What works in Santa Fe

Santa Fe opted out of New Mexico's mandatory Amira AI reading assessment over biometric-privacy and accuracy concerns, joining five other districts in rejecting the voice-recording feature. The district, along with Los Alamos and four others, objected to a third-party vendor retaining children's voice recordings that could be used to train commercial AI models and flagged documented accuracy gaps for students with speech disabilities or accents. In response, New Mexico's Public Education Department introduced an opt-out policy allowing districts to use Amira without voice recording, revert to paper-based testing, or choose alternative assessments. However, the opt-out resolved this specific dispute without closing underlying governance gaps—the state still lacks statewide AI-procurement standards, AI-specific student data-privacy rules, or formal evaluation processes for education AI tools.