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. A question that looks like it is about one child's own records is private by default: Only for this family (Elira does not learn it) is checked, so only that family gets your answer. If your answer is true for every family, untick the box so Elira learns it; you can tick it for another private answer.

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. The same English wording follows the question everywhere else your team sees it — the activity log and "Needs you" list on the dashboard home, and the hourly questions email — and a question whose translation is not ready yet is marked "English translation pending" rather than guessed.

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.

Family-only answers appear under Answered for this family only, not under what Elira learned. If a reply is on hold, use Retry sending there; Remove deletes the answer.

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.

Nothing you upload is shared until you publish it

Every calendar, document and flyer you upload is held privately first and shows as Waiting for your review. Only your team can open it — families cannot, and Elira has not read it.

1. Press Open and check every page → and look at the whole file.
2. If it says *We could not check this file automatically*, it is an image, a scan, or has pages without selectable text. Our check could not read it, so your look is the only check.
3. Tick This is a school-wide document for families. It is not about one student. and press Publish. Only then does it get a link families can open, and only then does Elira read it.

Discard deletes a file you decided not to publish — the stored file and its record, straight away. Files you don't publish are deleted after 14 days. If you forget one, it is removed for you 14 days after you uploaded it; upload it again if you still need it. A published file is never removed this way. A file whose text plainly reads like a student record — a Social Security number, a report card with a student ID — is refused at upload and not stored at all.

1 · Upload a calendar

Press Upload file to add your monthly or yearly calendar, a school-wide flyer, or any handout — a PDF, or a PNG, JPEG or WEBP image. Name it first. Once you publish it, it's filed with a shareable link — one current copy, always findable.

Publish a calendar 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. Under Check these before Elira uses them, compare the list with your original and untick anything that looks wrong — dates read from a digital PDF arrive ticked. Nothing is read until you publish the calendar. Dates that have already passed are left off the list. Select all ticks only the dates shown, so hidden past dates are never added. No dates are saved until you press Add N dates to Elira’s knowledge, 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.

Setup and AI Knowledge use the same calendar text reader as the front page. If an upload says the fault is on our side and retrying will not clear it, contact Support; your calendar does not need to be remade.

The original digital PDF reads best. Export it from the program the calendar was made in, or download it from your school site. A calendar that exists only as an image (PNG, JPEG or WEBP) can be uploaded and published so families can open it, but its dates are not read automatically — add them by hand below.

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 just filed once you publish them — name it, share the link, and add any dates below.

2 · Add a single event

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, publish it, and the form fills itself in. Once you publish it, 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. The original digital PDF reads best — export from the program that created it; in Canva use Share → Download → PDF. A scanned or outlined PDF can still be uploaded: it is marked *could not be checked*, so look at every page before you publish it. If you only have a photo or image, enter the event by hand.

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.

Delete removes the saved event or document and its uploaded file — the private copy and the published copy — when nothing else uses that file. If deletion fails, the item stays listed and an error explains how to retry. A pasted external link is not deleted from its original website.

What Elira reads, and what she refuses to read

Reading a flyer or a calendar — which happens only after you publish it — 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's text plainly reads like one of those it is refused at upload: it is not stored at all, nothing is sent to the model, and no dates or fields are filled in — you can still add the event by typing the fields in. The page says so under the upload, and names what it found (for example *a date of birth* or *a Social Security number field*) so you can tell which file it was.

That check is a safety net, not the rule: it reads the PDF's own text, so it cannot recognise every record, and it cannot read an image or a scanned page at all. That is why nothing you upload is shared or read until a person at your school opens it and publishes it — the box you tick says it is a school-wide document and not about one student. Please don't upload student records here.