Ronit Singh still remembers feeling caught off guard after learning the Fairfax County School Board voted to change the cellphone rules in the Northern Virginia district.
Singh is a student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.
He had never been interested in monitoring school board developments, assuming a lot of them are tied to budgets or transportation issues. But, when the board voted to change the cellphone policy, Singh was surprised.
He didn’t find out about the change until one of his friends told him at school.
It was that feeling that prompted Singh and two of his friends to launch Civic Cycle, an online tool that imports school board agendas from BoardDocs and uses artificial intelligence to produce summaries.
“I felt in the dark about FCPS and other school board decisions,” Singh said.
“So I said, ‘I don’t like this, and hopefully I can change it.’ And that’s what led me to make the app.”
It’s a free, web-based app that Singh said detects when a new school board meeting gets published. It then, using Claude AI, summarizes the meetings and posts the summary online.
The group reviews the summaries the tech produces “because we know that some people don’t trust AI fully, so every single meeting is human reviewed,” Singh said.
As of June, Singh said the site is able to produce summaries for Fairfax, Loudoun, Arlington and Prince William counties. However, it could be scaled to do the same for any school boards that use the BoardDocs agenda platform, he said.
“I really just hope that people can be more informed about what’s going on in their local counties, and through this heightened sense of information and knowing what’s going on. Hopefully, if they find something that they don’t like or they do like, that they can go out and speak up about it, and hopefully make a change that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to if they didn’t know what was going on,” Singh said.
The tech tool also features the option for users to sign up for an account, which would enable them to receive email alerts if there’s a specific topic they’re following, “so they don’t have to reopen the website constantly.”
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
漏 2026 草莓传媒. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
