The educational chatbot company caught up in a federal investigation involving Miami-Dade’s former superintendent of schools collected about $1.6 million from the county school system before collapsing in bankruptcy nearly two years ago.
Records released this week by the Miami-Dade Public School System shed light on the 2022 contract that AllHere, then a Boston-based software company, secured months after Alberto Carvalho left as Miami-Dade superintendent to run the Los Angeles school system.
Carvalho is on paid leave from his Los Angeles post following the Feb. 25 search by the FBI of his home and his school office in L.A. Federal agents also searched a Broward County home of a lobbyist who had ties to AllHere, which had landed a $6 million contract in Los Angeles under Carvalho.
Miami-Dade was one of multiple school systems across the country that hired AllHere to develop technology the company pitched as a high-tech way to reduce truancy. In Los Angeles, Carvalho personally promoted AllHere’s chatbot, branded as “Ed.”
But behind the scenes, AllHere was heading for financial collapse, and its founder, Joanna Smith-Griffin, was arrested on federal charges in the fall of 2024 for allegedly duping investors. She has pleaded not guilty.
The Miami-Dade contract was for $1.8 million, but the school system had not previously said how much of that AllHere actually collected.
Miami-Dade’s three-year contract with AllHere ended after two years as the school system got word from the company that it was shutting down in the summer of 2024. “The vendor was blocked on 6/21/2024,” Charisma Montfort, chief procurement officer for the school system, wrote to colleagues in September 2024 after AllHere filed for bankruptcy.
The Herald obtained the email and other records through a records request with the school system.
After the bankruptcy, Miami-Dade school administrators took the unusual step to legally bar AllHere from bidding on future contracts. Known as “debarment,” the process requires a hearing.
Audio of a Sept. 12, 2024, debarment hearing for AllHere offers some details about the failed contract that prompted the procedure.
“We received an email on June 18 advising us that the company had furloughed all of its employees,” Lisa Thurber, a schools administrator, said in the recording that was provided as part of the records request.
Thurber said the system was dealing directly with Smith-Griffin to launch the chatbot, which was working before AllHere folded. “We had over 3,000 users,” Thurber told the committee, which quickly voted to debar AllHere. “We are unable to communicate with those users.”
Asked how much the system had spent of the $1.8 million contract, Thurber said only a final payment of about $200,000 was held back when the company’s troubles became public. Thurber described other disruptions, including having to trash marketing materials promoting the chat option to families and having to remove a chat option from the school system’s app.
“That’s where we are,” she said.
Miami Herald staff writer Jay Weaver contributed to this report.
