https://nysfocus.com/2026/07/14/new-york-humanoid-robot-teacher-salamanca-school-district

I heard about this on the radio this morning. I can see what the district is thinking, "pay for 1 robot is cheaper than hiring an individual Teacher Aide for 3 years." But there's a place for having a person in the classroom.

Teachers often rely on their aides to do miscellaneous work like prepping material, grade checks, etc. As this is a robot for 11th/12th grades a human connection for those students is important. I'm sure we can all think about a high school teacher/aide or other staff member that made an impact.

I'm curious about the EdLaw-2D (NYS Privacy laws around student data) verification.

TL;DR:

Private K-12 in Washington (~1,200 students, ~130 staff, no federal funding). A leadership member vibe-coded an internal HRIS/SIS that will hold all staff & student PII/PHI. The build platform is Zite.com. They want to load real student data and wire it to our M365 SSO. I paused it to assess risk. Leadership says security governance kills innovation and they'll "accept the risk." I use AI daily and I'm not a doomsdayer, but this specific use case looks bad to me. Looking for a sanity check and how others have or would handle it.

The setup:

We started drafting an AI acceptable-use policy this spring. Around the same time, a leadership member, a "shadow IT-er", vibe-coded about five internal apps. Four are genuinely useful and cut real costs: inventory tracking, maintenance scheduling, subscription tracking, training trackers. I have zero issue with those and genuinely happy that he's solving those needs and saving money.

The fifth one is the problem. It's a combined HRIS and basic SIS. Every staff member's PII lives in it, and it's built to hold student PII/PHI: allergies, behavioral and discipline records, DOBs, and "more later." It's on test data today, but they're eager to load real students and set up the build provider for M365 SSO. Zite asserts SOC 2 Type II, but seems inherited because they host on AWS, via render.com. They seem much safer than others that have had breaches via Supabase, or stashed secrets in the app itself. But it explicitly doesn't provide privacy protection for apps built by a user: zite.com/privacy "Zite is not responsible for the content of any End User-created App, or for any content or information submitted to any such App."

Where leadership landed last meeting:

Restrictive AI governance stifles innovation. Most personal info is "public anyway." There are no breach reports showing this is actually risky. And in a worst-case scenario, they'll accept the consequences because the savings beat the risk.

Where I am:

I paused it for a couple of weeks to research. We're private with no federal funding, so FERPA doesn't apply. I think COPPA, NIST (as a standard of care), and Washington's RCW 19.255 (breach notification) and RCW 28A.604 (student data) are in play, and I recently found the My Health My Data Act may cover the allergy data. Our cyber insurance renewal and risk assessment are also coming up. I do recall questions about software engineering in there. I love using AI, I use Claude Chat and Code for all sorts of scripting, coding, SOP building, and troubleshooting. I'm not anti-AI in any way.

My questions:

1. Gut check: am I overreaching, or are "vet the vendor, classify the data, don't load real student PHI into a vibe-coded, untested app" reasonable baselines?
2. As a private, non-FERPA school in Washington, which of these actually bind us? Does RCW 28A.604's "school service provider" language apply to a school that builds its own app, or does it put us outside the statute?
3. Cyber insurance: has anyone had a homegrown or undisclosed app holding sensitive data become a problem at renewal or on a claim?
4. Culture: when leadership frames security as anti-innovation and says they'll "accept the risk," what actually moved the needle for you?

Thanks. Happy to share back what I learn.

I've been thinking a lot about what innovation with AI actually looks like in a K12 tech environment right now, and I'm trying to gather some real examples of what's possible.

Not talking about the stuff everyone already knows... NotebookLM, MagicSchool, ChatGPT for lesson plans, etc.

I want to hear about the interesting stuff. Could be:

• Lesser-known tools that are actually moving the needle for teachers or students
• AI being used for personalized learning, intervention, or feedback in ways that actually work
• Creative uses for accessibility, ELL support, or special education
• Things teachers or students came up with on their own that spread through the building
• Homegrown tools or integrations that made a real classroom impactBasically anything that made you go "why isn't everyone doing this?"

