A tech company catering to school districts removed an AI chatbot named Raina from all student-facing platforms last month amid concerns that the companion-style bot could cause children to form unhealthy relationships with it.

Bend La-Pine Schools introduced the bot to classrooms earlier this year, but the district’s technology leader wasn’t aware of Raina’s Jan. 28 retirement as he defended the bot amid public outcry this week.

Parent protests over Raina dominated a Feb. 10 school board meeting. In interviews with OPB after that meeting, school district IT director Scott McDonald called the district’s approach to technology intentional, and supported student use of a generative AI chatbot without knowing it had already been disabled on student iPads by MagicSchool, the Boulder, Colorado-based tech company that created it.

A group of parents recently organized a petition to protest what they say is a pattern of too-fast adoption of educational technology in BLS, Oregon’s largest school district outside of the Willamette Valley. AI’s place in schools is widely debated nationwide, with some districts leaning into new technologies while others shy away. In Oregon, individual districts devise their own policies. Critical parents say Bend’s broad AI policy effectively puts tech companies in charge of deciding what is safe for children, though the district contends control is ultimately in teachers’ hands.

MagicSchool declined to share how many other school districts across the country had Raina in classrooms interacting with students. In an email, the company said the issues raised by Bend parents are the same ones that led it to scrap the student-facing bot.

“The concerns Bend La-Pine parents are voicing about how chatbots are normalizing unhealthy relationships during critical brain development are valid, and that’s precisely why we removed Raina from the student-facing platform last month, and it is now exclusively a teacher-facing tool,” said Kirsten Underwood, a MagicSchool spokesperson.

A ‘new best friend’

In its promotional videos, MagicSchool initially pitched Raina, a rainbow-haired character wearing a unicorn beanie, as a “new best friend” for teachers and students.

The school district’s top technology leader learned the student-facing bot had been shelved through OPB’s reporting this week, interviews and emails showed.

Before OPB contacted MagicSchool, the district’s IT director McDonald said in interviews that Raina was available to students when a teacher enabled it, though in reality, the bot had already been gone for weeks.

Raina’s usage was mixed, according to McDonald, but enough to “support investment in the tool.” MagicSchool’s entire platform of AI tools costs BLS $4 per student annually, according to McDonald. With over 16,000 students currently enrolled, he said, the annual cost of the platform is estimated at over $64,000.

McDonald disagrees with parents who say the district is rolling out new technology too quickly.

“We have been very much looking at all the tools that we can use intentionally, and we have certainly slow rolled that to the point of most AI being blocked on student devices,” he said.

The district does not allow student iPads to use a host of well-known tools like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, he added.

McDonald later confirmed that MagicSchool notified district officials of changes to Raina in a January newsletter from the company.

The bot is still available to teachers, the company said. But students can only interact with a version that is not personified and has a neutral, robotic voice.

McDonald wrote in response to emailed questions that teachers can still “create and assign a chatbot that does not draw from the live internet and instead responds using content curated exclusively by Magic School.”

At a packed school board meeting in Bend on Feb. 10, parents presented Bend leaders with a letter expressing their “growing concern” about “reliance on screens in classrooms, including one-to-one student iPads, educational technology apps, and student-facing Generative AI tools.” In roughly three weeks the parent groups gathered over a thousand signatures in support of their cause.

The parents, like the district’s tech leaders, didn’t know Raina had already been removed from student-facing platforms before the contentious school board meeting.

“The fact that the District was unaware of this roll-back further undermines the credibility of those who continue to claim the products given to our students are well vetted and safe,” said two parents leading the charge, Natalie Houston and Annelise Cappy, in an email statement to OPB.

Houston is a licensed professional counselor who works with children and adults at her practice in Bend.

“One of my biggest concerns with children interacting with chatbots is that children are naturally predisposed to believe things that aren’t real, especially if they are humanlike,” Houston said after the meeting.

‘Hitting a brick wall’

In 2023, the Oregon Department of Education announced guidelines around generative AI in schools, becoming the first state education agency in the nation to do so. But these guidelines aren’t rules. The state doesn’t track which AI tools districts are adopting, a spokesperson said.

State lawmakers putting arguments about youth access front and center are currently considering a bill to regulate AI programs, as the Oregon Capital Chronicle reported. The bill would require programs like ChatGPT to remind users more regularly that they are speaking to a machine, not a human.

BLS adopted its own AI policy last year, giving teachers broad leeway to decide what’s appropriate for students.

School board member Amy Tatom said at the Feb. 10 meeting that she was “definitely concerned” about technology in the classrooms.

She pointed to iPad misuse and its ability to distract students from work as a widespread problem in schools. She said the advisory group helping the district draft technology policy should involve more expertise, including parents such as Houston who are versed in potential pitfalls of AI.

“As someone who has participated in the IT stakeholder work group,” Tatom said, “it doesn’t seem like the knowledge and expertise of the people in that room is really being taken into account.”

Brendan Bouffard is a father with two kids in the district and an attorney for Fairplay, a national nonprofit focused on children’s online safety and privacy. He’s a part of the district’s IT stakeholder group. Like Tatom, he felt that while the district might be listening to concerns, it isn’t putting them into action.

“It seems like in every possible step, in every possible decision to reduce technology, we’re just hitting a brick wall,” Bouffard said after the meeting. “The answer is always: Throw more money into technology rather than putting money into human connection. And it’s very frustrating.”

Parents like Houston and Bouffard say they’d like to see more options for parents who want to scale back their kids’ tech usage, such as tracking iPad usage in school, and limiting screens in lessons.

The district said it is in the process of collecting data around student iPad use, but does not have a way of tracking individuals’ screen time.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/02/13/bend-parents-protest-ai-chatbot-tech-company-schools/