District
Location
Students
Products
Key Features
Background
Belen Consolidated Schools serves a diverse student population across a vast geographic area in central New Mexico. As Superintendent, Lawrence Sanchez faced the challenge of ensuring educators and administrators had the necessary tools to streamline their workload and prevent teacher burnout while maintaining high-quality instruction as part of a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) initiative.
Challenges
Teachers and administrators were overwhelmed with routine tasks like drafting emails, writing recommendation letters, and creating intervention plans. On top of that, with the district’s adoption of the UDL framework for lesson planning, teachers now had to restructure their lessons to align with the new format. These additional responsibilities took up valuable time that could have been spent on instruction and student support.
Beyond the challenge of adapting to new district standards, the leadership team recognized that the sheer volume of documents, agreements, and policies their team has to navigate daily was overwhelming. On top of this, the district must also manage two separate collective bargaining agreements with unions, adding another layer of documents and policies to ensure the district is compliant and familiar with them.
Solutions
To tackle these challenges, the district leveraged MagicSchool’s AI for educators, specifically the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, to streamline access to essential information. By building Custom Chatbots in MagicSchool, the team created a system where staff could quickly retrieve answers from district policies, agreements, and other documents without sifting through endless files. Instead of wasting valuable time searching, educators and administrators could simply ask the chatbot direct questions and receive instant, accurate responses.
“With RAG-powered AI, our staff no longer spends hours digging through documents. The answers they need are available in seconds.” – Lawrence Sanchez, Superintendent of Belen Consolidated Schools
The MagicSchool implementation drastically reduced the administrative burden, allowing teachers and district leaders to focus more on instruction and decision-making than document retrieval.
Although the benefits of MagicSchool were clear, some educators were initially hesitant about integrating it into their workflow. To ease concerns, Sanchez and his team provided hands-on demonstrations, showing exactly how MagicSchool’s teacher tools could simplify tasks rather than complicate them. As teachers saw the time-saving potential firsthand, adoption grew significantly.
A key breakthrough came with MagicSchool’s AI lesson plan generator. MagicSchool enabled teachers to quickly generate UDL-aligned lessons, ensuring accessibility for all students while eliminating extra manual effort. By removing barriers to AI adoption and embedding it into existing instructional practices, the district not only saved time, but also enhanced the quality and consistency of lesson planning across schools.
"I can’t create more minutes in the day, but I would challenge anyone to tell me, ‘That’s not a time-saver.’" – Lawrence Sanchez
By leveraging powerful automation and RAG technology within MagicSchool, Belen Consolidated Schools enhanced operational efficiency and reduced teacher burnout, freeing up educators to focus on what matters most, student success.
