Rethink provided the company with more than cash flow; it oversaw a “strategic transition,” specifically “a pivot towards an AI chatbot” that observers would later say was outside the scope of AllHere’s capabilities.

Rethink Education partner Ebony Brown offered AllHere critical connections to influential education players and helped it build “a truly amazing board” of directors, by Matt Greenfield, Rethink’s managing partner. She successfully recruited Jeff Livingston, a at McGraw-Hill Education and a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , and Janice Jackson, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools. 

“Ebony got introductions to several former superintendents of large districts, secured a meeting with Janice, and delivered an impassioned and ultimately successful pitch,” Greenfield wrote. The addition of Livingston and Jackson to the AllHere board was strategic, according to the case study, noting that they “have been instrumental in securing deals with major school districts and in developing a customer acquisition playbook to expand the company’s nationwide presence.” 

The extent to which board members’ helped AllHere land the LAUSD contract is unclear. Livingston and Jackson both declined to provide comment for this story. Greenfield and Brown didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Brown, who also gained a seat on AllHere’s board, then sought to improve the company’s visibility, helping Smith-Griffin “secure a spot as the featured entrepreneur” on the for education leaders in 2021. A year later, Smith-Griffin served as alongside Purdue University president and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and Deborah Quazzo, a managing partner at the investment company GSV Ventures. 

GSV is heavily involved in education technology companies. In April, Smith-Griffin and Carvalho unveiled the district’s buzzed-about chatbot in San Diego co-hosted by the venture firm and Arizona State University.

“The Forbes profile,” Greenfield’s post notes, “in turn led to inbound interest from venture capitalists, multiple term sheets [documents outlining the terms under which VCs fund startups] and a round” of investments totaling more than $8 million. 

On June 12, just before AllHere announced that it had furloughed most of its staff, the company got bad news from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Officials for a chatbot that addressed student absenteeism, finding that the tool didn’t present eligible technological advancements. 

The office wrote: “No inventive concept exists sufficient to transform the abstract idea of ‘student monitoring’ into a patent-eligible application of that idea.” 

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.”

With Joe Biden out and Kamala Harris in, the Democrats’ last-minute, presumptive presidential nominee will once again have to reckon with her — and their nationwide surge since the pandemic — as she faces off against Donald Trump between now and November. 

Elected first as San Francisco district attorney and then California attorney general, Harris has offered her tough-on-crime bonafides on the newly forged campaign trail as an alternative to Trump, a convicted felon. Yet just five years ago, her signature education issue as California’s top cop — as she sometimes called herself — was . 

By portraying a crackdown on student truancy as a way to avert future criminals, Harris championed a California truancy law that set into motion a hold-parents-accountable approach that leveraged fines and jail time for chronic absences that are including health problems and homelessness.

Parents, as a result, wound up behind bars. Such an outcome, Harris said during her failed presidential bid in 2019, was an “unintended consequence.” 

• Fast forward to 2024: A coalition of education nonprofits launched a bipartisan effort last week to slash chronic absenteeism in half over the next five years, with one expert noting that punitive measures “do nothing but burden families.” 

In the news

A Big Tech reckoning on child safety? Senate Democrats renewed efforts this week to pass the most sweeping tech industry regulations in decades, with the goal of formalizing new online privacy protections for children before their August recess. Taken together, two bills would ban companies from feeding content and targeted ads to teens with algorithms and hold tech firms to a “duty of care” to ensure their products don’t harm kids. |

The White House isn’t waiting for Congress to act. In new guidance, a Biden administration task force outlines strategies parents can use to ensure their children are using the internet safely. |

From AllHere to where? The Los Angeles superintendent plans to appoint a task force to examine what went wrong — and how to move forward — after a company that built its $6 million AI chatbot went kaput. The task force will look into allegations that the company misused L.A. students’ data before it collapsed under financial strain. The allegations were first reported by yours truly. |

• Superintendent Alberto Carvalho remains committed to the supposed AI revolution in education, but Los Angeles parents are urging the rhetorically high-flying schools chief to pump the brakes and focus on pressing issues including a literacy crisis and student homelessness epidemic. |

New York educators must alert parents at least a week in advance of lockdown drills under new regulations that require the safety routines be conducted in “a trauma-informed, developmentally and age-appropriate manner.” |

