BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

MASSENA — The Massena Central School District will start using artificial intelligence (AI) to communicate with families and track attendance.

Community Schools Director Kristin Collarusso-Martin discussed the program with the Board of Education during their Thursday, Jan. 14 meeting.

She said the chat bot, named Raider, can be used to send announcements to the entire district. And people getting a text from Raider can ask it questions and it will answer them.

“If we have an announcement to get out to the district. We want to remind people it’s a holiday because USDA meal pickup would be Friday,” she said. “It will talk back and fourth. The more we use it, the smarter it will actually get.”

She said they are building a database “of all critical information we want Raider to start out with.”

In addition to that, they can set an attendance threshold for the Raider bot to send a text to parents asking if everything is ok if the student misses so many days.

In case the bot is unable to answer questions, or receives a serious report of something serious, the district has what Collarusso-Martin called “escalation teams” to handle that.

“Each building set up escalation teams so if someone asks a question the chat bot, Raider, isn’t able to answer, it goes to the escalation team,” she said, adding that something serious like a report of a student in crisis would go directly to a building principal.

She said they have the chat bot on a trial basis until June. After that, it’s $500 per building to extend the contract.