A $57,590 human-shaped machine was headed for a high school on Seneca land. The district called it a first. Teachers called it creepy. Albany hit pause. The paper trail is more tangled than the press release.
Salamanca High School sits inside the only American city built entirely on a Native reservation. In June 2026 its board voted to buy a seated humanoid robot and an after-hours teaching program from Realbotix. Staff named the machine Sally. The company called the deal a flagship. By late July the whole plan was frozen. The fight that followed is not only about one robot. It is about who gets to test new machines on other people’s children, who owns the parent company, and what a “closed system” still remembers.
What the district actually bought
The contract attached to the board agenda put the price at $57,590. Realbotix lists the M-Series body at a starting price of $95,000, so the school paid a discount. The package had two parts: a physical robot that stays in a chair and moves its face, arms and hands, and Optio, a digital stand-in students could open on a laptop after class.
Superintendent Mark Beehler said the machine would sit in one classroom at first, with software limited to teachers and juniors and seniors. It would not walk the halls. He told reporters it used about as much power as a laptop. In a district statement the system “does not collect personally identifiable information,” “does not record video or audio,” “does not transmit data to the Realbotix Corporation,” and “operates using locally stored educational content.”
The same week, New York Focus reported a different detail that still sits on the page: students would give the robot a unique identification code so it could pick up yesterday’s chat. That is personalization. It is also a memory. Those two facts can both be true. They are why the privacy fight never died.
Sex Doll Manufacturer Realbotix Now Teaching New York School Kids. How Appropriate.Abyss Creations, LLC is the mother company of Realbotix, the producer of the infamous RealDoll sold for sexual intercourse.New York school district to become one of the first in the United… pic.twitter.com/An0DzyR3jh— SynCronus (@syncronus) July 19, 2026
Beehler framed the purchase as fairness. Rural students, he said, should not wait for New York City to try the tool first. The high school already runs Woz Ed courses built with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. About 1,300 students sit in the district. Roughly 32 percent identify as American Indian or Alaska Native. About 79 percent are listed as economically disadvantaged. For the superintendent, that mix was a reason to move, not a reason to wait.
“Having a difficult time programming an Arduino board? Don’t even know what an Arduino board is? Ask Sally and she can explain it.”
— Mark Beehler, superintendent, Salamanca City Central School District
He also said teaching is “a human-to-human process” and that no robot would replace a teacher in Salamanca. The district’s own early presentation to the board still called the unit a “tutoring platform.” That wording later appeared in the state commissioner’s letter.
Who built Sally
Here is the corporate file, without the slogan.
In April 2024 a Toronto firm then named Tokens.com bought Simulacra, a Las Vegas holding company, for about $16.7 million in stock. Simulacra’s world included Abyss Creations, the shop behind RealDoll, a line of life-sized adult figures sold for more than 25 years. Tokens.com later took the name Realbotix Corp. The adult line did not vanish. It was parked in a sister unit now called Intima LLC, which holds a majority stake in RealDoll. The school-facing unit is Realbotix LLC.
In July 2026, after the headlines hit, Realbotix published a structure note. It said the two limited companies keep separate staff, payroll, buildings, tools and product lines. It said the Salamanca body was newly built for school use and that no RealDoll worker, drawing or part went into it. It said a planned share deal with Nasdaq-listed Onconetix was meant to split the two businesses onto separate public listings in the second half of 2026. CEO Andrew Kiguel said some reports had “falsely connected” the school project to an adult-products business.
That is the company’s case. The other case does not require anyone to claim the school robot is a sex doll. It only requires the ownership chart. The same holding company that paid for a sex-doll maker in 2024 is the company that sold a human-shaped tutor to a public school in 2026. Investors were already being told the adult brand and the “family-friendly” brand would be split so money could flow to one without touching the other. The split is a business move. It is also an admission that the family tree matters to buyers.
Kiguel has said in other interviews that the firm’s larger aim is machines “indistinguishable from humans,” and that companion robots could answer a “loneliness epidemic.” Companion is not the same word as teacher. It is the same shape: a face that talks back.
“A robot built by a company associated with sex dolls has no business in our classrooms.”
— Melinda Person, president, New York State United Teachers
Person added a second line that does not depend on the adult brand at all: “Our students don’t need robots. They need real relationships with caring adults.” Lacey Pihlblad, president of the Salamanca Teachers’ Association, put the local worry in plainer words. The union, she said, was “concerned about the background of the company,” about “the security of the software,” about “whether or not the data will be stored, how it will be gathered,” and about “the recording capabilities.”
