Ross School sits on the east end of Long Island, in East Hampton, New York. Like most boarding schools, it asks a version of the same question every day: where is everyone right now?
What makes Ross unusual is the physical answer to that question. The boarding houses aren't on the main campus. They're about a 15-minute drive away. With 265 boarding students, many of them from overseas, every departure after school, every weekend outing, every airport transfer, and every sports fixture has to be logged, approved, and visible to the right people.
Jessica Lu, residential life coordinator and Orah admin at Ross, manages that picture every day.
Fifteen minutes between home and class, and 1500+ passes in 90 days
The pass system at Ross has grown into something comprehensive over the years. There are more than 15 pass types, covering everything from local after-school trips that don't require parent endorsement, to day trips, overnight stays, and long-break travel that do. Event passes for sports fixtures and spring concerts are scheduled in advance. Airport shuttle passes are set up each term.
In the last 90 days, students at Ross completed 1500+ passes through Orah. In the last 30 days alone, 545 were completed.
Most passes are student-initiated rather than staff-initiated. The team previously used school-informed events for weekend shuttles; they have since switched to student-initiated for better accuracy. "We've started to organise a few things better," Jessica said. "We switched to student informed for better accuracy."
Part of what makes this volume manageable is the school's international student population. Of the 265 boarding students, 78 are from overseas. Many have parents or guardians in time zones where a 3pm approval request arrives at 4am or later. Some have appointed local agents rather than parents as their day-to-day guardians. Orah connects those agents directly into the approval chain, and as long as one parent or guardian is active on the platform, leave requests move without the school having to chase anyone. "As long as there's one connected parent, we haven't had that many issues," Jessica said.
What the start of each day looks like for the residential life team
Jessica begins each morning in the Activity Feed, reading through house parent reports from the night before. From there she opens Home Board: who is on a pass right now, who has a pending request, whether there are any after-school passes submitted between 3 and 5pm for her own house.
At 8:30am, the automated morning tap-in roll closes. Students arriving at the main campus check in at a kiosk; their phones have been collected by that point, so any student who hasn't tapped in shows up automatically in an email. Jessica forwards that list to all faculty: if you see these students in class, send them to the kiosk. In the last 30 days, the team completed 82 daily rolls. Dinner check-in runs on the same automated schedule every evening.
"The students are a lot more comfortable with it. They expect it now," she said.
Students also adapt to the pass system quickly. "It's pretty easy for the students to pick up. We usually get it really quickly, like within the first week." Within days of the school year starting, boarding students understand which pass type covers which kind of outing, which ones require a parent to respond, and which they can schedule themselves for sports and events.
The school has also run 7 emergency rolls in the last 90 days, with 13 in the last 180. The infrastructure for rapid headcounts is there and in active use.
Pastoral notes that feed quarterly house reports
While the pass and roll systems handle daily whereabouts, pastoral records build up the longer view. The team logs welfare observations, discipline records, merits, medical incidents, and academic concerns in Orah. In the last 30 days, they created 290 pastoral notes. Over the last 90 days, 579.
Four times a year, roughly every 12 weeks, each house parent writes a house report. Orah's AI pastoral summary is the starting point for each student. Jessica opens the student's profile, generates the summary for the reporting period, and uses it as the foundation for the house report template. If one incident risks dominating the summary, she adjusts the prompt to weight other entries more proportionally.
A newer signal is now surfacing in the Activity Feed: mentions of individual students in house parent posts are being linked to those students' profiles. "I think that's really cool," Jessica said. "That would be a cool thing, like if we could maybe summarise that for our house reports, that would also be huge, like for like smaller things that weren't necessarily recorded in the pastoral."
Elizabeth Gridley, an administrator in the Health Center, rated the platform a 10 in NPS surveys in both 2025 and 2026. "Very easy to use. Has been a tremendous help in improving communication and student care," she wrote in May 2025. A year later: "Easy to use. The extension allows me to do a better job with documentation in 2 systems." [lightly edited for clarity]
"Very easy to use. Has been a tremendous help in improving communication and student care."
Elizabeth Gridley, Administrator, Health Center, Ross School
Wellness and medication, coming into focus for next year
Ross is expanding its use of Orah's wellness and medication modules heading into next year.
Mood checks are being introduced gradually, running as structured warm-ups during weekly house meetings. At least one student has already submitted a mood check completely unprompted. The goal is for the wellness section to become a regular reference point, with counsellors' contact details visible and students and staff both comfortable using it.
The medication module is in active preparation for launch. The team is spending the summer doing a full stock count across all boarding houses, then running weekly meetings with the health office to ensure inventories and workflows are accurate before September.
When both are fully online, they'll sit alongside a pass system the school has run since December 2019 and a pastoral documentation workflow that produces 290 notes a month and feeds quarterly house reports for every boarding student.
