At Bishop John J. Snyder High School in Jacksonville, attendance management landed on Amelia's desk by default. As the administrative assistant responsible for knowing who was and wasn't at school each day, she inherited a process held together by printed reports, manual parent calls, and a workflow that required her to do most things by hand. It worked, but only when she was there. And for a school without a dedicated attendance coordinator, that left a lot of room for things to go unnoticed.
Attendance was a manual process that depended on one person being at her desk
Bishop Snyder runs FACTS as its student information system, and for years, the daily attendance process was largely manual. Teachers were responsible for marking rolls, but without an easy way to see who had and hadn't done so, Amelia regularly had to email teachers to check. Within the first two weeks of switching to Orah, those emails stopped entirely.
At the end of each day, Amelia would pull the attendance report from FACTS, review it manually, identify which students were unaccounted for, and then click through each name individually to trigger a notification call. On high-absence days, that list could run to 80 students. Each one required manual action before the call would go out.
The front office carried its own share of the load. When parents called the school directly to report an absence, the front office would log it, and the same student might end up handled differently depending on who picked up the phone. There was no single channel, no shared standard, and inconsistency had become the norm. And on any day Amelia wasn't in the office, the calls didn't go out at all.
Orah sits on top of FACTS and keeps both systems in sync
When Bishop Snyder started evaluating Orah, the FACTS integration was the first question on the table. For a FACTS school, any new platform needs to work with the SIS, not around it. Orah is built to do exactly that: it sits on top of FACTS as a school safety and attendance layer, pulling the class schedule in automatically each day and writing attendance data back to FACTS in real time.
“A lot of programs don’t play very nice with FACTS,” said Kindall Crummey. “I really liked the opportunity to have a FACTS integration.”
The two-way sync means both systems stay current without any manual step between them. Each morning, the schedule syncs from FACTS into Orah so every class, every period, and every student is already in place when teachers open the app. When a teacher marks a student absent in Orah, that data flows back into FACTS automatically. Reporting in either system reflects the same records. Amelia no longer needs to reconcile two sources or chase down whether attendance was logged in the right place.
Teachers adopted it in two weeks, mostly because of a Chrome extension
Rolling out any new system mid-year is a risk. Change is hard, teachers are busy, and anything that adds friction to an already full day will quietly get skipped. Amelia’s real concern going into the January 2026 launch wasn’t whether Orah worked. It was whether the teachers would use it.
Kindall started communicating the change to staff in December, giving everyone advance notice before the Christmas break. On the first planning day back in January, the school ran a 30-minute Orah training session with the Orah team present to answer questions directly. Within two weeks, Amelia’s follow-up emails to teachers about missing attendance had stopped entirely.
“The first couple of weeks, I had to send maybe two or three emails when we had switched to Orah. But then I didn’t have to send anymore. I think it’s the Google Chrome extension. I think that’s what they love the most. It just hangs out on the side of their screen.”
For teachers, taking a roll went from a multi-step process to a task that sits alongside whatever they already have open in their browser. What previously took several minutes of navigating a separate system can now be completed in under a minute. Across 45 staff members running six periods a day, that adds up to a meaningful return of classroom time every single week.
Automated notifications replaced 80 daily parent calls
Before Orah, the daily notification process was manual from start to finish. A previous front office staff member had spent years calling absent students’ parents by hand, working through a list of however many names came through that day. On heavy absence days, that meant making up to 80 individual calls.
When Amelia took over, she moved to an automated calling system, but the manual step didn’t go away. She still had to pull the report, review it, identify the right names, and click through each one to queue the call. If she wasn’t at work, the list didn’t get touched.
“I’d have to print out the report, look through the report, slide the names over, tell it which notification call I wanted it to send, and then send it.”
With Orah, the notification rules are configured once. When a student hits the threshold Amelia set, the alert goes out automatically, regardless of whether she’s at her desk. The daily time saved across the front office and admin team runs to an estimated 30 to 45 minutes on a typical school day, not counting the hours previously spent on manual calls during high-absence periods. More importantly, the process no longer depends on any single person being present.
Attendance patterns are surfacing students who would have gone unnoticed
One of the less visible changes has been what Orah’s attendance concerns feature makes possible. Before, there was no reliable way to spot a student who had been arriving late three times a week or quietly missing the same period across several weeks. Those patterns only surfaced at the end of a grading period, by which point an early conversation had long passed.
Now Amelia can see, by the third period of the day, whether a student is likely to show up at all. When a pattern starts developing, she flags it. Kindall is now routinely meeting with students whose attendance habits would have gone unnoticed before, catching issues weeks earlier than the old process allowed.
“I like the patterns early instead of waiting until the end of a nine weeks to realise, oh, so and so has had a lot of attendance issues this nine weeks.”
Students who were slipping through the cracks are now getting a conversation. “And before, because we didn’t have a designated person, I think a lot of them were slipping through the cracks. For sure.”
From hesitation to a mid-year rollout that worked
The biggest hesitation going in wasn’t the technology. It was the people. Change introduced in January, in the middle of a school year, to a staff that included teachers who had been doing things the same way for years.
“Change is hard. Nobody likes change.”
What made the difference was preparation. Starting the conversation with staff in December. Running a focused 30-minute training with Orah present to handle questions. Following up through the first month to catch any friction before it became resistance.
Pass management, parent accounts, and kiosk check-ins have since been added, extending automation into how tardies are logged and how parents communicate absences directly. The goal is one channel, one set of rules, and a process that runs itself.
