Springside Chestnut Hill Academy spans 62 acres in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with 15 buildings, public streets running through the middle of campus, and nearly 1,100 students ranging from 18 months to 18 years old. Managing who was where, at any given moment, had become one of the most time-consuming parts of the school day.
Four deans, 90 minutes a day, and no single view of campus
The problem was not lack of effort. Before Orah, SCH's upper school attendance process relied on teachers manually entering data into Blackbaud, deans following up on missed entries, and a daily reconciliation round at the end of each afternoon. Because upper school students are permitted to leave campus at certain times, and because public streets run through the property, the picture was never complete.
Peter DiDinato, Chief Innovation Officer at SCH, describes what that looked like for the four deans responsible for upper school: "That was what they were doing for, like, an hour and a half every day, trying to reach out to parents, figure out where people were."
Beyond the daily grind, incomplete data made it hard to catch patterns early. Were certain students frequently absent on test days? Was a string of latenesses adding up toward a disciplinary threshold? Without clean, centralised records, those questions required manual counting and spreadsheet work, and the answers often came too late to be useful.
One question in April 2024 set a three-year plan in motion
SCH's path to Orah started when DiDinato received a text from Head of Upper School Matt Norcini during a management team meeting. Norcini's message: "How can we improve the way that we do attendance?" A week later, DiDinato was at the ATLIS conference, where he met the Orah team for the first time. Within a short time after that, SCH signed on.
The school went live on Orah for upper school attendance in August 2025. The implementation came together over a handful of calls across the summer. DiDinato notes that the lift was smaller than expected: "It is not a big lift from your team. It's probably a couple of 30 to 45 minute calls, and maybe one or two in August, and you'd be up and running."
What attendance looks like now across 15 buildings and a 62-acre campus
SCH built a cross-functional team for the rollout, bringing together the head of upper school, deans, registrar, IT staff, and nurses. Peter noted that the breadth of that team was important for a successful rollout. The registrar, for instance, helped translate the threshold rules already in Blackbaud into Orah's alert system. Now when a student accumulates three latenesses in a quarter, that information surfaces automatically rather than requiring anyone to count.
Upper school students who have off-campus privileges use NFC tiles to check out, giving staff an immediate record of who has left and when. DiDinato describes what that change means in practice: "If they're able to leave campus and tap a tile with their phone, great. That means we don't have to have a fire drill and say, 'Where is Emily? Emily's not here.' We can just see in Orah that she checked out at this point, so we know she's off campus."
Parent adoption came quickly. SCH ran a communications campaign in late August and early September 2025 to announce the transition. According to DiDinato, the lead dean responsible for the project observed: "The transition was more seamless than I thought it would be. Any new app has a learning curve, but fortunately, a majority of SCH faculty and parents were on board right away. The automatic alerts definitely helped."
In the 30 days to June 2026, staff completed 3,123 attendance rolls and processed 4,393 passes through the platform.
Deans moved from daily reconciliation to student success conversations
The most significant outcome at SCH is what the deans are doing with the time they recovered. DiDinato draws on a pointed analogy: "If AI can do more of the mundane things, we can do higher level work. And I think that's the way we've experienced Orah this year. It's allowed us to have more white glove interactions with parents, more thoughtful strategic conversations about the success of students in their academic journey."
Patterns that once required manual effort now surface automatically. Attendance data connects to student outcomes in a way it could not when the records were incomplete or delayed. The deans' afternoons, previously consumed by reconciliation, are spent with families instead.
"The idea that our deans, our head of upper school can be doing strategic work with families around student success is way better than them contacting parents to find out whether or not their kid was supposed to be at school that day," DiDinato said.
A three-year roadmap to one platform across the whole school
SCH launched an emergency roll call pilot for the upper school in November 2025. The roadmap from there: bring middle school into Orah for attendance and emergency management in year two, then add lower school, dismissal, and visitor management in year three.
The school currently uses another system for dismissals. The goal is to replace it with Orah, consolidating four separate tools into one. DiDinato frames this as a parent experience question as much as an operational one: "We could effectively replace four different things with one. That's very appealing, not just for us internally, but trying to lead with what is the parent experience, what are we asking of parents."
The middle school kickoff is scheduled for June 2026.
The question DiDinato applies to every tool SCH considers is the same one many schools are asking: does this make it easier to focus on students? "Does this make our job easier and allow us to spend more time on what our mission is, and that's students. And Orah does that for us."