Ending ‘forced disclosure’: A new California law prohibits school districts from imposing rules that require teachers to notify parents when a student changes their gender identity. |

A Justice Department lawsuit alleges that employees at Southwest Key, a nonprofit that serves as the largest operator of shelters for unaccompanied migrant children, repeatedly subjected minors under its care to sexual abuse and harassment. |

No qualified immunity: Three Honolulu police officers can be sued on excessive force allegations that stem from a 2020 incident in which the cops handcuffed and arrested a 10-year-old girl at her elementary school. “No reasonable official could have believed that the level of force employed against” the student was necessary, a panel of federal judges wrote in their decision. |

A ransomware attack targeting the Pueblo, Colorado, school district led to a massive data breach that exposed the sensitive information of students over a 15-year period. |

The high cost of cyber crime: About two-thirds of K-12 schools were hit by ransomware in the last year, according to a new report by the cybersecurity company Sophos. That’s a significant decrease from 2023, when 80% were targets. But recovery costs have surged over the last year — from $1.6 million to more than $3.75 million. |

ICYMI @THE74

• Advocates Fear Minnesota Students Will Again Be Subject to Restraint Used on George Floyd

• Youngkin Signs Order on ‘Cell Phone-Free Education’ in Virginia Public Schools

• Parents of Children with Special Needs Charge LAUSD Limiting Services, Holding Back Information

Emotional Support

I’m pleased to announce that Mika has joined the School (in)Security team after an exhaustive, nationwide search. I’m told that Mika — who was hired alongside ����Ӱ��’s new editor-in-chief Nicole Ridgway — offers extensive experience and “sonar dish” ears that detect news leads with unrivaled precision. 

(Send Mika a news tip)

Investigators with the Los Angeles Unified School District’s inspector general’s office conducted a video interview with Chris Whiteley, the former senior director of software engineering at AllHere, after he told ����Ӱ�� his former employer’s student data security practices violated both industry standards and the district’s own policies. 

Whiteley told ����Ӱ�� he had alerted the school district, the IG’s office and state education officials earlier to the data privacy problems with Ed but got no response. His meeting with investigators occurred July 2, one day after ����Ӱ�� published its story outlining Whiteley’s allegations, including that the chatbot put students’ personally identifiable information at risk of getting hacked by including it in all chatbot prompts, even in those where the data weren’t relevant; sharing it with other third-party companies unnecessarily and processing prompts on offshore servers in violation of district student privacy rules. 

In an interview with ����Ӱ�� this week, Whiteley said the officials from the district’s inspector general’s office “were definitely interested in what I had to say,” as speculation swirls about the future of Ed, its ed tech creator AllHere and broader education investments in artificial intelligence. 

“It felt like they were after the truth,” Whiteley said, adding, “I’m certain that they were surprised about how bad [students’ personal information] was being handled.”

To generate responses to even mundane prompts, Whiteley said, the chatbot processed the personal information for all students in a household. If a mother with 10 children asked the chatbot a question about her youngest son’s class schedule, for example, the tool processed data about all of her children to generate a response. 

“It’s just sad and crazy,” he said.

The inspector general’s office directed ����Ӱ��’s request for comment to a district spokesperson, who declined to comment or respond to questions involving the inquiry.

While the conversation centered primarily on technical aspects related to the company’s data security protocols, Whiteley said investigators probed him on his personal experiences with AllHere, which he described as being abusive, and its finances.

Whiteley was laid off from AllHere in April. Two months later, a notice posted to the said a majority of its 50 or so employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position” and the LAUSD spokesperson said company co-founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin had left. The former Boston teacher and Harvard graduate was successful in raising $12 million in venture capital for AllHere and appeared with L.A. schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at ed tech conferences and other events throughout the spring touting the heavily publicized AI tool they partnered to create.

Just weeks ago, Carvalho spoke publicly about how the project had put L.A. out in front as school districts and ed tech companies nationally race to follow the lead of generative artificial intelligence pioneers like ChatGPT. But the school chief’s superlative language around what Ed could do on an individualized basis with 540,000 students had some industry observers and AI experts speculating it was destined to fail.

