Every district has one. The secretary who has worked the front desk for thirty-one years and knows which bus covers the new development, which form goes to the county, who to call when a field trip check bounces, and which door is unlocked on Saturdays.
She retires in June. None of that is written down anywhere.
Some of it gets reconstructed painfully over two years. The rest quietly disappears, and the district becomes slightly worse at things nobody can quite name.
The debate about AI in schools usually asks whether a machine can do someone's job. In a front office, that isn't the question. The twelve questions she answers forty times a week (school hours, absence reporting, lunch balances, bus routes, the calendar) are not her job. They're the interruption between her and her job, which is the parent standing at the counter in tears and the kindergartner who missed his bus.
There's a second benefit, and it may be the larger one. Setting up an assistant forces a district to write down what only she knows. Someone has to decide the answer, in writing, and put it where anyone can read it. Thirty-one years of institutional memory stops being one person's memory and becomes the district's.
She should spend her last year teaching what only she knows, not repeating what anyone could look up.