A humanoid robot named Sally was due to take a seat in a Western New York high-school classroom this autumn, silicone skin, long brown hair, and all. Instead she is on hold.
A plan that had quietly cleared the Salamanca school board back in June turned, over the following weeks, into a public fight over student privacy, screen time, and the company that built her, and the state’s top education official has now asked the district to wait.
The Salamanca City Central School District sits on the Seneca Nation reservation in the state’s rural southwest and educates roughly 1,300 students, about a third of whom identify as American Indian or Alaska Native.
It announced the pause on Friday, after a letter from New York State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa.
“The Department remains concerned about the effect that a humanoid robot may have within a high-school classroom,” Rosa wrote, adding that many parents, teachers, and stakeholders were “understandably concerned about the presence of artificial intelligence technology in classrooms.”
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It is an unease that has followed AI into schools well beyond Salamanca.
Sally is the work of Realbotix, a Toronto firm that has spent the past year arguing that friendly, physical humanoid robots belong in the classroom rather than the lab.
The district paid $57,590 for the robot and an accompanying AI teacher’s assistant, a discount on the $95,000 list price, and planned to use her in high-school AI and robotics courses built around a curriculum from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Sally stays seated but moves her upper body and face, and the district says she carries no facial recognition, keeps no recordings, and runs on a closed network with no internet access.
Beyond the robot itself, the package included an AI assistant students could reach as an avatar on their laptops, offering homework help, feedback, and real-time translation in more than 100 languages.
What tipped a modest pilot into a statewide story was less the hardware than the maker’s lineage. Realbotix, formerly known as Tokens.com, acquired Simulcra in 2024, the parent company of RealDoll, which makes hyperrealistic sex dolls and companion robots.
Realbotix says the two divisions share no staff, premises, or technology, and that it is pursuing a full separation by September, but the association was enough to move the teachers’ unions.
“A robot built by a company associated with sex dolls has no business in our classrooms,” said Melinda Person, president of New York State United Teachers.
Superintendent Mark Beehler has defended the project as a lesson in living with technology rather than pretending it away.
“Many schools are taking the easy solution of simply banning it,” he said, “but I have found that students will find a way around most rules that schools put in place.”
He has stressed that Realbotix would not have access to personally identifiable student information, and that Sally was never meant to replace a teacher, only to sit alongside one.
In Salamanca itself, opinion had split, with some parents welcoming early exposure to AI as a route to future work and others asking why the district was buying a robot rather than hiring more teachers.
The department was not persuaded, at least not yet, and the concerns it raised were the ones that now shadow almost any classroom technology: data protection, screen time, and whether the tools are ready for children at all.
Half of American parents already worry their children lean on AI too much, and researchers have separately flagged the risk to students from general-purpose AI slipping into schoolwork.
Salamanca said it would use the pause to work through enhanced student data privacy agreements and keep talking to parents before deciding what comes next.
For now, Sally waits. Realbotix chief executive Andrew Kiguel struck a conciliatory note, saying the company wanted the programme to be “demonstrably safe, fully district-approved, and strongly supported by teachers.”
Whether Salamanca’s classrooms get their robot this autumn, or at all, is no longer the district’s to settle on its own.
