AllHere Set Meeting With LAUSD Leaders Months Before Landing $6.2M Chatbot Deal

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This story was reported by Mark Keierleber and written by Kathy Moore

Months before the Los Angeles school board approved a $6.2 million contract with AllHere, an AI chatbot maker that is now being investigated by the FBI, top district leaders were invited to a meeting with its CEO and a consultant, who is a close friend and associate of schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

The Jan. 18, 2023, calendar invite for the gathering at the district’s downtown headquarters, billed as “AllHere Meeting,” was shared with The 74 by a former central office staffer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. 

The AllHere contract in question is widely believed to be connected to the high-profile raids on Carvalho’s home and district office in late February. 

The 74 has not received confirmation on whether the meeting took place or what specifically may have been discussed, but the invite suggests district administrators were consulting with AllHere principals five months before the contract was voted on.

It also calls into question public statements by Carvalho, who was placed on paid leave Feb. 27, that he had no role in AllHere’s selection. He said the education technology venture represented by his longtime friend and business associate Debra Kerr won the job based on legally mandated bidding. Kerr called the Jan. 18 meeting.

AllHere filed for bankruptcy in September 2024 and its founder and CEO, Joanna Smith-Griffin, was later arrested on charges of identity theft and defrauding investors. 

The 74 filed extensive public record requests with Los Angeles Unified School District in September 2024 for documents related to the AI chatbot contract, including all proposals, bids or submissions made by AllHere and any other companies vying for the work. The request also asked for documents detailing how the district evaluated AllHere’s qualifications and determined that the small Boston-based firm with little to no artificial intelligence experience was capable of carrying out the contract.

On Feb. 11, 17 months after those requests were filed and two weeks before the FBI raids, a senior paralegal in the general counsel’s office sent The 74 an email asking if we still wanted the documents.

Through his attorneys and a spokesperson, Carvalho issued his first public statement Tuesday since the FBI probe exploded into public view. The Los Angeles Times reported that he denied any wrongdoing, pointed out that “no evidence has been presented by prosecutors supporting any allegation that (he) violated federal law” and pressed to return to his job.

“Mr. Carvalho remains confident that the evidence will ultimately demonstrate that he acted appropriately and in the best interests of students,” said the statement that was issued through the spokesperson and the law firm of Holland & Knight, according to the Times. “We hope the school board reinstates him promptly to his position as superintendent.”

Kate Brody, the vice president of communications for Schools Beyond Screens, a 2,000-member LAUSD parent and educator advocacy group, sees the moment differently. Her group has called for an audit of all the education technology contracts entered into under Carvalho, saying they lack independent research into their efficacy and now is “the time to peel this whole thing back and take a look, not just at what’s going on with AllHere, but the inappropriate amount of access that all these companies have.”

“The evidence is increasingly clear that this technology is not really for the benefit of the students,” she told The 74. “Our big question has been for a long time — whose benefit is it for?”

Carvalho has not been accused of any wrongdoing and authorities have not provided details about the investigation. The warrants underlying the searches of the superintendent’s home and office remain sealed. 

In a statement released after the Board of Education placed Carvalho on paid leave and named an acting superintendent, the district said that while it understood “the need for information, we cannot discuss the specifics of this matter pending investigation.”

Kerr could not be reached for comment and attorneys for  Smith-Griffin did not respond to requests for comment. District spokesperson Britt Vaughn could not be reached for comment.

Kerr and Carvalho

Federal agents also searched Kerr’s Florida home. Her ties to Carvalho go back to his days leading the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, a period of time in his prominent career that is also now reportedly under investigation. According to the Los Angeles Times, grand jury subpoenas have been issued seeking records from the district’s inspector general and a fundraising foundation overseen by Carvalho while he was the Miami schools chief.

Kerr was a key player in executing the failed contract between AllHere and the nation’s second-largest school district. In addition to her being in a position to call senior staff to a meeting at district headquarters, according to the calendar invite, Kerr’s son Richard, a former AllHere account manager who began working for the company in 2022, told The 74 in September 2024 he pitched AllHere to LAUSD school leaders.

Among The 74’s long-unanswered public records requests were any conflict of interest disclosure forms filed by AllHere, its employees, third parties involved in the contract or LAUSD personnel.

The location listed on Kerr’s hourlong invite to discuss AllHere was the office of LAUSD’s longtime chief spokesperson Shannon Haber, who has since retired. Other invitees included senior advisor of communication Bích Ngọc Cao, senior director of engagement and partnerships Antonio Plascencia Jr.. and director of development and civic engagement Sara Mooney. 

Mooney is also the former executive director of the LAUSD Education Foundation, the district’s separate fundraising arm whose leadership team includes Carvalho. Attempts to reach Haber and the other meeting invitees, which also included Vaughn, the district spokesperson, and marketing director Lourdes Valentine, were unsuccessful.

Earlier calendar entries shared with The 74 show Carvalho had an hourlong meeting scheduled with Kerr and someone identified only as “SN” on Oct. 21, 2022, about eight months after he took the $440,000-a-year job in Los Angeles. The meeting was scheduled for 12:30 p.m. at a place “to be determined.”