The chatbot was supposed to serve as a “friendly, concise customer support agent” that replied “using simple language a third grader could understand” to help students and parents supplement classroom instruction, find assistance with kids’ academic struggles and navigate attendance, grades, transportation and other key issues. What they were given, Whiteley charges, was a student privacy nightmare. 

Smith-Griffin recently deactivated her LinkedIn page and has not surfaced since her company went into apparent free fall. Attempts to reach AllHere for comment were unsuccessful and parts of the company website have gone dark. LAUSD said earlier that AllHere is for sale and that several companies are interested in acquiring it.

The district has already paid AllHere $3 million to build the chatbot and “a fully-integrated portal” that gave students and parents access to information and resources in a single location, the district spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday, and “was surprised by the financial disruption to AllHere.” 

AllHere’s collapse represents a stunning fall from grace for a company that was named among the world’s top education technology companies by Time Magazine just months earlier. Scrutiny of AllHere intensified when Whiteley became a whistleblower. He said he turned to the press because his concerns, which he shared first with AllHere executives and the school district, had been ignored.

Whitely shared source code with ����Ӱ�� which showed that students’ information had been processed on offshore servers. Seven out of eight Ed chatbot requests, he said, were sent to places like Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Australia and Canada. 

‘How are smaller districts going to do this?’

What district leaders failed to do as they heralded their new tool, Whiteley said, is conduct sufficient audits. As L.A. — and school systems nationwide — contract with a laundry list of tech vendors, he said it’s imperative that they understand how third-party companies use students’ information. 

“If the second-biggest district can’t audit their [personally identifiable information] on new or interesting products and can’t do security audits on external sources, how are smaller districts going to do this?” he asked.

Over the last several weeks, the district’s official position on Ed has appeared to shift. In late June when the district spokesperson said that several companies were “interested in acquiring Allhere,” they also said its predecessor would “continue to provide this first-of-its-kind resource to our students and families.” In its initial response to Whiteley’s allegations published July 1, the spokesperson said that education officials would “take any steps necessary to ensure that appropriate privacy and security protections are in place in the Ed platform.” 

In in the Los Angeles Times, a district spokesperson said the chatbot had been unplugged on June 14. ����Ӱ�� asked the spokesperson to provide documentation showing the tool was disabled last month but didn’t get a response. 

Even after June 14, Carvalho continued to boast publicly about LAUSD’s foray into generative AI and what he described with third-party vendors. 

On Tuesday, the district spokesperson told ����Ӱ�� that the online portal — even without a chatty, animated sun — “will continue regardless of the outcome with AllHere.” In fact, the project could become a source of district revenue. Under the contract between AllHere and LAUSD, which was obtained by ����Ӱ��, the chatbot is the property of the school district, which was set to receive 2% in royalty payments from AllHere “should other school districts seek to use the tool to benefit their families and students.” 

In the statement Tuesday, the district spokesperson said that officials chose to “temporarily disable the chatbot” amid AllHere’s uncertainty and that it would “only be restored when the human-in-the-loop aspect is re-established.” 

Whiteley agreed that the district could maintain the student information dashboard without the chatbot and, similarly, that another firm could buy what remains of AllHere. He was skeptical, however, that Ed the chatbot would live another day because “it’s broken”

“The name AllHere,” he said, “I think is dead.”

The AI bot, created by Boston-based AllHere Education, was launched . But just three months later, AllHere posted that a majority of its 50 or so employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position.” A spokesperson for the Los Angeles district said company founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin was no longer on the job. AllHere was up for sale, the district said, with several businesses interested in acquiring it.

The news was shocking and certainly bleak for the ed tech industry, but several observers say the partnership bit off more than it could chew, tech-wise — and that the ensuing blowup could hurt future AI investments.

Ed was touted as a powerful, easy-to-use o for students and parents to supplement classroom instruction, find assistance with kids’ academic struggles and help families navigate attendance, grades, transportation and other key issues, all in 100 languages and on their mobile phones.

But Amanda Bickerstaff, founder and CEO of , a consulting and training firm, said that was an overreach.

“What they were trying to do is really not possible with where the technology is today,” she said. ”It’s a very broad application [with] multiple users — teachers, students, leaders and family members — and it pulled in data from multiple systems.”

