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By Jesse Jones, The Paper. — Parents across the Duke City pushed back against Albuquerque Public Schools’ use of artificial intelligence to record, analyze and store elementary students’ voices without explicit parental consent. The district listened and is now changing how it handles those recordings.
At the center of the debate is Amira AI, an automated speech-recognition reading tool. While the New Mexico Public Education Department funds and requires it for kindergarten through second grade, APS has expanded its use to weekly headset-based recordings for third graders and 4-year-olds in pre-K. During an Aug. 19 APS Board meeting, Jody Hoffman and other advocates presented nearly 800 signatures calling for an immediate halt to the program, citing concerns about biometric privacy, potential bias against non-native English speakers and an opt-out form that does not mention “AI.” The school district took those concerns seriously.
In an email to APS parents yesterday, Deputy Superintendent of Leadership and Learning Randy Mahlerwein said the district raised the concerns with Amira. The company has since deleted all APS student voice recordings from the previous school year and earlier and provided the district with a certificate confirming the deletion. Mahlerwein also said APS will now delete Amira Assessment recordings within 48 hours.
An Aug. 4 NMPED memo gave districts an out from Amira’s voice-recording feature. Under the department’s guidelines, districts can use paper tests instead or apply for a waiver to use a different assessment. While Santa Fe and Los Alamos school districts used those options to opt out, APS chose to continue with Amira and double down on the weekly voice recordings.
Albuquerque City Councilor Stephanie Telles, whose child attends elementary school, echoed parents’ concerns Aug. 20 at the Local Government Coordinating Commission, a joint public body made up of city councilors, county commissioners and school board members. She said the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, could allow third-party developers to collect and store student voice recordings without parental consent to train commercial AI models, potentially bypassing local sanctuary guidelines meant to protect immigrant families. School Board member Rebecca Betzen said she opposes Amira, adding, “We should be working on teachers and students, and not computers.” School Board Member Heather Benavidez said she did not have much to add and defended deferring to administrators as “utilizing [power] in a more subtle way. LGCC Chair and Councilor Nichole Rogers pushed back, saying Benavidez’s response “didn’t feel subtle” to families concerned about the program.
School board members will begin drafting a student well-being framework at their Sept. 2 meeting in response to community concerns. The parent coalition is urging families to request paper alternatives and is seeking a meeting with the superintendent to call for the immediate deletion of children’s biometric data.
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