In 2022, Kerr was busy consulting for and promoting AllHere in multiple Florida cities, according to her Facebook page. She also did consulting work for Rethink Ed, a New York-based company that provides social-emotional and wellness resources. In May 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national school shutdowns, Miami-Dade announced it had hired the company to support students with autism and other related disabilities during remote learning. 

“We appreciate partners like Rethink Ed which assist us in empowering these very deserving students with a variety of innovative and helpful tools to successfully engage in distance learning,” Carvalho said in a statement when the Miami-Dade contract was announced.

Roughly two years later, when Carvalho was leading LAUSD, the firm was hired there.

Other calendar entries shared with The 74 show that right before the scheduled meeting with Kerr that October Friday, Carvalho had back-to-back interviews lined up with reporters from The Wall Street Journal and Politico. Later that day, he was scheduled to attend a retirement dinner for Michael Hinojosa, the former Dallas schools superintendent, at the Ravello restaurant at the Four Seasons in Buena Vista Lake, Florida, near Orlando.

Two days before Carvalho was due back in Florida for that celebration, the Miami-Dade Board of Education voted to award AllHere a $1.89 million contract to provide text-messaging support to students struggling with attendance, academics and social-emotional issues. The SMS tool was a precursor to its AI-powered chatbot. 

Carvalho told the Los Angeles Times he had nothing to do with AllHere getting the three-year deal in Miami although the newspaper reported that the bidding process began while he was still in charge. 

Two years later, in November 2024, the district would move to bar AllHere from doing business with Miami-Dade schools for a period of three years after the ed tech company abandoned its contract.

The 74 filed public records requests on Sept. 13, 2024, asking for copies for all of Carvalho’s daily calendars going back to his first date of employment at LAUSD. The district has yet to produce them.  

AllHere then gone

Also invited to the Jan. 18, 2023, meeting set up by Kerr was AllHere’s Smith-Griffin, who six months after landing the L.A. schools deal was charged with defrauding investors of nearly $10 million.

Her case, which involves allegations of securities and wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, is being heard in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The Harvard graduate and former middle school math teacher  pleaded not guilty in December 2024. Conferences on her case were postponed three separate times in 2025 to allow the parties time to work on a possible disposition. The last was a 60-day adjournment on Sept. 25, 2025, and there’s been no activity in the file since then.

By the time Smith-Griffin was arrested at her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November 2024, the company she founded in 2016 had been forced into bankruptcy, unable to pay its debts, including a disputed $630,000 commission claimed by its largest creditor: Kerr.

Carvalho and Smith-Griffin spent considerable time together in the spring of 2024, appearing at multiple ed tech conferences touting “Ed,” their sunny chatbot that was seen as catapulting LAUSD into the K-12 AI vanguard. They said communicating with Ed would provide an unprecedented level of support, accelerating learning and strengthening well-being for students and families, many of whom were still struggling from the pandemic. 

“He’s going to talk to you in 100 different languages, he’s going to connect with you, he’s going to fall in love with you,” Carvalho raved at the April 2024 ASU+GSV conference in San Diego. “Hopefully you’ll love it, and in the process we are transforming a school system of 540,000 students into 540,000 ‘schools of one’ through absolute personalization and individualization.”

None of that materialized for the district, whose enrollment has since fallen to 389,010 students and which is now facing major budget woes and a potential teachers strike.

After AllHere shuttered and a former company manager-turned-whistleblower told The 74 that students’ private data  was not properly protected in the push to launch Ed, Carvalho vowed to investigate. He promised a task force of outside experts who would dig into what went wrong with the AllHere contract and determine how the district could strengthen its bidding process to avoid future debacles.

Carvalho told the Los Angeles Times in July 2024, he expected the task force to complete its work in about three months. Some 19 months later, there’s been no further news or shared task force findings. The district’s independent inspector general’s office launched its own investigation around the same time. 

However, the office’s 2024 and 2025 reports to the Board of Education make no mention of AllHere. In 2024, the IG opened a total of 62 cases, closed 54 and identified nearly $2.5 million in waste. In 2025, it opened 38 cases and closed 43, including some from previous years, though none appear to have involved AllHere. No financial waste was identified in 2025. 

Inspector General Sue Stengel stepped down at the end of 2025 after three years. The office did not respond to a request for comment. 

Equally elusive is what happened to Ed or the underlying tech tool for which LAUSD paid AllHere $3 million out of its $6.2 million contract. Although it’s been reported that school officials said the district was not financially harmed in the contractual fallout, and it received the services and products it spent several million dollars to acquire, it’s difficult to substantiate that.

When Carvalho unveiled Ed at a major March 20, 2024, celebration attended by Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, he said the chatbot would be available “immediately”  to 55,000 students in 101 elementary, middle and high schools as part of a pilot program. By the fall, Ed was supposed to go districtwide. 

Much later, that reported group of Ed testers had been winnowed down “to a small number of schools (that) tried it out, each with a sample of students and parents.” In July 2024 after the district “unplugged” Ed in the wake of AllHere’s demise, the Los Angeles Times reported that it was “hard to find students, teachers or other staff who have used any part of the system since its official launch.” 

Absent human interactions with Ed, the district has been slow to produce documentation from AllHere of services rendered. Among the public records sought by The 74 in September 2024, which LAUSD now appears ready to provide, are “purchase orders, invoices, and payments records related to any and all goods and/or services provided by AllHere.” 

Staff reporter Amanda Geduld contributed to this report

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