Episcopal High School sits 10 minutes from Washington, DC, and in recent years the school restructured its academic schedule to take advantage of that. On any given school day, anywhere between three and eight classes now leave campus mid-afternoon to spend two hours in the city and return. It is an arrangement that puts one clear requirement on the Dean's office: know where every student is, at every moment, including the ones crossing the Potomac.
Chris Davies, Associate Dean of Students, has been at Episcopal for ten years. His office has relied on Orah for almost all of them.
Three to eight classes leave for DC every afternoon, and sign-out takes three taps
Before Orah, tracking student whereabouts meant pulling from several places at once. Ashley McDowell, former Dean of Students at Episcopal, described the problem plainly: "All the information was in so many different places that when a kid didn't show up when expected, it was hard to check whether they were on leave or at basketball practice."
Today, with anywhere between three and eight classes leaving campus mid-afternoon for DC, that kind of ambiguity isn't workable. "We recently rearranged our schedule so that we could take advantage of being so close to DC, and so at this point, on any given school day, there's somewhere between three and maybe eight classes leaving in the middle of the day to spend two hours in DC doing something and then come back," Davies explains.
Orah resolves the coordination problem before anyone has to ask. "I can do this three-tap thing that signs out all of my kids, but also I see that this kid's in the health center, so I'm not waiting for this kid or trying to find this kid because it's so clear that this kid's on a pass," Davies says. "Knowing that he was in his English class when the teacher took attendance, and that's visible to all of us who need to find kids. It's just allowed us to know where people are, to find them more quickly."
In a drill or a lockdown, no one runs back into a building to look for a student
Episcopal is a 100% boarding school. Every student is the school's responsibility around the clock, and when something goes wrong, the response begins with one question: who is where?
"Being able to know where every kid is allows us to do, when it comes to things like we're going to do the drill or we have to do a lockdown, knowing where everybody is is incredibly useful," Davies says.
Before Orah, that question required physical verification. Someone had to check whether a field trip had actually departed, whether a student was in a classroom or had stepped away. "We're not doing the thing where you're running back into a building to see if maybe that kid is there and did this field trip actually go," Davies says.
McDowell put it in terms of how it changed the staff experience: "The faculty feel much more confident about knowing where our students are."
A weekend leave tool became the platform the entire school day runs on
Episcopal first adopted Orah, then called Boardingware, around 2011, primarily for boarding leave management on weekends. Students submit leave requests, parents approve or decline via a single email, and the school has a clear record of who is off campus, with whom, and when they are due back.
The shift to a digital system was smoother than staff expected. "The kids didn't even bat an eye. They love it. They think it's easier," McDowell noted. The efficiency gains showed up quickly in other ways too: student check-in at events like prom dropped from 45 minutes to 10 minutes after Orah was introduced.
The student-led process is now so embedded in school culture it is essentially invisible. "We have been using Orah for almost 10 years... our kids are so Orah fluent that they're able to do all of this stuff and they figure it out quickly because as you know, there is motivation for kids to get off campus," Davies says.
In the past year, Episcopal expanded Orah to include classroom attendance. What had been a system for tracking weekend whereabouts now captures student location from first period through evening check-in. "Our parents are so... it's so easy for them to do what they want to do and to know where their kids are," Davies notes.
Attendance records, weekend leave patterns, and conduct notes in one view surface students at risk of slipping through
Expanding into classroom attendance brought a less expected benefit: a clearer picture of individual students whose situation would not have been obvious from any single data source.
"We've got a better picture of kids who are kind of slipping through the cracks. But it's just a little bit here and a little bit there, so it may not all get put together. This kind of allows you to see a better view of each individual kid," Davies explains. "If the concern for safety is not something external, if the concern for safety is mental health, that I also think has been useful for us."
Staff who live in Blackbaud stay in Blackbaud. Attendance flows back automatically.
Episcopal runs Blackbaud as its student information system. The Orah integration means staff most comfortable in Blackbaud do not need to change their workflows. Roster and student data flow from Blackbaud into Orah at the start of each year; attendance flows back.
"The people who are working in IT, who are working in the registrar's office... they are really comfortable with Blackbaud. And they're able to continue working in Blackbaud. And while from the dean's office perspective, every class list is in there, you can go through and check on individual classes. It's all synced," Davies explains.
Davies himself moves between both, reaching for whichever is faster. "I find myself getting information that I know is in Blackbaud, and I actually just grab the Orah app because I know that has the kids' sport in there because we've tagged them that way."
In their own words
"I feel like knowing, really knowing how much you know where your kids are is really important. I think once you start using it, you're gonna find that you didn't have as good an idea of where kids were as you think you do."
Chris Davies, Associate Dean of Students, Episcopal High School
"If we don't know that our students are safe and they are where they're supposed to be, then we can't really do anything else. Orah has made that part of our job much more efficient and much more sound. I would 100% recommend Orah."
Ashley McDowell, former Dean of Students, Episcopal High School
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