She noted that even a mega-corporation like McDonald’s had to trim its AI sails. The fast-food giant recently admitted that a small experiment using a chatbot to power drive-thru windows had resulted in a few fraught customer interactions, such as one in which a woman angrily tried to persuade the bot that she wanted a caramel ice cream as it added to her order.

If McDonald’s, worth an estimated $178.6 billion, can’t get 100 drive-thrus to take lunch orders with generative AI, she said, the tech isn’t “where we need it to be.”

If anything, L.A. and AllHere did not seem worried about the project’s scale, even if industry insiders now say it was bound to under-deliver: Last spring, at a series of high-profile ed tech conferences, Smith-Griffin and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho showed off Ed widely, with Carvalho saying it would revolutionize students’ and parents’ relationships to school, “utilizing the data-rich environment that we have for every kid.”

In an interview with ����Ӱ�� at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego in April, Carvalho said many students are not connected to school, “therefore they’re lost.” Ed, he promised, would change that, with a “significantly different approach” to communication from the district.

“We are shifting from a system of 540,000 students into 540,000 ‘schools of one,’” with personalization and individualization for each student, he said, and “meaningful connections with parents.”

Better communication with parents, he said, would help improve not just attendance but reading and math proficiency, graduation rates and other outcomes. “The question that needs to be asked is: Why have those resources not meaningfully connected with students and parents, and why have they not resulted in this explosive experience in terms of educational opportunity?”

Carvalho noted Ed’s ability to understand and communicate in about 100 different languages. And, he crowed, it “never goes to sleep” so it can answer questions 24/7. He called it “an entity that learns and relearns all the time and does nothing more, nothing less than adapt itself to you. I think that’s a game changer.” 

But one experienced ed tech insider recalled hearing Carvalho at the conference in April and say it was already solving “all the problems” that big districts face. The insider, who asked not to be identified in order to speak freely about sensitive matters, found the remarks troubling. “The messaging was so wrong that at that point I basically started a stopwatch on how long it would take” for the effort to fail. “And I’m kind of amazed it’s been this long before it all fell apart. I feel badly about it, I really do, but it’s not a surprise.”

‘A high-risk proposition’

In addition to the deal’s dissolution, ����Ӱ�� reported last week that a former senior director of software engineering at AllHere told district officials, L.A.’s independent inspector general’s office and state education officials that Ed processed student records in ways that likely ran afoul of the district’s own data privacy rules and put sensitive information at risk of being hacked — warnings that he said the agencies ignored. 

AI for Education’s Bickerstaff said developers “have to take caution” when building these systems for schools, especially those like Ed that bring together such large sets of data under one application.

“These tools, we don’t know how they work directly,” she said. “We know they have bias. And we know they’re not reliable. We know they can be leaky. And so we have to be really careful, especially with kids that have protected data.”

Alex Spurrier, an associate partner with the education consulting firm , said what often happens is that district leaders “try to go really big and move really fast to adopt a new technology,” not fully appreciating that it’s “a really high risk proposition.”

While ed tech is of overpromising and disappointing results, Spurrier said, other districts dare to take a different approach, starting small, iterating and scaling up. In those cases, he said, disaster rarely follows.

Richard Culatta, CEO of the (ISTE), put it more bluntly: “Whenever a district says, ‘Our strategy around AI is to buy a tool,’ that’s a problem. When the district says, ‘For us, AI is a variety of tools and skills that we are working on together,’ that’s when I feel comfortable that we’re moving in the right direction.”

Culatta suggested that since generative AI is developing and changing so rapidly, districts should use the next few months as “a moment of exploration — it’s a moment to bring in teachers and parents and students to give feedback,” he said. “It is not the moment for ribbon cutting.” 

‘It’s about exploring’

Smith-Griffin founded AllHere in 2016 at Harvard University’s . In an April interview with ����Ӱ��, she said she originally envisioned it as a way to help school systems reduce chronic absenteeism through better communication with parents. Many interventions that schools rely on, such as phone calls, postcards and home visits, “tend to be heavily reliant on the sheer power of educators to solve system-wide issues,” she said.

A former middle-school math teacher, Smith-Griffin recalled, “I was one of those teachers who was doing phone calls, leaving voicemails, visiting my parents’ homes.” 

AllHere pioneered text messaging “nudges,” electronic versions of postcard reminders to families that, in one key study, modestly. 

