Five minutes before dismissal on one of The Windward School's campuses, a fire alarm went off. The afternoon routine, which ran on printed lists, PA announcements, and walkie-talkies, had no way to recover.
"The entire process got short-circuited on one of our campuses," said Bernie McCormick, Windward's CTO. "It led to bedlam and kids getting home late and lots of tears and phone calls. And ultimately, that was somebody at the school saying, 'There has to be a better way to do this.'"
Three campuses, five ways home, one 40-minute window
Windward serves about 964 students across three campuses: a Lower School and a Middle School in White Plains, and a full-service building in Manhattan. None of them dismiss students the same way.
"I have three different campuses, I have buses and car lines in two, and I have a Manhattan campus where I have buses, car lines, Ubers, and people picking up and kids self-dismissing," Bernie said. "And I need all of that to run at the same 40 minutes in three different geolocations at the same time and make it go."
Before Orah, coordinating that happened out loud. "Dismissal used to be an awful lot of people yelling on the PA system and yelling into walkie-talkies," Bernie said. "There's a period of 30 to 45 minutes a day where it was just constant, 'What about this kid? Is this club meeting? Has that kid shown up there?'"
Why Windward chose a partner willing to build for its setup
Bernie met with a number of dismissal vendors in spring 2026 and gave each the same brief: an "impossible dismissal set up" spread across three locations. Parts of Windward's process didn't match how Orah assumed dismissals ran, and it took a lot of joint work to close the gap.
"In 30 years of nonprofit tech, I have not ever worked with a developer who has been more agile in trying to meet the needs where they were," he said. "They understood the stakes. This is not something that we could kind of play around with."
A live dismissal plan for every student, on every device
Every Windward student now appears in Orah as a small card with their photo, their default dismissal plan, and any exceptions for the day, color-coded so staff can read it at a glance. If a student normally rides the bus but is going home with a friend's parent and staying for D&D club first, that shows on the card.
Because dismissal runs off the same records as attendance, a student marked absent that morning is already accounted for at 3pm. "The dismissal system knows the kid's out sick, so nobody's looking for the kid and holding the bus," Bernie said. A student leaving early for the dentist won't be expected at practice either.
The front desk at each campus acts as the switchboard. When they change a student's plan, the change appears immediately on the iPads and phones at every dismissal point. "They don't have to hop on the walkie-talkie and then tell three different locations, 'This is what's going on with that kid,'" Bernie said. "Anybody who sees that kid can see it."
Families use the Orah parent app to manage pickups, including one-off changes when they're running late. When families asked how nannies and regular caregivers fit in, Orah added permanent pickup contacts in about three weeks. "My nanny picks up Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday every week," Bernie said. "The parent doesn't want to have to do that every day."
In Manhattan, families of students who walk home now see exactly when their child left the building. Before, Bernie said, "the way that they would find that out would be call the front desk." Windward also runs club and after-school dismissals through Orah, and staff completed 2,018 hall passes in Orah in the 30 days to late October 2026.
Dismissal down from 30 to 45 minutes of radio traffic to a 12.5-minute average
Windward still needs plenty of staff on duty at dismissal, though fewer at each station. The difference is that everyone now sees the same picture. "The coordination of those student flows and parent pickups is now transparent to several different people at the same time," Bernie said. "We have kids who aren't where they're supposed to be, but it's now really clear where those kids are."
The rollout had another effect. Getting dismissal right across three campuses meant bringing the attendance teams from each building together for the first time. "In doing that, we actually improved attendance processes in all campuses because of that brain share," Bernie said. "We ended up with a stronger, more unified dismissal vocabulary."
Launch after the first weeks of school, not during them
Windward went live in September 2026, all three campuses at once, because many families have children on more than one campus. Bernie is candid that the timing added strain. A week of open Zoom sessions, a parent session, and written guides still left some families surprised, three days in, that they needed an app.
"For those of you who are considering onboarding, don't do it at the beginning of the year, and if you can slow roll it, do," he said. In-person faculty meetings at each campus made the biggest difference: "We really didn't see motion until we did live presentations and faculty meetings with each of the campuses."
In their own words
"It is amazing how quickly we have been able to move that from pen and paper and phone calls and bedlam to, I think, our average dismissal right now is like 12 and a half minutes in New York City, which is like astounding, and not what we used to do."
Bernie McCormick, CTO, The Windward School
Next: emergency roll call and visitor accountability
Windward has run test drills with Orah's emergency roll call and plans a campus-by-campus rollout mid-year. In a lockdown drill, staff currently walk door to door to find students caught in a hallway or bathroom. "Orah would actually let you know that without anybody ever having to walk," Bernie said. "The kid is in this class, but they're on a pass right now."
Visitors are part of the same picture. In a fire drill today, visitors are often told to wait by a tree while staff piece together who is on site. "That's not where you wanna be when you're talking to a fire lieutenant," Bernie said. Athletics dismissals are next on the list.
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