At Brooklyn Friends School, an absent teacher used to mean missing attendance. Substitutes couldn't easily take attendance in Blackbaud, so it arrived by email, waited for someone to enter it, and sometimes landed on the head of Upper School's desk.
"When attendance doesn't skip a beat when someone's out, that says a lot for me about the platform," said Ray Shay, Director of Technology and Auxiliary Programs. "Whereas before, everything came to a halt."
Upper School attendance depended on teachers leaving their teaching tools
Brooklyn Friends adopted Orah in its Upper School to fix four problems, and class attendance compliance was the first. "Upper school class attendance compliance was really low," Ray said. "IB teachers work out of their IB specific platforms, not necessarily our SIS." Taking attendance meant stopping a lesson to log into Blackbaud.
Covered classes were harder still. "You would have to assign them as a teacher temporarily to the class, which would mean either the upper school office or the tech team was doing a whole bunch of work, and lots of it last minute," Ray said. "And it often didn't work." When it failed, attendance went out by email for someone to enter by hand. "Sometimes it was even the head of upper school was jumping in to enter attendance, and it was just not a situation you want."
Families had their own workaround. Reporting an absence, late arrival, or early dismissal meant remembering the right email address, "tough when you have kids in multiple schools and you're on the subway," Ray said.
Attendance in the browser teachers already have open
Orah's Chrome extension put attendance where Upper School teachers already were. "They already had the Chrome browser open to deliver their content, and they used the extension, and everything synced back to the SIS, which was so important for us," Ray said.
Colleagues covering a class and substitutes now take attendance the same way, through school Google accounts secured with multi-factor authentication and USB security keys. "It's very easy for our colleagues to jump into another class that they're covering," Ray said. Teachers adopted it quickly: "They were so happy to be off of doing it from our SIS that that training went really well."
Families report absences, late arrivals, and early dismissals in the Orah parent app, and Upper School office passes run through Orah. Coaches, many of them classroom teachers, then asked for the mobile app for their teams. "The challenge in athletics was everything we were feeling for classroom teachers, but multiplied," Ray said.
A rollout that cleaned up how the school records absences
Ray treated the rollout as a chance to fix problems that had been carried along for years, not copy them into a new system. "I think our school conflated excuse and excused," he said. "A reason doesn't make something excused." Once Orah made the data visible, the school had to agree on what each code meant. "Now that we're making them visible, we really need to have our house in order."
The school also rolled out in stages, starting mid-year with attendance managers and leadership. "We waited until we had our house in order and had all of the things working internally in Orah, then invited the families in," Ray said. Using Orah's template messaging, "most of them were able to get in without much troubleshooting."
5 to 10 hours back each week, and more accurate attendance
Upper School daily attendance and class attendance have both "dramatically improved in terms of compliance and accuracy," Ray said. Teachers completed 2,028 class attendance registers in Orah in the 30 days to late October 2026, each one written back to Blackbaud.
When Ray asked Upper School staff how much time Orah saves, "they were saying between 5 and 10 hours are saved" each week, time once spent on "paper and inefficient processes, even when they were digital." Office passes have been "a huge addition and just so helpful," he said, with 793 passes completed in the same 30 days. Between attendance and passes, the Upper School office now knows which students are in class and which are on a pass.
The stability matters as much as the hours. "In that upper school we've had three different people in charge of attendance in these three years," Ray said. "Having something that has provided the stability and not made it all about one person, in practice, has been really great."
In their own words
"When attendance doesn't skip a beat when someone's out, that says a lot for me about the platform. Whereas before, everything came to a halt. Having something that has provided the stability and not made it all about one person, in practice, has been really great."
Ray Shay, Director of Technology and Auxiliary Programs, Brooklyn Friends School
Next: connecting building access and off-campus lunch
Brooklyn Friends uses Verkada for door access and cameras, but "it doesn't understand schools the way Orah understands schools," Ray said. The team is weighing how to bring that entry data into Orah, or whether students should use Orah QR codes or combined cards to tap in. Upper School students can leave campus for lunch, so knowing who is in the building at any moment is the next step.
Ray's advice to schools starting out is to time it well. Brooklyn Friends launched mid-year almost by accident, and it worked. "I can't claim that we planned it, but I would love to plan that again."
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