Know Where You Stand: A Quick Safety Readiness Check for Independent Schools

Independent schools are being asked to do more with the same systems they’ve always used: spreadsheets, static SIS reports, radios, paper rosters. Those tools were designed for record‑keeping, not for real‑time decision‑making when safety is on the line.

The School Safety Readiness Score is a short, five‑question checkup designed specifically for independent schools. It helps school leaders quickly understand how well their current processes support one simple but critical idea: knowing where students are, in real time, when it matters most.

Calculate Your School Safety Readiness Score

Answer five quick questions to see how prepped your school is to account for the students in your care throughout the day.

This scoring tool works best for independent schools with over 200 students.

Why we built it

In conversations with schools, a few themes keep coming up:

• During drills or incidents, it takes too long to account for every student.
• Attendance, passes, and check‑ins are spread across multiple systems or on paper.
• It’s hard to see who’s missing and why without a flurry of phone calls and emails.
• Attendance data is collected every day, but rarely used as a live safety signal.

The readiness tool turns those themes into five questions about how you:

1. Account for students in an emergency.
2. Measure “time to full accountability.”
3. See where students are meant to be vs. where they actually are.
4. Handle late arrivals, early dismissals, and off‑campus passes.
5. Spot risky attendance patterns before they become bigger issues.

Each answer describes a real‑world scenario. From fully manual, paper‑driven workflows through to a unified, real‑time view powered by attendance, passes, and check‑ins.

How it works

You select the option that best matches your current practice for each question. Behind the scenes, each response is scored from 1 to 4. Added together, they produce a readiness score out of 20, grouped into four tiers:

• At‑risk (5–8): Heavy reliance on manual processes and fragmented tools.
• Developing (9–13): Digital foundations in place, but limited real‑time visibility.
• Strong (14–17): Solid systems, with room to unify data and automate more.
• Leading (18–20): Close to best practice in how you manage attendance and safety.

The result is not an audit report or compliance checklist. It’s a conversation starter. This a quick way to see whether your current setup would support staff under pressure, or slow them down.

You can think of Northwood School’s 90‑second drill as what a “Leading” environment looks like in practice: multiple adults collaborating in one emergency roll, a clear view of who should be there, who is away legitimately, and who still needs to be found.

How this connects to Orah

Orah’s school safety platform is built around the idea that everyday routines can power real‑time safety:

• Period‑by‑period attendance
• Late arrivals and early dismissals
• Off‑campus passes and activities
• Student‑initiated check‑ins

When these routines flow into a single system, schools can:

• See who is on or off campus at any moment.
• Account for students faster in drills and real incidents.
• Understand not just who is missing, but why.
• Use attendance trends and alerts to catch issues early.

The School Safety Readiness Score helps you see how close you already are to that kind of environment—and where a platform like Orah could close the gap.

For some schools, the tool will highlight basic steps, like moving away from paper rosters. For others, it will point toward consolidating multiple digital tools into a single live view of student locations that can be used every day and in every emergency.

What schools can do next

• Share the results with your safety, operations, or leadership team.
• Use the five questions as an internal agenda for improving drills and daily workflows.
• If you want to see what “Leading” looks like in practice, use the built‑in call‑to‑action to schedule a demo and map your score to a concrete safety roadmap.

In a few minutes, the tool gives independent schools a clearer answer to a crucial question:

“If something happened today, how quickly and confidently could we say where every student is and confirm their safety?”