AI chat to support District 112 teens in pilot program

AI is more than just your stereotypical big-names of ChatGPT and Grok, offering up synopses of long articles and making up user-prompted recipes.

With a target date of Thursday, May 1, North Shore School District 112 plans to pilot Eliza Chat, an AI-powered mental health tool that will be available to support middle-schoolers, ages 13 and 14, who opt in to the program.

“I feel very strongly that generative artificial intelligence tools should be used in education,” Dr. Michael Lubelfeld, Superintendent of Schools for District 112, told The Record via Zoom of the decision to pilot Eliza Chat. “They should be used in mental health … with proper training, proper guardrails, proper consideration of ethics and safety.”

According to program co-founder Luke Olson, Eliza Chat, which has been in development for approximately 1 1/2 years, is largely a response to expanded mental health challenges spurred in part by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, the CDC reported that four in 10 students have persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness.

Olson and his co-workers’ professional backgrounds in AI led them to consider how the technology can be applied in a meaningful way as an early intervention and prevention tool.

His hope with the tool, he told The Record, is to help combat the mental health epidemic in “a safe, accessible, scalable way” and “hopefully help teens build that resilience and skill set necessary to face challenges in their lives.”

Eliza Chat is designed to complement traditional mental health tools, not replace them.

The bot, Olson and Dr. Lubelfeld said, was trained on clinical supervision from human psychologists and therapists. Eliza Chat’s advisory board is made up of national school psychologists, therapists and other clinicians.

Unlike traditional AI bots, Eliza Chat has the ability to escalate to humans — namely school officials and even law enforcement.

While messages reportedly are largely confidential, conversations that indicate imminent danger or harm for the student will be escalated for the student’s well-being. The bot also has the ability to flag to students within the chat if an in-progress conversation is being escalated.

This human element (both in the advising and training behind the AI and the ability to escalate to people) sets Eliza Chat apart from other standard AI models like ChatGPT and Grok.

And, with “therapy and companionship” now forming the No. 1 use-case for AI, according to recent findings published in the Harvard Business Review, district officials like Lubelfeld want to make sure that students aren’t turning to these standard AI bots for conversation and help — a motivating factor behind the implementation of therapeutically trained support tools like Eliza Chat.

BJ Watkins, director of product management at the Cook Center for Human Connection (which is distributing Eliza Chat), said Eliza Chat is also set apart from other generative-AI tools in its goals.

“Their goal is to keep people in the system and to get usage, get eyes in their system,” he said of many other generative-AI tools. “By keeping a human in the loop, (Eliza Chat’s) goal is to actually get you out of the system, and a lot of the feedback that it provides is, ‘Hey? Do you have a trusted adult you can talk to? Who?”

He continued, “Part of that goal is to be able to push the student out to have real-world conversations as well. And it will even role play that with you if you say, ‘Hey, I’m nervous about talking to my mom about this. Can you help me?’ (Eliza Chat:) ‘Sure? Let’s talk about it. I’ll be the mom, you be you. Let’s see, how would you approach that?’”

Lubelfeld said the district is fundamentally interested in its students’ wellness, but the July 4, 2022 parade shooting tragedy thrust the community into a new and urgent trauma-informed practices.

As a result, and in consideration of the mental health epidemic, Lubelfeld said the district has been seeking out partners in the field (such as ParentGuidance.org and Safe 2 Help Illinois) for the past several years, especially within the category of “secondary prevention,” which involves early detection and prompt intervention.

Of the approximately 200 students ages 13 and 14 in District 112, 10 students had signed up for the Eliza Chat pilot as of April 24.

They will be able to access Eliza Chat by logging into their school email address through a browser at app.elizachat.com or via the Eliza chat app on their Apple and Google devices.

On the start of the pilot, Lubelfeld said, “I’m doing this because I genuinely believe, in my decades worth of work and leadership, that this is revolutionary and has promise to improve society.”

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