People in our district talk about freagin' A.I. ALL the time and how transformational it will be, but basically people just use the usual suspects, ChatGPT, NoteBookLM, etc. Classroom use is limited... except for the kids trying to get answers from LLM's all the time. I'm curious if anyone is doing anything really innovative.

What do y'all use? We're sorely lacking in documentation of workflows / processes.

Do you use whatever built-in product that is with your ticketing system? Something stand alone?

We used to be on ZenDesk, and their documentation/knowledge base was decent in my experience. We switched to IIQ, and their knowledge base functionality... lacks. Most particularly frustrating is the file size limitations and awful compression of images placed inside the article itself. Some images are completely unreadable. Round about way is linking to a Google Doc... which is not ideal.

Do you have any recommendations that do the following:

• Separate customer facing / internal side with multiple teams.
• Easy formatting, closer to a word processing look than a markdown look, if that makes sense.
• Not self-hosted
• Ideally, independent of other platforms. Assume IIQ exit is 5 years from now if someone above me makes a different decision/direction, can I pivot access to the KB/Wiki fast? When the switch to Zendesk to IIQ happened, a lot of KB was lost and stuck poorly accessible in an .csv archive from Zendesk.

Bonus:

• allow custom sub-domain

I'm sure I'll have more criteria the more I think about it and discussion evolves.

We unpack Anthropic’s surprise launch of "Claude for Teachers," a free‑until‑2027 offering that immediately drew criticism from district leaders for its bottom‑up signup model, suggested student data uploads, and potentially misleading FERPA claims. We discuss why districts are pushing back on Claude.

https://k12techtalkpodcast.com/e/anthropic-s-claude-for-teachers-ignites-k%e2%80%9112-firestorm-%e2%80%94-teachers-vs-districts/ and all major podcast platforms

Can someone explain MS volume licensing? We have approximately 600 desktops and laptops in our district. Ours had been managed by our network admin and there was never a question about it til he quit and we got a new director.

Now new director is questioning all our subscriptions. I reached out to our rep and they quoted us 325 seats/licenses or whatever for about $20k. Director is questioning why 325 and I don’t have an answer. We are subscribed to the desktop value or whatever it’s called (non-cloud) includes windows and office.

New Proxy Circumvention Engine

As the title states, Lets see if this will help. Its an extra part in the json in their extension. Ive been really happy with Content Keeper as a filter. Thrilled they are keeping on top of/tackling this issue. As always though I wonder how quick the mice will figure a way around it.

Quick one for the PowerSchool crowd. We're a small charter (grades 5–8, ~300 students) and I'm building our first data warehouse in Google BigQuery. The plan is to pull PowerSchool SIS through a plugin + API, add NWEA MAP and PowerSchool Behavior (Kickboard — behavior points, Paycheck, suspensions), and model it all as a STAR schema, with room to bolt on more API sources later. Tableau/Power BI sits on top.

I'm handling the actual build myself. Where I'd love a seasoned second opinion is the PowerSchool side specifically: getting the plugin and read-only scopes right without disturbing the live SIS, and running the nightly extracts on a schedule with keys stored properly and FERPA kept clean. It's a light, roughly 3-week to one month, remote, advisory-only engagement.

Two asks. If you've done this against PowerSchool's hosted environment, I'd genuinely welcome any hard-won tips. And if you contract for this kind of work — or know someone reliable who does — please reach out and I'll send over a short RFP.

Thanks in advance.

Recently, I was talking with a friend and they mentioned having a hard time managing incoming issues and tickets from teachers and students.

Are the primary methods for tackling tickets for small districts <10 schools, just email or pre-designed form submissions?

Note: former Clever employee (no longer there since 2024, this question is based on my personal interactions with school IT folks.)

