Wayne County Schools approves Lightbeam.AI pilot pending legal review to detect and redact PII in Google accounts

The Wayne County Public Schools Board of Education voted Feb. 3 to approve, pending legal review, a one-year pilot of Lightbeam.AI, a data-governance platform staff said will monitor adult Gmail and Google Drive accounts for personally identifiable information and automatically redact or flag data and documents.

Technology staff described Lightbeam as an AI-trained engine that will scan district Google accounts for patterns of PII, redact sensitive fields from emails or documents where appropriate, and produce reports staff can use to train users on safer data-handling practices. The system is intended to move the district from after-the-fact discovery to proactive detection.

Mr. Yancey presented the package to the board and said Lightbeamcould identify users transmitting PII and be used as an education tool; he emphasized staff will follow up with targeted training after detection. The board accepted the Finance Committeerecommendation to approve the item pending completion of a legal review of the vendor contract.

Board members asked that legal counsel review the agreement before final execution. Staff listed the legal-review milestone as a near-term follow-up task; the board recorded no roll-call vote counts in the public portion of the meeting and approved items K through N as a block.

Legal review was explicitly noted in the motion and in the meeting discussion; staff said the Lightbeam pilot will focus on adult user accounts (staff) rather than student accounts and will be used to reduce inadvertent data exposure and improve staff practices.