Student-Led Breakthroughs With Global Impact

Student innovation opportunities like the recent trip to Houston for the NAIS Symposium on AI and the Future of Learning are a direct result of the generosity and fundraising efforts that strengthen Saddle River Day School. Philanthropic support allows SRDS students to move beyond the classroom, transforming ideas into real-world impact and sharing their work on a national stage.

This year, SRDS students developed pilot projects that turn connectivity into capability for low-resource African schools, collaborating with educators in Nigeria at KNOSK and at the Malawi Children’s Mission, a school supported by an SRDS family. Their work includes Studia, a student-built, AI-powered learning management system that uses a RAG-based LLM to ensure students engage only with teacher-curated materials, and Writing Mastery, an AI-driven writing platform offering rubric-guided, low-bandwidth feedback that is now used in U.S. schools and is expanding internationally.

Upper School students Sophie G. ’27, Shailen S. ’27, Sridatta S. ’26 and Emmanuel Z. ’26 showcased these projects at the NAIS symposium, demonstrating full-stack development, ethical AI design and a commitment to equity and access—including solutions that run locally on Raspberry Pi devices. Theirs was the only student-led workshop at the symposium. Experiences like this exemplify how SRDS fundraising and community support directly fuel student learning, leadership and global engagement.