The Benjamin School runs K–12 across three divisions in North Palm Beach, Florida, with 1,320 students and a Blackbaud SIS that administrators rely on every day. For years, the accuracy of that system depended on one thing: a single staff member who owned the attendance process and was the only one who could run it effectively. Everyone else worked around them.
A single-person dependency at the center of student accountability
The school had no period-by-period view of where students were. Teachers took attendance, but their records didn't feed into a live, centralized system. If an administrator needed to know which students were in which classroom at a given moment, there was no dashboard to check and no fast answer.
At the end of each day, someone had to manually reconcile Blackbaud against what teachers had reported. For Kevin Jacobsen, Dean of Students, the problem was not just inefficiency. The school was running a critical accountability process on "a manual process that only one person on our team could run effectively."
Jacobsen's goal was straightforward: replace the single-person dependency, get real-time period-by-period visibility into where students were, and have Blackbaud stay accurate throughout the day without manual reconciliation.
Building the right foundation before the full rollout
The Benjamin School kicked off with Orah in February 2026, starting with a focused pilot for grades 9 through 12. Beginning with the Upper School gave the team the space to configure the Blackbaud integration precisely: mapping attendance codes, enabling daily auto-sync, and building smart tags to handle senior off-campus privileges, where student permissions shift frequently throughout the year.
Orah's onboarding team worked alongside the school through weekly calls across February, March, and early April. By April 22, 2026, teacher training was complete and 69 staff members were live on the platform. The Blackbaud two-way sync was active, with attendance records pushing from Orah into Blackbaud and student and schedule data syncing back automatically each day.
1,892 rolls and 2,161 passes in the first 30 days
In the first month, teachers completed 1,892 attendance rolls across the Upper School's 380 active student profiles. Each roll was marked from the Orah mobile app or Chrome extension as class began, feeding into a live dashboard that shows exactly who has permission to be where, by period, throughout the school day. No phone calls to locate a student. No end-of-day reconciliation.
Staff also created 2,161 passes in the same 30 days, managing student movement across campus in the same system. Attendance roll completion sat at 80% in that first period and has continued to climb as the process becomes routine.
The school ran 2 emergency rolls in their first 90 days, verifying the system could account for every student quickly in an unplanned scenario. Orah holds 187 active parent accounts, keeping families informed alongside the school's internal records.
As for adoption, Jacobsen noted that "our teachers adopted it through the app almost immediately." He gave Orah's onboarding experience a 10 out of 10 in April 2026, and added that "it already feels like we've always done it this way, the transition was far smoother than we anticipated."
"Knowing where our students are at any given moment is the most fundamental thing we do. For too long, we were doing it with a manual process that only one person on our team could run effectively. Orah changed that completely. Period-by-period attendance is now happening in real time, our teachers adopted it through the app almost immediately, and our team has a live dashboard showing exactly who has permission to be where at any point in the day. The two-way sync with Blackbaud means our SIS stays accurate without anyone having to reconcile it manually. We've only been live a few weeks and it already feels like we've always done it this way, the transition was far smoother than we anticipated. The Orah team was present every step of the way. We're already looking at how to use it beyond attendance, from managing early dismissals to tracking student movement across campus."
Kevin Jacobsen, Dean of Students, The Benjamin School
Building toward a single system for all 1,320 students
The Upper School rollout was always the starting point, not the finish line. The Benjamin School plans to expand Orah to its Lower and Middle School divisions, putting all 1,320 students on the same real-time platform and creating a unified picture of student whereabouts across the entire campus.
The team is also exploring RFID-based check-in and check-out, which would add a hardware layer to the existing digital record. Early dismissals, which Jacobsen called out as the next workflow to bring into Orah, are on the roadmap alongside broader student movement management across campus.
The school's long-term goal is to fully eliminate paper-based attendance and remove reliance on any single staff member. The first 30 days suggest the foundation is already in place.
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