Sally has long dark hair, movable arms and hands, and no working legs. She sits in a fixed base in a classroom in Cattaraugus County and, until last Friday, she was on track to start helping Salamanca High School students with robotics and technology coursework this fall. Superintendent Mark Beehler had already picked out her first job. "Having a difficult time programming an Arduino board? Don't even know what an Arduino board is? Ask Sally," he told local reporters, describing her as a hands-on aide for exactly the kind of technical question that stumps a single teacher juggling thirty students. The board had approved the purchase. The curriculum, called WozEd and built by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, was already loaded. Then word got around about who makes Sally, and the district hit the brakes.
The company is Realbotix, based in Las Vegas. Its website sells the pitch familiar to anyone who has watched a school district get talked into new classroom technology: personalized, patient, endlessly available instruction from a system that never gets tired or irritated. What the pitch does not lead with is that Realbotix and Intima LLC, a company that holds an ownership stake in RealDoll, one of the country's largest manufacturers of hyperrealistic sex dolls, are corporate siblings built on the same underlying robotics and AI platform. Salamanca families did not learn this from the district's procurement paperwork. They learned it from neighbors, from a WAMC radio report on July 28, and from each other, in the same week the robot was supposed to arrive.
A Robotics Curriculum, Sold On A Wozniak Name
Beehler's reasoning for picking Realbotix in the first place was not unreasonable on its face. The district already used WozEd, the robotics and technology curriculum built by Wozniak's team, and Realbotix's robots come pre-loaded with it. Buying a robot from the same company that built the curriculum the school already ran looked, from a purchasing standpoint, like buying the matching hardware for software you already own. Beehler was explicit that Sally was never meant to replace a classroom teacher. "There is no possible way a robot can replace a human in a school," he said, framing her strictly as a technical assistant, a way to answer the kind of question a robotics teacher gets asked twelve times a period by twelve different students at twelve different skill levels.
That framing did not survive contact with the district's own community once Realbotix's ownership structure became public knowledge. Melinda Person, president of New York State United Teachers, the state's teachers union, put it in terms that needed no follow up question. "A robot built by a company associated with sex dolls has no business in our classrooms," she said, adding that the union's objection went beyond the specific corporate tie: "Our students don't need robots. They need real relationships with caring adults." Joplin Ficek, a 2024 graduate of the district who now works at a daycare, made a similar point from a different angle, telling reporters that young kids "need more interaction with the children than having some robot raise our kids."
Realbotix's Defense, And Why It Did Not Land
Realbotix did respond, and its statement is worth reading closely because it is technically precise in a way that still manages to dodge the actual question parents were asking. The company said Sally is a "newly manufactured, purpose-built educational unit with no modified hardware," and that Realbotix LLC and Intima LLC "maintain their own management, personnel, payroll, facilities, manufacturing operations." Every one of those claims can be true simultaneously, and none of them addresses the part that made parents uneasy in the first place: the two companies share a platform, a founder lineage, and a brand history, and no amount of separate payroll systems changes what the underlying robotics and conversational AI stack was originally built to do. A school district can run its own due diligence on a vendor's finances. It cannot easily un-know that the same engineering team behind a child's classroom aide also built the company's flagship adult product line.
The district's response, once the connection became impossible to ignore, was to pull back rather than dig in. Salamanca announced on Facebook that the Realbotix pilot was on hold while officials "work through enhanced student data privacy agreements" with the New York State Education Department and meet with community members directly. The district was careful to lay out, in the same statement, everything Sally was never going to do: no collecting personal student information, no recording audio or video of interactions, no sending data back to Realbotix, no open internet access, and no ability to pull answers from unvetted generative AI services outside the WozEd curriculum. Those guardrails may well be real and enforceable. They also arrived only after the backlash, which is exactly the sequence that makes a privacy promise sound like damage control instead of a design principle.
The State Was Already Asking Questions
New York State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa had raised her own concerns before the pause was announced, focused specifically on data privacy protections and the role a robot would play as an instructional platform in a public classroom, separate from any question about who manufactures the hardware. That a state commissioner was already scrutinizing the arrangement suggests the corporate ownership story accelerated a reckoning that was already underway rather than manufacturing one from nothing. Regulatory pressure and a public relations crisis arrived from two different directions and landed on the same pilot program in the same week.
None of this means Salamanca acted carelessly by district standards. The board went through a normal purchasing process, picked a vendor tied to curriculum it already trusted, and got a straightforward answer wrong: nobody flagged the sister company. That is the actual lesson here, and it is a boring, unglamorous one compared to the headline. School procurement offices evaluate price, curriculum fit, and vendor references. They rarely run a full corporate ownership trace on every AI hardware supplier bidding for a contract, and there is no standard checklist item that says "confirm the manufacturer's parent group does not also sell adult products." Los Angeles Unified learned a version of this same lesson in 2024, when a chatbot vendor it paid three million dollars for collapsed into fraud charges within months. Different failure mode, same underlying problem: districts are buying AI systems from companies whose full picture nobody on the school board has time to research.
Every AI vendor selling into a school district should have to answer one question in writing before a contract is signed: who else owns a piece of your company, and what else do they make? Salamanca found out the hard way that nobody was asking.
What Happens To Sally Now
The pause is not a cancellation. Beehler's public position has stayed consistent even as the district works through the state's data privacy review: Sally is a tool for a robotics classroom, not a teacher, and the district still wants to use her once the paperwork and the community conversations catch up to where the purchase order already was. Whether that argument survives a second round of school board meetings, with parents now aware of exactly whose engineering team built the product sitting in their kids' classroom, is the open question nobody in Cattaraugus County has answered yet. WazEd curriculum and robotics electives are not going away regardless of what happens to this specific vendor. The pilot's fate depends on whether Salamanca families decide the technical case for Sally outweighs how uncomfortable it feels to learn where the rest of her manufacturer's revenue comes from.
Why Every District Should Be Taking Notes
Realbotix is not a fringe operator selling knockoff hardware out of a warehouse. It is a real robotics company with a real, functioning enterprise product, court records and public statements show it operates with normal management structures, and its founders built a legitimate curriculum partnership with one of the most recognizable names in American technology. That legitimacy is exactly what makes this story useful. Salamanca did not get fooled by a scam. It got surprised by a completely legal, completely disclosed corporate structure that simply never came up during a routine purchasing decision. Any school district shopping for an AI classroom assistant this year is one Google search behind Salamanca's parents, and most of them do not know it yet.
The Verdict
Salamanca City Central School District paused its $60,000 AI robot teacher after parents and the state teachers union discovered its manufacturer's sister company owns a stake in RealDoll. Nobody accused the robot itself of doing anything wrong. The failure was a purchasing process with no step for checking who else profits from the platform.