The company’s for L.A., Smith-Griffin said, envisioned extending the attendance strategies while applying them to student learning “in the most disciplined way possible.”

“You nudge a parent around absences and they will tell you things ranging from, ‘My kid needs tutoring, my kid is struggling with math’ [to] ‘I struggle with reading,’” she said. AllHere went one step further, she said, bringing together “the full body of resources” that a school system can offer parents.

The district had high hopes for the chatbot, requiring it to focus on “eliminating opportunity gaps, promoting whole-child well-being, building stronger relationships with students and families, and providing accessible information,” according to the proposal.

In April, it was still in early implementation at 100 of the district’s lowest performing “priority” schools, serving about 55,000 students. LAUSD planned to roll out Ed for all families this fall. The district “unplugged” the chatbot on June 14, the Los Angeles Times , but a district spokesperson said L.A. “will continue making Ed available as a tool to its students and families and is closely monitoring the potential acquisition of AllHere.” The company did not immediately responded to queries about the chatbot or its future.

As for the apparent collapse of AllHere, speculation in the ed tech world is rampant.

In the , education entrepreneur Ben Kornell said late last month, “My spidey sense basically goes to ‘Something’s not adding up here and there’s more to the story.’” He theorized a “critical failure point” that’s yet to emerge “because you don’t see things like this fall apart this quickly, this immediately” for such a small company, especially in the middle of a $6 million contract.

Kornell said the possibilities fall into just a few categories: an accounting or financial misstep, a breakdown among AllHere’s staff, board and funders or “major customer payment issues.” 

The district also may have withheld payment for undelivered products, but he said the sudden collapse of the company seemed unusual. “If you are headed towards a cash crisis, the normal thing to do would be: Go to your board, go to your funders, and get a bridge to get you through that period and land the plane.”

Bellwether’s Spurrier said L.A. deserves a measure of credit “for being willing to lean into AI technology and think about ways that it could work.” But he wonders whether the best use of generative AI at this moment will be found not in “revolutionizing instruction,” as L.A. has pursued, but elsewhere. 

“There’s plenty of opportunities to think about how AI might help on the administrative side of things, or help folks that are kind of outside the classroom walls,” rather than focusing on changing how schools deliver instruction. “I think that’s the wrong place to start.”

ISTE’s Culatta noted that just down the road from Los Angeles, in Santa Ana, California, district officials there responded to the dawn of tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini by creating evening classes for adults. “The parents come in and they talk about what AI is, how they should be thinking about it,” he said. “It’s about exploring. It’s about helping people build their skills.” 

‘How are your financials?’

The fate of AllHere’s attendance work in districts nationwide isn’t clear at the moment. In one large district, the Prince George’s County, Maryland, Public Schools, near Washington, D.C., teachers piloted AllHere with 32 schools as far back as January 2020, spokeswoman Meghan Thornton said. The district added two more schools to the pilot in 2022, but AllHere notified the district on June 18 that, effective immediately, it wouldn’t be able to continue its services due to “unforeseen financial circumstances.” 

District officials are now looking for another messaging system to replace AllHere “should it no longer be available,” Thornton said.

Bickerstaff said the field more broadly suffers from “a major, major overestimation of the capabilities of the technology to date.” L.A., she noted, is the nation’s second-largest school district, so even the pilot stage likely saw “very high” usage, raising its costs. She predicted a fast acquisition of AllHere, noting that they’d been looking for outside investment for several months.

As founder of the startup , which offers teachers tools to streamline their workload, Adeel Khan is no stranger to hustling for funding — and to competitors running out of money. But he said the news about AllHere and Ed was bad for the industry more broadly, leaving districts with questions about whether to partner with newer, untested companies.

“I see it as something that is certainly not great for the startup ecosystem,” he said.

Even before the news about AllHere broke last month, Khan attended ISTE’s big national conference in Denver last month, where he talked to school district officials about prospective partnerships. “More than one time I was asked directly, ‘How are your financials?’” he recalled. 

Usually technology directors ask about features and what a product can do for students, he said. But they’re beginning to realize that a failed product doesn’t just waste time and money. It damages reputations as well. “That is on the mind of buyers,” he said. 

When school districts invest in new tech, he said, they’re not just committing to funding it for months or even years, but also to training teachers and others, so they want responsible growth.