Those are not slogans. They are the questions a buyer asks before a camera-shaped person sits three feet from a sixteen-year-old.
What “closed system” still leaves open
A machine can be offline and still keep a file. A student code that recalls last night’s homework is a file. A flag that alerts an administrator when a child types “suicide” is a file. A 24-hour avatar that reads a photo of a worksheet is a file. None of that is the same as a live stream to Toronto. All of it is data about a minor.
New York already has student-privacy rules. The state education department still was not satisfied. On July 24, 2026, Commissioner Betty Rosa sent a letter. She wrote that the department “remains concerned about the effect that a humanoid robot may have within a high school classroom.” She noted the gap between the district’s promise that Sally would not deliver instruction and the board packet that called her a tutoring platform. Two hours after the letter, the district posted that the pilot was “on hold” while it worked through “enhanced student data privacy agreements” and talked with the community.
That pause is the latest hard fact, not a rumor. As of late September 2026, public reporting has not shown the robot in a Salamanca classroom. The contract was not described as cancelled. It was described as stopped.
Parents split in public comments. One mother, Makayla Eschbor, called the spend a waste and said she would look at home schooling. A student, Arleigh Chudy, said the school was giving classmates a supervised first look at tools they will meet at work. An education-technology professor, Ryan Schaaf, said ignoring the tools leaves graduates behind, and that the test only works if a human teacher stays in the room and watches the chat.
Both claims can be held at once: children will live with talking machines, and a talking machine is not a teacher.
Why this school, on this land
Salamanca is not a random pin on a map. It is the only incorporated U.S. city that sits entirely inside a reservation. The high school draws a large share of Seneca and other Native students. The Seneca Nation itself declined to comment when national papers called. Local people did not.
Sierra May Abrams, a substitute teacher and resident, said: “Out of all the schools in New York state, let alone in the US, they chose to experiment on Native American children yet again.” She pointed to the boarding-school years that took language and kin from elders and left a culture “struggling to stay alive.” Alyson Brown, a community health worker, Seneca Nation member and Salamanca graduate, said many families see “history repeating itself.” She named the Thomas Indian School on Cattaraugus territory. She said she saw “nothing positive” in putting the machine in class and worried about “the cognitive development of young minds in this exposure.”
Those sentences are not a proof that the board meant harm. They are a record of how the first test site looks from inside the town. American boarding schools were state and church projects that treated Native children as raw material. A 2026 STEM pilot is not a boarding school. It is still a pilot, and pilots need subjects. When the subjects are poor, rural and Native, people with long memories will say the word “again.” The honest answer is not to shout them down. It is to show why this district, and not a wealthy suburb with a louder lawyer, was the flagship.
Beehler’s answer is that his students deserve the new tool before the cities get it. Realbotix’s answer is that Salamanca is the start of a “new era” in which humanoid robots become “standard tools” in STEM rooms. Those two sentences explain the speed. They do not answer Brown’s question about young minds learning social life from a face that cannot care.
The wider machine, not just one chair
This story is local. The pattern is not.
Japan has set a public target of about ten million AI-equipped robots by 2040. A plant in Liuzhou, China, now claims it can finish an industrial humanoid on a short cycle. Oslo this month barred camera glasses from the school day after officials said children were being turned into unpaid extras in a recording business. See Oslo Bans Smart Glasses in Schools Over Meta Data Collection and China Humanoid Factory Goes Live: Robots Building Robots in Liuzhou. The same week, Planet Today tracked how schools and families collide when institutions move faster than consent, in Paris Nursery Case: Why 22 Children Spoke Before the School Acted and in the longer health file Massachusetts Family Loses Teen After School’s Secret Transition Fight.
None of those pages prove Salamanca’s robot is unsafe. They show why a parent in a small town does not treat “innovation” as a blessing by default. A camera in glasses, a file in a tutoring avatar, and a human-shaped torso in row one are different tools with the same habit: they sit closer to children than the company that sells them.
Researchers who study child development keep returning to a blunt point. Young people learn speech, trust and conflict from faces that can be hurt. A silicone face can smile on cue. It cannot be late, tired, proud or ashamed. Melinda Person called the plan “kind of creepy” and said a lifeless machine in front of students who are still learning how to deal with people “will lead to the dehumanization of the profession of education.” That is a union line. It is also an old teaching claim: the lesson is the person, not only the content.