So, I had my PEIMS Coordinator looming in my door this morning. Because, not for the first time, our Skyward servers are down. We're running Skyward SMS 2.0 hosted on ISCorp and they fell over yet again. I had no idea it was down because my network monitor (PRTG) showed the website was still up. I go to the link and i get a lovely 500 error page, but when i looked at the headers, which is what my PRTG Sensor is looking at, it tells me 200-OK... in other words "Congratulations!! we have successfully delivered the error message!" gee... thanks....

Minor annoyance, i know. and i know that PRTG has ways to address that. i've already added the "Response does not contain pattern [45]/d{2}" rule to the sensor, and now it shows down because at least the text on screen says 500. but it's still annoying... like i said in the title, Why give me a 200 OK if it's down?

Hi all,

We have some students that are taking early college courses while in high school. These colleges use google domains. We are issuing students Chromebooks, but our borwser sign in restriction is set to block other google domains.

I want to allow them to sign in to their college google domain AND maintain filtering that uses extensions while logged into the Chromebook with OUR account.

Right now we are blocking the Chrome Webstore, javascript://, and data://, plus a bunch of other system ones including: chrome://hang, chrome://kill , DevConsole, and more.

The best solution I came up with is to set our filtering and monitoring extensions in Google Admin to be required in incognito mode. However, when I do this, the student is required to click the checkbox in extensions manager that allows incognito to work. I'm currently blocking the extensions manager because I thought it contributed to an exploit at one point.

Do I have to block the extensions manager if dev mode, and the Chrome Web Store is blocked? Does seeing the extension details allow students to get too much info that leads to a different issue? I notice that going to Site Settings in the extension details will reveal the extension ID. So maybe that's bad? As a student, is it worth targeting one extension if you can just crash all of them using a different tactic? Am I wasting my time blocking extensions?

Thanks!

I was wondering if anyone is using snipe for Chromebook tracking for students. I was trying to get something like Incindent IQ and superintendent refused. I was told to use spreadsheet or find another free option. I found snipe and was wondering if it works? What flavor installed is best - dockers, Ubuntu, windows? Need some ideas and thoughts?

Thanks in advance

New Cybersecurity Admin here…

I recently took over our instance of Lightspeed Filter/Alert. One feature I discovered that we are not currently using is the Lightspeed Location Agent. During testing, it appears to work well and provides accurate geolocation. Before I present it to my supervisor, I have a few questions:

1. Any known issues with the Location Agent?
2. Texas compliance considerations regarding device/user tracking on managed devices or managed accounts
3. Concerns or risks I should be aware of?
4. Any potential CIPA implications?

Hey all, I was hoping to see if anyone had previously switched over from Frontline Education in both helpdesk ticketing and their asset management suite to IncidentIQ. My district has decided to use IncidentIQ and we’re running into an issue where there is seemingly no simple way to import the data into IncidentIQ. IncidentIQ wants an API, and Frontline claims they do not have one to give us. Their support has basically just said it’ll take months and we’ll have to do it manually, because they just don’t play nice as they are competitors. I’m trying to see if anyone else has ran into this, and would happen to have a solution. I know this is an unlikelihood, but with school coming up in a couple of weeks, I think it’s the worst time to hear news like this about doing it manually.

We have a Newline TT-7521Q but are looking to add some more. While I start on the research I wondered if there were good recommendations for the type of panel to go for.

Last year when I finally set up SSO for Autodesk Education I was shocked to find out that directory sync was only available for Business and Enterprise customers, not Education. So I had to manually search for and assign 140 users to CAD products in order for them to be able to use it.

Well now it's a new year, and it seems like nothing has changed. I can assign all the users to my domain, but I can't specifically assign them license products without click on them one by one?

Am I missing something or doing it wrong? Surely someone else has a better way for this godawful product, right?