“There’s a lot of disruption to K-12 when a product goes out of business,” Khan said. “So people remember this. They remember, ‘Hey, we committed to this product. We discovered it at ISTE two years ago and we loved it. It was great — and it’s not here anymore. And we don’t want to go through that again.’ ”

As the eight-year-old startup rolled out Los Angeles Unified School District’s flashy new AI-driven chatbot — an animated sun named “Ed” that AllHere was hired to build for $6 million — a former company executive was sending emails to the district and others that Ed’s workings violated bedrock student data privacy principles. 

Those emails were sent shortly before ����Ӱ�� first reported last week that AllHere, with in investor capital, was in serious straits. A June 14 statement on the company’s website revealed a majority of its employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position.” Company founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles district said, was no longer on the job. 

Smith-Griffin and L.A. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho went on the road together this spring to unveil Ed at a series of high-profile ed tech conferences, with the schools chief dubbing it the nation’s first “personal assistant” for students and leaning hard into LAUSD’s place in the K-12 AI vanguard. He called Ed’s ability to know students “unprecedented in American public education” at the ASU+GSV conference in April. 

Through an algorithm that analyzes troves of student information from multiple sources, the chatbot was designed to offer tailored responses to questions like “what grade does my child have in math?” The tool relies on vast amounts of students’ data, including their academic performance and special education accommodations, to function.

Meanwhile, Chris Whiteley, a former senior director of software engineering at AllHere who was laid off in April, had become a whistleblower. He told district officials, its independent inspector general’s office and state education officials that the tool processed student records in ways that likely ran afoul of L.A. Unified’s own data privacy rules and put sensitive information at risk of getting hacked. None of the agencies ever responded, Whiteley told ����Ӱ��. 

“When AllHere started doing the work for LAUSD, that’s when, to me, all of the data privacy issues started popping up,” Whiteley said in an interview last week. The problem, he said, came down to a company in over its head and one that “was almost always on fire” in terms of its operations and management. LAUSD’s chatbot was unlike anything it had ever built before and — given the company’s precarious state — could be its last. 

If AllHere was in chaos and its bespoke chatbot beset by porous data practices, Carvalho was portraying the opposite. One day before ����Ӱ�� broke the news of the company turmoil and Smith-Griffin’s departure, spotlighted the schools chief at a Denver conference talking about how adroitly LAUSD managed its ed tech vendor relationships — “We force them to all play in the same sandbox” — while ensuring that “protecting data privacy is a top priority.”

In a statement on Friday, a district spokesperson said the school system “takes these concerns seriously and will continue to take any steps necessary to ensure that appropriate privacy and security protections are in place in the Ed platform.” 

“Pursuant to contract and applicable law, AllHere is not authorized to store student data outside the United States without prior written consent from the District,” the statement continued. “Any student data belonging to the District and residing in the Ed platform will continue to be subject to the same privacy and data security protections, regardless of what happens to AllHere as a company.” 

A district spokesperson, in response to earlier questioning from ����Ӱ�� last week, said it was informed that Smith-Griffin was no longer with the company and that several businesses “are interested in acquiring AllHere.” Meanwhile Ed, the spokesperson said, “belongs to Los Angeles Unified and is for Los Angeles Unified.”

Officials in the inspector general’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment. The state education department “does not directly oversee the use of AI programs in schools or have the authority to decide which programs a district can utilize,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

It’s a radical turn of events for AllHere and the AI tool it markets as a “learning acceleration platform,” which were all the buzz just a few months ago. In April, Time Magazine education technology companies. That same month, Inc. Magazine dubbed Smith-Griffin in artificial intelligence in its Female Founders 250 list. 

Joanna Smith-Griffin, Founder and CEO of AllHere, joins on stage as he delivers the keynote at on Unlocking the Potential of AI. With Ed, students receive personalized support to help them excel in school.

— allherek12 (@allherek12)

Ed has been similarly blessed with celebrity treatment. 

“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 said at ASU+GSV. “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.”

Smith-Griffin, who graduated from the Miami school district that Carvalho once led before going onto Harvard, couldn’t be reached for comment. Smith-Griffin’s LinkedIn page was recently deactivated and parts of the company website have gone dark. Attempts to reach AllHere were also unsuccessful.

