The Kiski School in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania runs 24 hours a day. With students in grades nine through post-graduate living on campus, staff are responsible for knowing where students are not just during class, but through mealtimes, athletics, and late-evening dorm checks. That responsibility used to fall heavily on Brian Serbin, Assistant Head of School, who spent a significant part of his day chasing down information that should have come to him automatically.
Teachers logging into their SIS manually, and often not logging in at all
Before Orah, taking class attendance at Kiski meant teachers had to sign into Blackbaud, locate their class, and mark roll by hand. The process was cumbersome enough that many simply forgot. When that happened, Brian had to follow up: find the teacher, send an email, or dig through Blackbaud himself.
"Before that, it was a lot of weight on my back to follow up through Blackbaud or go find a teacher or email a teacher if a kid's missing," says Serbin. "And now it's set up that if a kid gets marked absent, I get an email, several other deans here get an email. So it's just much more automated now."
Kiski had been using Orah for dorm check-ins since early 2021, which helped with evening accountability. But the daytime picture, built through Blackbaud alone, stayed incomplete.
A Chrome extension that faculty adopted in the first month
In the 2024-25 school year, Kiski moved class attendance fully onto Orah. Rather than navigating Blackbaud's manual sign-in workflow, teachers now open a Chrome extension, click once, and their class roll appears. Serbin had anticipated some pushback.
"I was a little hesitant because we were using Blackbaud for class attendance," he says, "and that went away within the first week of school. I knew it wasn't gonna be a problem when after the first month I didn't hear any complaints from teachers."
Kiski's campus is cell phone-free from 8am to 3pm, so during the academic day attendance is teacher-driven. After hours, students use their phones to tap NFC tiles placed at 15 checkpoints around campus, confirming their location as they move between buildings. Together, these inputs give staff a continuous picture of student whereabouts across the full day.
Automated alerts where there used to be a manual search
With class attendance now on Orah, absences no longer wait to be discovered. When a student is marked absent, Serbin and a group of deans are notified automatically. What used to require manual follow-up through Blackbaud now surfaces on its own.
The same approach covers every part of Kiski's day. Orah handles class rolls, dorm check-ins, meal check-ins, and athletics, with 786 rolls completed in the past 30 days alone. Emergency readiness is built in too: Kiski has run 33 emergency rolls in the past six months, a regular part of their safety practice. Parents are part of the system as well, submitting passes directly through Orah when students need to miss class or leave campus, with excuse documentation handled in the same place.
"Parents were really quick to put in a pass early if a kid was gonna be absent, or to email us even quicker when they knew that we were using Orah," Serbin says.
What they're building toward
Kiski is expanding into student discipline management in the 2025-26 school year, currently handled through Blackbaud. Bringing discipline records into Orah would give deans a more joined-up view of each student in one place. "I think next year we're looking to potentially bring discipline under that umbrella as well," says Serbin. "That would definitely make my life easier and all of our deans' lives easier."
The school also values Orah's responsiveness to how boarding schools actually operate. "One thing I certainly appreciated at Kiski is Orah's ability to ask us for feedback on how things are working, and work with us and customise things as we need them," Serbin says.
Four years in, The Kiski School has moved from a patchwork of manual processes to a single system that covers students from morning classes through late-night dorm checks. See how Orah helps boarding schools account for every student, every part of the day.
