Families who never answered their offer
The Lottery & offers tab lists families who were offered a seat and have not replied by the deadline. Elira never takes a seat back — releasing one is always your click, and it is recorded with your name.
Your lottery and your waitlist order live in SchoolMint. Elira does not run the draw, does not assign lottery numbers, and never changes anybody's place in line.
What SchoolMint leaves to your office is the part after the offer email goes out: noticing who never replied, and deciding what happens to those seats. That is what [Lottery & offers](/dashboard/lottery) is for.
Elira never takes a seat back
This is the important part. Elira checks every morning who is past their deadline and shows you the list. That is all it does. No overnight job frees a seat, and there is no setting that turns one on.
A seat is released only when somebody at your school clicks Release this seat and confirms. Before anything happens you are shown the family's name, the exact deadline that passed and where that date came from, and who is next on your waitlist. The release is recorded with your name and the date, so months later anyone can see who made the call and why the seat came free.
Which deadline a family is held to
Elira uses the registration deadline you published, from your School tab — the same date Elira reads to guardians on the offer call. A family is never cut off before the date they were actually given, and deadlines land at the end of that day in your own time zone, not at the hour the offer happened to go out.
If you have not set a registration deadline, Elira allows ten days from the offer and says so on the record.
If your registration deadline is not a date Elira can read — "Rolling", or "August 15" with no year — those families appear in a separate list headed Fix your registration deadline first, and Elira will not offer to release their seats at all. It cannot tell what date they were given, so it refuses to guess. Put a real date on the School tab and they move onto the normal list.
What releasing a seat does and does not do
- It does record, with your name and the date, that this offer went unanswered.
- It does not change anything in SchoolMint. Rescind the seat in SchoolMint as you do today. SchoolMint then moves your waitlist #1 up to Offered by itself — that promotion is SchoolMint's, not Elira's, and Elira never changes anybody's place in line.
- It does not message the family whose offer lapsed. Nothing is sent when you release a seat.
- It does not remove that family from your waitlist. They keep their place in line.
The family SchoolMint moves up
You do not have to tell Elira about them. On the next roster sync, the newly-offered family appears with their own deadline on this board, and their offer messages start on the normal schedule — the same contact hours, language and consent rules as every other family. That works mid-year too: a seat freed in November is picked up the same way as one freed in April.
A family who replies late
If a guardian answers after the deadline but before you release the seat, their answer is recorded normally and flagged as late — the seat is still theirs to take. If they answer *after* you released it, the reply is still written to the record so nobody can ever be told "you never replied", and your office is prompted to call them.