Flagler County Schools on Aug. 26 demonstrated a pilot AI chatbot on the district website and a separate internal tool for staff research that searches uploaded policy and handbook documents. Presenters said both tools are configured to pull from district sources and cited an approximate annual hosting cost of roughly $6,000–$7,000 for the customer‑facing chatbot.

Why it matters: the chatbot can deliver instant, sourced answers for parents and reduce routine contact volume to central offices; the internal NotebookLM tool lets staff search board policy, the student code of conduct and other PDFs and receive passages and citations.

IT staff said the chatbot (branded internally as an 'Ask Flagler Schools' pilot) was rolled out first to administrators for testing, then to staff, and is now visible on the district website as a bottom‑right widget. A demo showed the bot answering calendar questions and returning links to source pages. The district will not publish a broad promotion until the team finishes testing and addresses out‑of‑date website content. Presenters said the bot is bi‑lingual and will show the specific source links for each answer so families can verify the material.

On the internal side, staff demonstrated a NotebookLM instance that holds PDFs and official documents for staff research; presenters said schools and departments can create notebooks for topics such as the digital learning handbook, code of conduct and board policies. NotebookLM returns highlighted passages and direct links to the underlying documents to support staff fact‑finding and policy comparisons.

Privacy and scope: presenters emphasized both tools are closed‑system implementations that search district content, not general web sources. They noted the need to keep source documents current and assign owners for web pages and PDFs because the chatbot will reflect whatever is live on the district site. The board discussed costs and alternatives; staff said other vendors and custom builds were considered but the current vendor offered integration with the district website and less maintenance overhead.

Next steps: staff will expand the knowledge base with PDFs (for example, board policy), add school sites incrementally, monitor chat logs and usage and present a cost/usage update if metrics rise. The district will continue guardrails and human review to reduce the chance of inaccurate responses.