A rural Western New York school district has paused its plan to place a humanoid robot in a high school classroom this fall, retreating within hours of a warning letter from the state education commissioner and mounting objections from the state teachers' union and local Seneca Nation parents.

Salamanca City Central School District, situated on the Seneca Nation reservation in Cattaraugus County, announced the pause Friday on Facebook, saying it needed to work through enhanced student data privacy agreements with the state and continue engaging community members.

The district planned to deploy a Realbotix M-Series robot named Sally, along with an AI teaching assistant named Optio, in 11th- and 12th-grade AI and robotics classes taught within a STEM curriculum designed by Steve Wozniak.

The retreat occurred the same day that State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa wrote Superintendent Mark Beehler, stating that her department "remains concerned about the effect that a humanoid robot may have within a high school classroom."

The $57,590 contract, approved at a June board meeting, was a discount from the M-Series robot's $95,000 list price, according to Realbotix CEO Andrew Kiguel.

Sally would have sat stationary in class, powered by a closed network with no internet connection, facial recognition, or recording, and preloaded with district curriculum.

Students would have logged in with an ID code to interact with an on-screen avatar for tutoring during and after school hours.

New York State United Teachers pressed the hardest against the non-human instructor.

In a July 23 statement, NYSUT President Melinda Person said "a robot built by a company associated with sex dolls has no business in our classrooms," a reference to Realbotix's April 2024 acquisition of Simulacra, the parent of RealDoll.

Realbotix has said its education and adult product lines share no employees, payroll, locations, or technology, and told New York Focus it is pursuing a Nasdaq transaction to separate the businesses at the ownership level by September.

Local opposition ran alongside the union's.

Substitute teacher and Seneca Nation member Sierra May Abrams told The Guardian that the choice of a district where roughly 32% of students identify as American Indian or Alaska Native amounted to another experiment on Native children, invoking the legacy of federal Indian boarding schools.

The district serves about 1,300 students, 79% of them economically disadvantaged.

Beehler had defended the pilot as a way to cross geographic barriers to emerging technology, arguing schools should teach the responsible use of AI rather than ban it.

State Sen. George Borrello, a Republican who represents Salamanca and surrounding areas of Western New York, backed the district, calling the program a chance to spark STEM interest in upstate youth.

The pause aligns Salamanca with the broader posture staked out by federal officials: Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Newsmax on July 24 that schools should embrace AI experimentation only with appropriate safeguards, echoing an April 2025 Trump executive order establishing a federal AI-in-education task force.

Kiguel said Realbotix "fully" respects the district's decision. No new deployment date has been set.