LAPS News:
Los Alamos Public Schools (LAPS) Superintendent Jennifer Guy submitted the following letter this morning to New Mexico Secretary of Public Education Mariana D. Padilla asking that the New Mexico Public Education Department allow LAPS to pause the required use of Amira as the state’s K–2 early literacy assessment and dyslexia screener until the security and accuracy concerns surrounding the platform are resolved, and that LAPS be permitted to use mCLASS DIBELS 8th Edition in the interim.
The Superintendent’s letter to the Education Secretary:
July 31, 2026
Honorable Mariana D. Padilla
Secretary of Public Education
New Mexico Public Education Department
Dear Secretary Padilla,
I am writing on behalf of Los Alamos Public Schools to respectfully request that the New Mexico Public
Education Department allow Los Alamos Public Schools to pause the required use of Amira as the state’s
K–2 early literacy assessment and dyslexia screener until the security and accuracy concerns surrounding the platform are resolved, and that our district be permitted to use mCLASS DIBELS 8th Edition in the interim.
Los Alamos Public Schools has spent years following NMPED directives and building a literacy program
rooted in the Science of Reading and Structured Literacy. Our teachers, interventionists, and administrators have been trained to read DIBELS results at the subskill level—phonemic awareness, letter-sound knowledge, decoding, fluency—and to translate those results directly into Tier 1 adjustments and targeted Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions. A pause would not leave a gap since DIBELS is a proven, state-familiar alternative that is already in place and working. LAPS will report all data to the state during all appropriate benchmark windows.
While we share the concerns other districts have raised about instructional alignment, the concerns we are hearing most consistently and urgently come from our parents, and they center on questions that remain unanswered in a satisfactory way.
Amira requires students to read aloud to an AI system that records and processes their speech. Our
families are asking questions we cannot fully answer: Where are these voice recordings stored, and for
how long? Who can access them? Are they used to train or refine the vendor’s AI models? What
safeguards protect them from breach or misuse? A child’s voice is effectively biometric data, and parents
are rightly uneasy about it being collected and retained by a third-party system as a condition of a
state-mandated assessment. Until we can provide our district and families with clear, verifiable answers to
these questions, we do not believe the state should require children to submit their voices to the platform.
We were advised to turn off the recording feature but have been unable to do this at the district level.
Parents and teachers lose confidence quickly when assessment results contradict what they observe at
home and in the classroom. Speech-recognition technology remains imperfect with young voices,
developing articulation, and the speech patterns of bilingual learners. Because teachers are not
administering or scoring Amira sessions, and because the ability to correct scoring errors has been
removed at the state level, our staff and families may be presented with results that may be wrong and
teachers have no means to fix. That is an untenable position for teachers and a poor foundation for parent partnership, intervention planning, or special education decisions.
Our early-grade teachers and reading interventionists report that the assessment experience itself is a
barrier for beginning readers. Children become anxious or restless when the software fails to register their
responses or asks them to repeat themselves, and for students already struggling with reading, the
technology layer compounds the difficulty. LAPS has struggled with loading and bandwidth issues that have resulted in failed attempts to test and lengthy sessions. We are investigating issues with our network that may contribute to this situation. Often, the test results reflected a child’s comfort with a device and a
speech engine or the technology failures rather than the student’s actual reading skill.
Los Alamos Public Schools fully supports the Department’s goal of improving early literacy outcomes for
every New Mexico student, and our request does not reflect resistance to innovation. In fact, Los Alamos
has regularly supported and advocated for NMPED literacy initiatives. We believe that NMPED has made
great strides in improving literacy instruction in New Mexico and we remain committed partners with this
effort. This request reflects our obligation to families to protect their children’s data and to use an
assessment they can trust and our dissatisfaction with Amira. We respectfully ask that NMPED make
allowances with the Amira mandate and allow LAPS to pause the use of Amira until the vendor’s data
security, voice storage, and scoring accuracy practices have been independently reviewed and the
identified concerns resolved, and we have further research on the use of the AI platforms in early reading
assessment. We request that you authorize Los Alamos Public Schools to use mCLASS DIBELS 8th Edition to meet the K–2 early literacy assessment and dyslexia screening requirements during that period.
Thank you for your consideration and for your leadership on behalf of New Mexico’s readers. I welcome
the opportunity to discuss our district’s literacy data and framework, our experiences with Amira, and the
feedback we have received from our families, in greater detail.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Guy
Superintendent
Los Alamos Public Schools