‘The product worked, right, but it worked by cheating’

Smith-Griffin, a former Boston charter school teacher and family engagement director, founded AllHere in 2016. Since then, the company has primarily provided schools with a text messaging system that facilitates communication between parents and educators. , the tool relies on attendance data and other information to deliver customized, text-based “nudges.” 

The work that AllHere provided the Los Angeles school district, Whiteley said, was on a whole different level — and the company wasn’t prepared to meet the demand and lacked expertise in data security. In L.A., AllHere operated as a consultant rather than a tech firm that was building its own product, according to its contract with LAUSD obtained by ����Ӱ��. Ultimately, the district retained rights to the chatbot, according to the agreement, but AllHere was contractually obligated to “comply with the district information security policies.” 

 The contract notes that the chatbot would be “trained to detect any confidential or sensitive information” and to discourage parents and students from sharing with it any personal details. But the chatbot’s decision to share and process students’ individual information, Whiteley said, was outside of families’ control. 

In order to provide individualized prompts on details like student attendance and demographics, the tool connects to several data sources, according to the contract, including , an online tool used to track students’ special education services. The document notes that Ed also interfaces with the stored on , a cloud storage company. , the Whole Child platform serves as a central repository for LAUSD student data to help educators monitor students’ progress and personalize instruction. 

Whiteley told officials the app included students’ personally identifiable information in all chatbot prompts, even in those where the data weren’t relevant. Prompts containing students’ personal information were also shared with other third-party companies unnecessarily, Whiteley alleges, and were processed on offshore servers. Seven out of eight Ed chatbot requests, he said, are sent to places like Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Australia and Canada. 

Taken together, he argued the company’s practices ran afoul of data minimization principles, a standard cybersecurity practice that maintains that apps should collect and process the least amount of personal information necessary to accomplish a specific task. Playing fast and loose with the data, he said, unnecessarily exposed students’ information to potential cyberattacks and data breaches and, in cases where the data were processed overseas, could subject it to foreign governments’ data access and surveillance rules. 

Chatbot source code that Whiteley shared with ����Ӱ�� outlines how prompts are processed on foreign servers by a Microsoft AI service that integrates with ChatGPT. The LAUSD chatbot is directed to serve as a “friendly, concise customer support agent” that replies “using simple language a third grader could understand.” When querying the simple prompt “Hello,” the chatbot provided the student’s grades, progress toward graduation and other personal information. 

AllHere’s critical flaw, Whiteley said, is that senior executives “didn’t understand how to protect data.” 

“The issue is we’re sending data overseas, we’re sending too much data, and then the data were being logged by third parties,” he said, in violation of the district’s data use agreement. “The product worked, right, but it worked by cheating. It cheated by not doing things right the first time.”

In a 2017 policy bulletin, the district notes that all sensitive information “needs to be handled in a secure way that protects privacy,” and that contractors cannot disclose information to other parties without parental consent. A second policy bulletin, from April, outlines the district’s authorized use guidelines for artificial intelligence, which notes that officials, “Shall not share any confidential, sensitive, privileged or private information when using, prompting or communicating with any tools.” It’s important to refrain from using sensitive information in prompts, the policy notes, because AI tools “take whatever users enter into a prompt and incorporate it into their systems/knowledge base for other users.” 

“Well, that’s what AllHere was doing,” Whiteley said. 

‘Acid is dangerous’

Whiteley’s revelations present LAUSD with its third student data security debacle in the last month. In mid-June, a threat actor known as “Sp1d3r” began to sell for $150,000 a trove of data it claimed to have stolen from the Los Angeles district on Breach Forums, a dark web marketplace. LAUSD Bloomberg that the compromised data had been stored by one of its third-party vendors on the cloud storage company Snowflake, the repository for the district’s Whole Child Integrated Data. The Snowflake data breach may be one of the largest in history. The threat actor claims that the L.A. schools data in its possession include student medical records, disability information, disciplinary details and parent login credentials. 

The chatbot interacted with data stored by Snowflake, according to the district’s contract with AllHere, though any connection between AllHere and the Snowflake data breach is unknown. 

In its statement Friday, the district spokesperson said an ongoing investigation has “revealed no connection between AllHere or the Ed platform and the Snowflake incident.” The spokesperson said there was no “direct integration” between Whole Child and AllHere and that Whole Child data was processed internally before being directed to AllHere.

