Everything Elira knows (the AI Knowledge tab)

The AI Knowledge tab: teach Elira answers, type notes about this week, keep the staff directory, and hold the calendars and flyers she shares with families.

The AI Knowledge tab (dashboard → AI Knowledge) is everything Elira knows about your school, in one place. Its address used to be /dashboard/announcements; that link still works and lands you here.

Teach Elira

Questions a family asked that Elira couldn't answer. The card shows how many are waiting and puts one question at a time in front of you — type the answer the way you'd tell a parent, press the button, and the next one takes its place. The family gets your reply, and Elira learns it for both the text line and your website chat.

You read and write in English, whatever language the family used. A question asked in Spanish or Arabic is shown with its English wording underneath, and the line under it says which language your reply will go out in. Write your answer in English; the family receives it in their own language, with every time, date, phone number and link kept exactly as you typed them. After you press the button the card shows what the family received. If the translation cannot be checked — a number or time did not survive it — nothing is sent: the learned answer is marked reply on hold, and Retry sending under it tries again. The family is never sent English for an Arabic question, and you are never told "sent" when it wasn't.

Changed your mind? Under *What Elira has learned*, Edit rewrites an answer for both the text line and the website chat (the family is not messaged again), and Remove makes Elira forget it. If an answer names a dismissal or start time that differs from your bell schedule on School info, a yellow note says so and which one to fix — Elira answers schedule questions from School info, so the two should agree.

Want to see the whole queue? See all N questions opens the list; click any row to jump to it. See Families can text the school a question.

"Is there school tomorrow?"

Two dates and a tick, and Elira answers the question families ask most instead of passing it to you. See "Is there school tomorrow?".

Tell Elira

Plain text about what's happening — *"Parent Teacher Conference, 1PM dismissal. Parents should get there by 3."* No form to fill in, just type it.

Put a date on it and Elira treats that note as that day's schedule, ahead of your regular school hours, then stops using it once the day passes. Leave the date blank for something that's always true ("Uniforms are required Monday through Thursday").

A dated note is also one of the things that lets Elira answer "is there school that day?" — see School hours & early dismissal.

Who's who

Your staff directory — who Elira can name when a family asks who to talk to. This is the same list as the one on School info; edit it in either place and both show the change.

Dates & documents

Calendars and one-off events share a single card. Both end up in the same place — a dated row Elira can answer from — so it no longer matters which half you start in. Upload a calendar to add many dates at once, or add one event at a time further down the card.

Calendars & documents

Upload your monthly or yearly calendar, a school-wide flyer, or any handout, name it, and it's stored with a shareable link — one current copy, always findable.

Upload a calendar as a PDF and review the dates we can read. Closures, half days, picture day and conferences come back as a list with the day of the week next to each date. Some layouts are only partly readable. Compare the list with your original before ticking the dates Elira should know about; dates that have already passed start unticked. Nothing is saved until you tick it, and until you do, Elira still sends those questions to your office.

Three calendar shapes are read, and a PDF often mixes them:

• Month grids with notes written in the day cells.
• Dated lists and tables — "9/7/2026 Labor Day - NO SCHOOL", or "Monday, September 7 … No School: Labor Day" under a "SEPTEMBER 2026" heading. The printed weekday is checked against the date; a row that disagrees is dropped, not guessed.
• Colour-coded days, read against the calendar's own key. A yellow Wednesday next to a yellow "Half Day (1:42 Dismissal)" swatch becomes a half day on that date. A colour the key does not print is ignored.

A bilingual PDF may repeat dates in Spanish. If the two versions disagree, confirm the correct dates with your office before saving them. An unreadable row or an unresolved calendar leaves some or all ordinary-day questions with your office rather than treating the calendar as complete. A date that applies only to one grade also needs that grade checked before it is used for another family.

Saved closures can answer questions about those dates. Answering that an unlisted Friday is a normal school day also requires a complete school-year calendar.

It has to be a PDF, and it has to be the original. A photo of a calendar, a screenshot, or a scan has no readable text inside it — only a picture of text. We won't guess at those, because a note that slides one column left turns "no school Monday" into "no school Sunday" and that goes out to families in your name. Export the PDF from whatever program the calendar was made in, or add those dates by hand.

A few more things it deliberately won't do:

• It refuses a page with no year printed on it. "January" alone could be any January.
• It checks dates against their printed weekday columns. A month with mismatched dates is refused; other readable months can still be reviewed. Ask your office for a corrected calendar or enter the confirmed dates by hand.
• It never moves a date. The dates come from where things sit on the page, not from a guess about what the calendar meant.

Handouts and flyers with no date grid are still just filed — name it, share the link, and add any dates below.

One event at a time (flyers & events)

Tryouts, open houses, picture day — add an event with up to 6 flyer PDFs (upload or paste URLs). Elira shares active events with families in the website chat; past events drop off automatically on their end date. An event with a time also tells Elira the schedule for that day.

Upload the flyer first and the form fills itself in. Elira reads it and drops the title, date, time, location and details it finds into the fields, then tells you what it filled and what's still blank. Check it against the flyer and press Add event — nothing reaches families until you save.

Flyers have to be a PDF. A PDF carries the flyer's own text — the characters as they were typed — so the date and time are taken from those rather than guessed at from a picture. A screenshot or a photo is only pixels, and a misread "7:00" becomes a time you never advertised. Got an image? Open it and choose File → Print → Save as PDF; on a phone, Share → Print, then share the result. In Canva: Share → Download → PDF. Nothing has to be uploaded to an outside converter.

A few things it will deliberately not do:

• It never guesses a year. Most flyers print "Friday, January 24" with no year, so the date is left blank for you rather than filled in wrong.
• It tells you when the weekday doesn't match the date — the usual sign that last year's flyer was reused.
• It says when the date has already passed, because past events drop off and Elira would stop answering about it.
• Anything left blank stays blank. Elira sends families to your office for details she doesn't have — she won't fill a gap with a guess.

Already typed something? Your text wins. The flyer only fills empty fields.

What Elira reads, and what she refuses to read

Reading a flyer or a calendar means sending that PDF to our AI model provider, at a United States endpoint, so it can pick out the title, date, time and location. Your agreement permits that for documents your school publishes — event flyers, academic calendars, family handbooks, school policies, bell schedules, menus, newsletters and blank forms. That is the whole category, and it does not need updating each time you have a new kind of document.

It never covers a document about an individual student. Not a registration document a family sent in, not a birth certificate, immunization record or proof of address, not an IEP or any special-education record, not a health record, and not a report card or transcript. If an upload looks like one of those it is refused before anything is read, and you'll see a note saying so — you can still add the event by typing the fields in, and nothing goes to a model.

That refusal is a safety net over the real rule, not a replacement for it: it works by reading the PDF's own text, so a scanned page it cannot read goes through unchecked. Please don't upload student records here.