A resident, Henry Rees Hansen, urged the Franklin School Committee to explore use of an educational instance of a commercial generative AI model so administrators could monitor student prompts and potentially flag mental-health concerns.

Hansen said he had discussed AI practices with Mark Racine, former CIO of Boston Public Schools, and relayed that Google offers an education-specific instance of its Gemini AI model that provides an isolated instance for a school district and, the vendor says, does not use inputs to train broader models. Hansen suggested such an instance could be searchable by administrators for keywords related to mental health and could be used to identify students who may need outreach.

Hansen described the suggestion as a privacy-aware oversight approach; he said it would allow monitoring of student inputs in a district-controlled environment while limiting exposure of inputs to external model training. He noted he considers the vendor’s claim that inputs won’t be used for model training to be a vendor assertion and that privacy questions remain.

This was a citizen comment and no committee action or formal district policy change was taken at the meeting. Residents and staff at future meetings may pursue the idea, and the committee did not record any direction to staff at this meeting to adopt or pilot the technology.

Source: Public comment by Henry Rees Hansen during Franklin School Committee meeting.