PHOENIX – Arizona school board meetings can be long, sometimes six hours on a weeknight. Parents, teachers and even principals are often not in the room when they happen.
“Really important stuff gets discussed at these meetings,” said Shelby Grossman, a professor of practice focused on AI tools at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, who developed the chatbots. “And frequently, reporters are not attending.”
A new AI-powered chatbot, developed by The Beam, aims to bridge that information gap and increase transparency into school board policy making. Starting with eight Phoenix-metro area school districts — Tempe Elementary, Queen Creek Unified, Deer Valley Unified, Phoenix Elementary, Gilbert Public Schools, Mesa Unified, Scottsdale Unified and Peoria Unified — the tool lets people ask questions about what happened at the three most recent school board meetings in the district they’re searching. The bots pull transcripts directly from district YouTube channels. The Beam plans to expand chatbot coverage to the 74 school districts in Arizona that post meetings publicly.
Accessing the tool requires a free ChatGPT account.
Stress Testing the Chatbots
The Beam tested all eight bots with a set of four questions and compared every answer against the original transcript.
For example, we asked the bots: “Did school closures come up?” All the bots provided accurate responses.
In an attempt to trick the bots into fabricating information, we asked all of them, “Was anything said about a teacher being fired?”
The Tempe Elementary bot replied, “No – there was no discussion about a teacher being fired at the April 1, 2026, meeting.” A check of the transcript revealed this to be accurate.
In a Peoria Unified School District meeting, there was in fact discussion of a teacher being fired. The Peoria Unified bot accurately replied, “Yes — a teacher being fired (or facing termination) was explicitly discussed at the March 26, 2026, meeting, and it was one of the more serious formal actions taken,” accurately matching the official transcript.
The bot then followed up with specific timestamps, quotes and a summary describing Peoria Unified’s vote to adopt a statement of charges and issue a notice of intent to dismiss the teacher, Haley Beck, for sexual misconduct with a student.
Like Tempe Elementary and Peoria, the other six bots provided accurate responses as well, relevant to their meetings.
We did, however, identify one issue. When queried about the most recent meetings, such as, “What was the most controversial thing said and who said it?,” the bots occasionally provided information from older meetings rather than the most recent one.
“This is AI. It does make mistakes,” Grossman said. “We believe this will be a useful tool, but at the same time we encourage parents to verify responses against the YouTube videos.”
The Beam will continue to test our chatbots and publish the results in an effort to increase transparency.