The contract between AllHere and the district, however, notes that the tool should “seamlessly integrate” with the Whole Child Integrated Data “to receive updated student data regarding attendance, student grades, student testing data, parent contact information and demographics.”

Earlier in the month, a second threat actor known as Satanic Cloud claimed it had access to tens of thousands of L.A. students’ sensitive information and had posted it for sale on Breach Forums for $1,000. In 2022, the district was victim to a massive ransomware attack that exposed reams of sensitive data, including thousands of students’ psychological evaluations, to the dark web. 

With AllHere’s fate uncertain, Whiteley blasted the company’s leadership and protocols.

“Personally identifiable information should be considered acid in a company and you should only touch it if you have to because acid is dangerous,” he told ����Ӱ��. “The errors that were made were so egregious around PII, you should not be in education if you don’t think PII is acid.” 

L.A. parents and students, we want to hear from you.  using AllHere’s Ed:

Boston-based AllHere Education, founded in 2016 by Harvard grad and former teacher Joanna Smith-Griffin, figured heavily in LAUSD’s , an AI-powered for students and parents designed to supplement classroom instruction and help families navigate. 

But on June 14, AllHere furloughed the majority of its employees due to its “current financial position,” according to on its website. A statement from LAUSD sent to ����Ӱ�� said AllHere now is up for sale.  

But even before the surprise announcement, AllHere was already having trouble fulfilling its contract with LAUSD, according to one former high-ranking company executive. 

The company was unable to push back against the district’s timeline, he said, and couldn’t produce a “proper product.”

An LAUSD spokesperson said the district is aware of Smith-Griffin’s departure and that “several educational technology companies are interested in acquiring AllHere.” 

“The educational technology field is a dynamic space where acquisitions are not uncommon,” the spokesperson said via email. “We will ensure that whichever entity acquires AllHere will continue to provide this first-of-its-kind resource to our students and families.”

Smith-Griffin and AllHere did not respond to requests for comment. The former CEO has taken down her LinkedIn profile. Portions of the AllHere website have also disappeared, including . 

James Wiley, a vice president at the education market research firm ListEdTech, said turmoil at AllHere could be a red flag for LAUSD’s AI program if the district hasn’t taken steps to protect itself from changes at the company.   

“It could be a problem,” said Wiley. “It depends on how much of the program the district has been able to bring in-house, as opposed to leaving with the vendor.”

Wiley also expressed surprise that LAUSD contracted with a relatively small and untested firm such as AllHere for its Ed rollout, as opposed to enlisting a major AI company for the job, or a larger ed tech firm.   

“You have bigger players out there who could have done this thing,” said Wiley.

Outside of Los Angeles, the company has offered districts a text messaging system that allows schools to inform families about weather events and other announcements. 

According to GovSpend, which tracks government contracts with companies, AllHere has already been paid more than $2 million by LAUSD. The company has had much smaller contracts with other districts, according to GovSpend, including a $49,390 payment from Brownsville Independent School District in Texas and a similar-sized payment from Broward County Public Schools in Florida. 

But AllHere’s star had been ascendant. 

With backing from the Harvard Innovation Lab, Smith-Griffin raised more than $12 million to start the new company. was named one of the world’s top ed tech companies by TIME. 

The LAUSD school board a competitively bid $6.2 million contract for AllHere to plan, design and develop the district’s new AI tool, Ed. The deal began with a two-year agreement ending in July 2025, with options for three subsequent one-year renewals.  

Smith-Griffin appeared with LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho in April to discuss the project, which was described by the district’s leader as a game-changer for LAUSD that represented the first time a school district systematically leveraged AI. 

The former AllHere executive, who was recently laid off, said in an interview that the company’s work with LAUSD was far more involved than that of its other customer school districts. 

The small company was being asked to create a far more sophisticated tool than its prior text messaging system and bit off more than it could chew in its contract with the nation’s second-largest district. 

At the same time, he said, AllHere employees operated more as consultants than as a company building its own product and were unable to “to say no or to slow things down” with the district.

“So I think because of that, they were unable or unwilling to build a proper product,” he said. 

LA parents and students, we want to hear from you. using AllHere’s Ed:

With reporting and contributions from Mark Keierleber and Greg Toppo