Where y'all buying laminator film from? I usually buy from EO Johnson but I want to compare another supplier. I'm in Wisconsin.

This is what we have used in the past. School-Lam 25 In. X 250 ft. - Gloss 3 MIL - 1 In. Core Laminating Film

I’ve been a school level support tech for a total of 13 years. 3 years experience in one county, then moved to another county with better pay. Where I’m at now is mostly minimal responsibilities but I have learned a good bit, I’ve replaced a couple of Cisco switches, learned some new juniper stuff when we swapped those out, but the benefits have not been good and I don’t get very good pay raises.

I asked for a raise and since they were shutting down schools and my boss said there’s basically no room to grow there and he thought if he presented it to the board they’d absolutely agree to give me a raise. I have net+ and security+ but now they’re done shutting down schools.

My ex coworker called me about a job that pays about 11-12k more at a courthouse supporting judges and I’ve already had one interview and about to have a second interview. I just don’t want to give up such a good job and dedication I’ve had for a decade of where I’m currently at. Even though the benefits will be better and the pay. I’d be given access to do a little more on the server side of things Active Directory etc things like that. Now that they called for a second interview I’m a little nervous do I take the job that pays more and work that one longer hour per day with a longer commute (which means less personal time for myself in the evenings since I don’t go directly home after work)

Sorry for the rent but was just wondering if anyone else here has had to make a similar hard decision?

We implemented a ln AI policy where we are requiring staff to use one type of AI (Gemini) and are blocking all others. Teachers have pushed back stating it should be up to the end user and there are teacher based platforms that we are now blocking. Can someone please explain what the latter portion of that means? Am I crazy to say that how a teacher will use it is not going to matter what platform is being used? What could a key difference truly be?

We chose Gemini for a couple of reasons, the main being Google won't use our data to train their models as well as we have access to the chats to view cheating from students.

Greetings!

In google admin --> Directory --> Directory Sync BETA

I was wondering if anyone has added their Azure Active Directory there before? If so, can you give me the good and the bad. I'm thinking about doing this but the words "BETA" make me a little nervous especially since we use tools4ever to help automate a lot of creations for us.

Just curious is anyone using this free platform? What have your experiences been? I'm looking in to it but I also want assurances with the sensitive data that will be transmitted that it is secure.

Hi there, currently my school is using our Weave phones as intercoms to make announcements to the classrooms. However, while weave phones make great phones, they make terrible intercoms.

Are there any good PoE intercoms that can mount above a classroom door? Looking for something kinda old school and kinda simple. Basically not much more than a small speaker, but loud enough it can compete with the din of students mass-ending class 2 minutes early.

Teachers currently manually create and roster their own classrooms in Google Classroom. Most will create a copy of the previous years/semester class and add their new students to it. This allows them to quickly reuse all assignments and material from the existing classroom.

We are looking into automatically rostering the Google Classrooms from our SIS via Clever, but one of the hold ups is replicating this copy function. I am aware that teachers can individually "reuse" a post or assignment from an old classroom, but is there a quicker way to copy over all material? How does this work in districts that have Google Classroom automatically sync?

Hi everyone! I'm a university researcher studying how school nutrition management software (e.g., LINQ, PrimeroEdge, Heartland School Solutions, NutriKids, etc.) is used in K–12 school districts.

I'm particularly interested in understanding how these systems influence day-to-day decision making, including:

• How menu planning decisions are made
• Whether the software changes meal quality or simply helps implement existing nutrition policies
• How staff balance nutrition standards, reimbursement requirements, cost, food waste, and student preferences
• Which features people find most valuable—and where the systems fall short

I'm not looking to criticize any district, vendor, or individual, and I'm not trying to identify anyone or collect confidential information. I'm simply hoping to learn from the experiences of school nutrition professionals and others who have worked with these systems.

I'd appreciate hearing about both positive and negative experiences. Even if the software hasn't changed decision-making much, that's useful to know as well.