Clear Day’s AI is a tray of work, not a chat window with a personality. Ask it something and the answer cites the child, room or filed document it rests on, and nothing at all when the answer is a school-wide count with no single record behind it. Hand it a job and it runs on the server while your phone is in your pocket. Anything that would touch the outside world comes back as a draft with a dashed border, and it stays a draft until a person taps approve.
Re-enrollment reminders
5 notes, one per family, each written from that family’s own thread.
Nothing sends until you approve. Regenerating makes DRAFT 2; DRAFT 1 stays on the receipt.
There is no persona, no greeting, no character. Sunny states what it can do for the person holding the phone, does the work, and puts the result somewhere your staff can find it. The status line is a fact, like “1 draft ready” or “offline · 2 queued”, never a mood.
Everything Sunny writes wears a dashed border and a DRAFTED tag until a person approves it. Solid means real. There is no second kind of AI card, no “confirm” that means something different on one screen than another.
One card per job, not a scatter of tool pills, with named steps and a one-line result under each, like “Read the fall roster · 37 children · 31 families.” That line is the step’s own words, not a link list: tappable sources belong to answers, not to receipts. The receipt outlives the conversation and becomes the record of what happened.
Approving a draft is a claim on the record itself, not a setting or a prompt asking the model to be careful. Only one claim can win.
Approve twice, send once
Two directors tapping approve on the same draft at the same moment is a race the server settles: one wins the claim and the message goes out once. The other is told the slip has already been decided. There is no path where the same slip sends twice.
What runs is what you read
Your edits are limited to the fields the draft says are editable, and they’re re-checked before anything executes. If the draft changed underneath you between reading it and approving it, the approval is refused rather than sending something you never saw.
It expires into nothing
A draft nobody decides on is archived after seven days as “expired, never sent”. The one thing an unattended draft can never do is quietly go out on its own.
Type it, say it, or photograph it. Quick questions answer in the thread. Anything longer becomes a job that runs on the server: close the app, lose signal, switch to the iPad, and the job carries on without you.
Named steps, one line of result each: “read the fall roster · 37 children, 31 families”. If a step fails it says so plainly and the rest of the receipt survives. You can watch it or walk away.
A message, a filing, a queued outreach note: a write never happens on its own. It arrives as a dashed action slip that names every consequence in words, says plainly what it was proposed from, and puts “Edit first” next to approve.
Approve names the recipient, as in “Approve & send to 5 families,” never a bare Confirm. Reject keeps your reason. Edit makes DRAFT 2 and leaves DRAFT 1 on the record. Leave it alone and it expires without ever sending.
What was sent, what’s waiting, what ran, what was answered, and what was refused and why: all filterable, and each row reopens the whole receipt with the approver’s name on it. Built for the day a licensing visit asks.
Reopen any row and you get the whole thing back: the steps, what each one read, every draft version including the ones you replaced, who approved it, and when. A rejection keeps the reason your director gave. Directors see the school’s log; teachers see their own.
When an answer rests on a record, like a child, a classroom, or a filed document, it cites it as a chip that opens the real record. When the answer is a school-wide count with no single record behind it, you get no chip rather than a caption dressed up as a citation. A source you can’t open isn’t a source.
Teachers work outside. Field trips happen in places with one bar. An ask made in a dead spot doesn’t fail and doesn’t vanish. It’s saved on the device, shown as queued with its place in line and a cancel button, and it survives closing or force-quitting the app.
When the signal comes back, the queue drains in order, because the second ask usually only makes sense after the first. Every ask carries a key minted once and never re-minted, so a flaky reconnect that sends the same thing twice still only lands once. Photos queue with their ask.
Log that Theo’s inhaler was used at 12:10 on the trip
Queued · sends when back
File this signed permission slip
Queued · 2nd in line
Nothing is lost. Keep asking.
Preschools run on paper, and paper is where the data goes to die. Photograph a signed form, an allergy sheet, a page of observation notes. Sunny reads it, and the original photo is kept forever beside whatever it pulled out. Reading paper needs the Grow plan: one of Sunny’s five Grow gates, alongside the seven enrollment and retention skills, teacher briefs, opening the full brief page, and generating a licensing inspection-readiness report.
