Highlights
- Automated welfare check fires when a student misses two consecutive morning classes — no manual monitoring required.
- Moved from Google Forms and paper clipboard rosters to a live view of who is on campus and who has left.
- 856 passes completed in the last 30 days. 1,156 attendance rolls taken. 26 broadcast messages sent to parents.
- Using Orah since 2017 — started with leave management for a snow sports school, expanded to full class attendance this school year.
Background
Holderness School is a co-educational boarding and day school in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, serving approximately 300 students in grades 9–12, including around 270 boarders. Tyler Cabot, Dean of Students, has been at the school for thirteen years. For years, knowing who was on campus and who had left came down to a system that was entirely manual: Google Forms for leave requests, a paper roster per dorm, and clipboards stored in a bag in the head of school's executive assistant's office. When a student missed morning classes and nobody noticed, finding them meant making phone calls.
From Google Forms and clipboard dorm lists to knowing who's here
Holderness first adopted Orah in 2017, when the platform was still called Boardingware, to solve a specific seasonal problem.
"We're a largely snow sports school in the wintertime. That's what got us into Orah nine years ago."
Students regularly left campus for ski races and mountain days, and the dean's office needed a way to manage permissions and know, at a glance, who had gone off campus. The system before wasn't built for that.
"We were a Google Form meets clipboards of names of each dorm in a bag in the head of school's executive assistant's office. So we were pretty much analog."
The transition began with leave management, then added dorm check-ins and evening accountability. This year, Holderness moved to full class attendance in Orah, a step that made something new possible.
Students request their own passes. Parents approve with one tap.
The leave management setup at Holderness reflects the school's culture: responsibility sits with the student. Students submit their own pass requests in advance, specifying the destination, the dates, and the host. Parents receive an email and respond with one button.
"We require our students to request the pass, and then the parents are simply approving it or declining it. It's a green or a red button via email, literally, and that's as simple as it gets."
If a student plans to stay with a family friend off campus, the host receives an automated notification as well. Because Holderness families are spread across the country and rarely see each other, this gives parents a natural opening to connect.
"They actually get that information and they can reach out to that person. It sort of allows that communication."
The Blackbaud integration keeps everything consistent. Class rosters, student records, and dorm assignments pull automatically from Blackbaud into Orah. Attendance taken by teachers in Orah syncs back to Blackbaud as the record of truth, so the registrar and academic staff never have to leave the system they know.
An alert now fires automatically when a student misses two classes in a row
Moving to class attendance this year unlocked the change Cabot describes as the biggest shift in day-to-day student safety. When a student misses two consecutive morning classes, Orah sends an automatic notification to the dean's office. Someone from the team, or the health centre, follows up straight away.
"We've automated a notification if a student misses two classes in a row in the morning, we get a notification and somebody from our dean's office, our administrative assistant, or our health center will go and make sure that student is okay. And that from a student safety standpoint has been a big fundamental change from the day-to-day."
Before, a student could slip through a morning if the right person wasn't watching or an email didn't get sent. Now the alert is automatic, regardless of who's at the desk.
Holderness also added Broadcast SMS to send a one-time text to all parents. The motivation was straightforward.
"We signed up strictly from a state of emergency. We have the ability to text all of our parents. That was the why we went to it."
With families distributed nationwide, a single broadcast that reaches every parent by SMS is now part of the school's emergency readiness. One benefit emerged from a more ordinary place — because every weekend leave is logged in Orah, the kitchen team now gets an accurate headcount earlier in the week.
"I can give our kitchen staff a pretty clear number of who's gonna be gone any given weekend, and they're very appreciative of that. It was something that we would never have a super accurate number of until really Saturday night, and now we have a much earlier understanding of roughly how many kids are gonna be gone."
What they're building toward
Holderness is in its first full year of class attendance and already exploring the next layer: pastoral notes and a more structured approach to behaviour management. The school is also navigating a shift in its cellphone policy, moving toward phones off limits during the school day. That change has prompted the team to confirm that leave requests and welfare workflows operate just as well from a laptop, which they do.
