Radnor parents demand policy changes after AI video scandal
Parents of Radnor High School students who spoke at a school board meeting about the investigation into an inappropriate AI-generated video had a simple message for school officials: Do better.
“I’m here tonight because the district’s handling of its sexual harassment policy raises serious concerns about transparency, investigative integrity and compliance with Title IX — before any district-wide emails were sent to address concerns regarding AI-generated videos,” Morgan Dorfman, a Wayne resident, said Feb. 10 at a meeting of the Radnor Township School District school board’s policy committee.
News of an AI-generated video depicting Radnor High School students first surfaced in December, when Principal Joseph MacNamara emailed parents to address “concerns and rumors regarding an AI-generated video that was reported to depict several of our students in an inappropriate manner.”
A Jan. 16 letter signed by MacNamara, Radnor Township School District Superintendent Kenneth Batchelor, Radnor Township Superintendent of Police Christopher Flanagan then acknowledged that “during a small gathering off school grounds and outside of school hours,” students used a personal cell phone to copy publicly available images of other students and put the photos into an app that “animates images, making them appear to move and dance.”
But that letter also stated that police and county forensic teams were never able to discover the images, and therefore there was “no evidence shared with law enforcement depicted anything inappropriate or any other related crime.” And it cautioned against “the spread of rumors and misinformation on social media,” plus “speculation and false claims” that officials said could cause further harm.
Radnor police then issued a Jan. 23 press release stating that a juvenile had been charged with harassment following the investigation into the AI incident — causing confusion among some parents who thought there was no evidence of a crime.
In their comments, parents criticized the communications from school and law enforcement officials regarding the incident.
“The school had an admission from a student that AI-generated sexualized images of minors had been created and the evidence was destroyed — yet those facts were not disclosed in any of the district’s emails regarding this incident,” Dorfman said. “Instead, they minimized the conduct and framed the situation in a way that obscured the seriousness of what the school already knew.”
Adam Dorfman, Morgan’s husband, suggested that the school’s response to the incident sends the wrong message. “Students reported something so disturbing that they felt compelled to tell the adults in the room — that matters,” he said. “What they learn next is troubling: instead of protection, they experienced delay; instead of accountability, minimization; instead of safety, silence.” He also took umbrage with the fact that the school “labeled this an out-of-school issue, even though the harm followed these children into their school day, their classrooms and their lives.”
Radnor resident Luciana Librandi, who said her family was “directly impacted by the misuse of generative AI,” asked the school board to change its policies to include “specific, clearly defined protocols for responding to incidents involving AI-generated content.” She said the new policies should require immediate action once an incident is reported, firm timelines for contacting the police department and pursuing search warrants, and “clear safeguards for students during questioning.”
After the parents’ remarks, members of the school board’s policy committee discussed in detail how they might update the district’s bullying and harassment regulations. Generally, those policies apply to conduct on school grounds, but committee members acknowledged that may not be sufficient.
“We, like all of you, are learning that that nexus between what happens out away from school and how it can come into school and impact our students is one that is becoming more present, more pertinent [and] more frequent, potentially, as technology grows,” said committee member Susan Stern.
Michael Kristofco, the solicitor for the Radnor Township School District, pointed out that regulating conduct off school property can get complicated.
“If, for example, two students were at the King of Prussia Mall on a Saturday, and one was harassing the other … could the district discipline for that conduct?” he asked. “Well, if that’s all that happened, the answer would be clearly no … just because somebody attends school here doesn’t give the school district the right to police every aspect of their lives.”
But in comments that drew applause from meeting attendees, Committee Chair Jannie Lau said Title IX language is different from Radnor’s bullying policies when it comes to defining which off-campus conduct the school can regulate.
Harassment can violate Title IX — a federal statute that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance — if it “has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with a student’s educational performance,” Lau said. “If it has this effect of interfering with your right to get an education, then that’s enough.”