Forms become typed fields against a schema: trip name, child, guardian who signed, signature date, the consent boxes. Handwritten notes are transcribed verbatim, with anything genuinely unclear bracketed rather than quietly guessed.
Every field carries its own confidence. A low one is flagged for your eye and blocks the filing until someone confirms or corrects it. That’s enforced on the server, not just greyed out in the app. Your correction is stored beside the machine’s reading, never over it.
Filing is a slip like any other: it names every consequence (attach the image, store the fields, link the child’s record) and waits. Once filed, the fields answer ordinary questions: “who hasn’t returned the Riverside Farm slip?”
Where the limit is: filing links a document to records that already exist: a child, a family, an incident, an event. It will not create a child’s record out of a stack of enrollment paperwork. Read it, check it, file it against someone already on your roster.
Mention it in a staff channel or DM and it answers in the thread. That’s the one place Sunny speaks in the first person, always wearing an AI tag. If a parent is in the thread, it is refused before a single word reaches a model. Ask it for something consequential and the draft leaves for your tray: the channel never becomes an approval surface.
“Every Friday at 2, draft the newsletter.” Said once, it becomes a schedule with a visible next-run you can switch off. It fires on your school’s clock, not a server’s, and the output lands as a draft: putting something on a schedule never means agreeing to send it.
The morning brief is composed in your school’s local morning, not at a fixed hour in a timezone you don’t live in. That’s the difference between a useful brief and an empty one for anyone west of Chicago. It leads with what you plan the day around: who’s expected, where the ratio gets tight, the thread that waited overnight.
A handful of observations nobody asked for: an alum’s sibling nearing enrollment age beside a seat that’s opening, a tour that’s gone quiet, a room that keeps drifting over ratio on the same afternoon. At most three a day, each naming its sources. “Not now” quiets that kind for a month.
On your iPhone or iPad, hold the sun button and say it, like “who’s still out today?”, and Sunny answers out loud while you carry the snack tray. Same rules as typing: answers freely, drafts wait. Voice lives on the phone app; the web keeps its keyboard.
The facts you save, like a big sister at the elementary school or a family that camps every June, stay with the family, not the conversation. And on a family’s first, second, third and fifth enrollment anniversary, a reminder lands in the director’s task list. The suggestion on it: a hand-written note.
Quiet hours run 6pm to 7am unless you change them, judged on your school’s clock rather than a server’s. Drafts Sunny raises without being asked are capped at two pushes a day; the morning brief push is a separate on/off setting, not part of that cap. A job you personally handed off isn’t capped either, but it isn’t exempt from quiet hours: hand one off at nine at night and the push is dropped rather than saved up, so the draft is simply sitting in your tray in the morning. Nothing waits on the notification.
The approval machinery, the receipts, the offline queue, the morning brief card in your tray, paperwork completeness, and asking Sunny to plan a lesson week: all of it works on Run. Five things need Grow, the same as they do everywhere else in the product: the seven enrollment and retention skills, reading a paper form, the teacher brief for a newly enrolled child, opening the full brief page (Refresh included; the tray card stays on Run), and generating a licensing inspection-readiness report. Two asks reach past their own dedicated screens today: Sunny will plan that lesson week even though the classroom’s one-tap Generate button requires Grow, and it will answer an inspection-readiness question on Run too, with nothing to read yet, since only a Grow school can generate the report it draws from. We’re deciding whether to close that gap.
On Run or Grow
On Grow
Where Sunny does the most work
The drafts your team actually approves are mostly enrollment drafts: the tour follow-up, the waitlist match, the note to a family who left. That’s the engine Sunny feeds.
Sunny is part of Clear Day on every paid plan: nothing extra to buy, nothing separate to switch on.
That promise is about Sunny specifically. Two scheduled family emails elsewhere in Clear Day, the end-of-day report and the Sunday family digest, are AI-written and go out on a schedule with no per-message approval. Parents can switch the end-of-day report off in their own notification settings; the weekly digest has no such switch today. Named here rather than buried.
Questions about how Sunny behaves? Email [email protected]. A person answers.