On the other side sits a rural superintendent who watched rich districts buy gadgets first and decided not to wait. He said many schools ban AI and then watch students route around the ban. He wanted a locked box trained only on Salamanca’s own course list. He wanted students to open the box, see the wires, and learn how a body like that is updated and repaired. That is a real vocational argument. It does not erase the ownership chart or the boarding-school memory. It sits beside them.
What Albany did next
The pause did not end the file. On August 3, 2026, Senate Education Chair Shelley Mayer introduced bill S10671. Co-sponsor Kristen Gonzalez joined. The text would make districts and charter schools write a policy that bars AI-enabled humanoid robots from doing a teacher’s job: classroom instruction, one-on-one teaching, tutoring and grading. Mayer said learning is social, not only academic, and that replacing a person with a machine “shouldn’t be marketed to any school in the United States.”
Kiguel answered that the bill arrived before anyone in Albany had watched the tool work, and before Salamanca had even switched it on. “Making a sweeping statewide prohibition on that basis, before any facts or evidence exists, is a premature step,” he said.
That is the live argument as of this writing. One side says do not run a first-in-the-nation humanoid on children and write the law after the damage. The other side says do not ban a seated tutor that has not had a single school day. The legislature is due to look at the bill when it returns in 2027. Until then, Sally is a purchase order and a press kit, not a classmate.
What the record shows, and what it does not
Settled, on the public record:
- The board approved a $57,590 deal for an M-Series body and the Optio avatar.
- Realbotix Corp. is the renamed Tokens.com vehicle that bought Simulacra in 2024.
- Intima LLC, under the same roof, holds the RealDoll adult line. Realbotix LLC says the school unit is separate in staff, plant and parts.
- The district and the company say the classroom body will not record sound or video and will not ship student names to the vendor.
- New York Focus reported student codes that let the robot continue a prior talk.
- Commissioner Rosa objected to the humanoid form and to the “tutoring platform” language.
- The district paused the project on July 24, 2026.
- A state bill now seeks to bar humanoid robots from teaching duties.
- Native teachers and graduates in town tied the test site to boarding-school history. The Nation’s government did not issue a public line.
Not settled:
- Whether the pause becomes a cancellation.
- Whether the Onconetix split will, in fact, put the adult brand and the school brand under different public owners.
- What an independent audit of the “closed system” would find if a child uploaded homework photos for months.
- Whether a seated robot with a Western New York accent helps a reluctant learner or trains that learner to treat a script as a friend.
The last point is the one mass outlets often skip because it cannot be fact-checked with a press release. It is not a secret plot. It is a design choice. A company that sells companionship in one shop and lesson help in another is betting that a human face is the product. Schools that buy the face are betting that children can tell the difference. Some children can. Some will not want to.
Parents who want more adults in the building are not “anti-science.” Teachers who want a contract clause on AI are not Luddites. A superintendent who wants poor students to touch a $95,000 machine at a discount is not a villain. A Seneca graduate who hears an echo of the Thomas Indian School is not inventing the past. All of those people are looking at the same chair and reading a different history into it.
The useful question is smaller than the panic and larger than the brochure. If the next district signs the next contract, will the public see the source code rules, the data map, the ownership chart and the opt-out before the box is opened — or only after the first child has already said, “Hey, I’m student number 1234”?
Latest on this file (as of 25 September 2026): The Salamanca pilot remains on hold after the 24 July 2026 district notice and the state education letter. Senate bill S10671, filed 3 August 2026, would bar humanoid robots from teaching, tutoring and grading in New York public and charter schools when the legislature returns. Primary write-ups: New York Focus, 24 July 2026; New York Focus, 3 August 2026; Associated Press.
Original source thread for this article: local and national reporting from 10 July 2026 through 3 August 2026, led by New York Focus, 14 July 2026, with district statements at Salamanca CSD, company structure at Realbotix’s July 2026 operations note, union comments via NYSUT, and resident quotes in The Guardian, 25 July 2026.
Note for fact checkers: Corporate names, dollar figures, dates, and quoted speech above are drawn from named newsrooms, the district, the company structure note, and the state bill number. Claims about “history repeating” are attributed to named local residents, not offered here as a legal finding. Realbotix LLC’s statement that no adult-product staff or parts entered the school unit is included in full sense; common ownership of the parent is also included. Readers can weigh both. This page is a news analysis, not a court brief and not a product review.
Original article: Why a New York School Paused Its Classroom Robot on Planet Today 🚀
Automatically republished from the main blog.