‍Note: This transcript is automatically generated and has been reviewed, but it may contain errors.
Warren Griffiths (0:05): Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Warren Griffiths. I'm an account executive here at Orah. We're joined by Kendall Crummy from Bishop John J. Snyder High School in Jacksonville, Florida. Kendall is going to walk us through what her experience has been with using Orah at Bishop Snyder, and how it has changed things on the attendance side, and how FACTS stays updated automatically. For our guests joining us online, we'll cover your Q&A questions as they come in, probably closer to the end. I'd love to pass it over to Kendall for a quick introduction.
Kendall Crummy (0:48): Thank you, Warren. Hi, everybody. My name is Kendall Crummy. I am the director of our school counseling office at Bishop Snyder High School in Jacksonville, Florida. I've been in this role for about four years now, and we started using Orah this year, so it's really exciting. It's been a great help to us in our office.
Warren Griffiths (1:10): Thanks, Kendall. Just a question to get us started — before Orah, how were you actually tracking attendance, and how did you know where students were?
Kendall Crummy (1:18): Yeah. So we used FACTS as our student information system, and within that we were able to take attendance through FACTS. Keeping up with students was all done on the FACTS interface. Our teachers would log into FACTS, take attendance with their roll, and then move on with the class. And all the reporting for that fell back on our office.
Warren Griffiths (1:41): And what was the visibility on where students were on campus from moment to moment?
Kendall Crummy (1:48): There really was no visibility, honestly, in FACTS, which is what really prompted us to start looking at other programs that could help us with that. We could take attendance with FACTS, and I would say that it was bare bones, basic. We knew which students were here and which students were not here, but as far as students moving around campus, we would literally have to go in and look at each roll. And then our school is set up on a little bit of a different schedule. We have seven class periods, but the students only see six of those a day. So we have a rotating schedule, which in FACTS is a little bit cumbersome to do when it comes to attendance. We really never were able to pinpoint exactly where students were at, and so again, that's what prompted us to look at some other options.
Warren Griffiths (2:43): Was there a particular moment or event that made it clear, like, we need to do things differently? What was the aha moment?
Kendall Crummy (2:55): Yes, absolutely. It was the reporting and contacting parents and dealing with teachers who are frustrated whenever students are tardy and absent. It just got to the point where our attendance policy and our attendance process were just not lining up. And so the aha moment for us here at Snyder was we have got to come up with a better system. We've got to get our ducks in a row, so to speak, and get organized in a way that what we say our policy is matches how we actually work through that on a day-to-day basis, and communicate with families.
Warren Griffiths (3:30): After you went through an evaluation with Orah and decided this was the right solution, what was actually involved in getting FACTS synced up and running with Orah?
Kendall Crummy (3:52): We were relatively — I think when we rolled out Orah, the integration was already there. Orah was already able to integrate with FACTS, but we did work very closely with the Orah team to help us with that integration. So I brought in my IT guy here on campus, and he helped us with all of the technical stuff that I honestly am not well-versed in. I can do the admin side of things all day long, but when it came to the actual tech stuff, my IT guy was instrumental in that. He communicated with Orah, and the Orah team really helped us just walk through that process. We got the codes that we needed, we got the permissions that we needed from FACTS, and we were able to integrate it, and it was a pretty seamless process. There were a couple of things that we had to work through with our scheduling because, again, we have that six-period day rotating schedule. And so the Orah team actually helped us build out exactly what our roles needed to look and our schedule needed to look like. So it was very integrated with the Orah team, and we were able to work together.
Warren Griffiths (5:02): Do you remember how long it took the school, understanding your complexities with the seven-period setup, from first meeting to we're ready to go live? How long was that?
Kendall Crummy (5:14): We chose to do a full semester, and we did that intentionally because I wanted to fully understand Orah. I wanted to roll it out in phases. I did not want to shock everybody with this brand-new program because I had a faculty that I had to onboard, and then I had families that I needed to onboard, and I had students that I needed to onboard. So I decided for our office and for our school that I wanted to roll it out in phases. We did not learn about Orah until late summer of last year. And so we were already making plans to start the school year. So in August or September, we started having communication with Orah. We jumped on several calls with Gabe at Orah, and he was fantastic and helped explain the program, the interface, what it could do for us, how it could help us streamline what we needed it to do. That's where we initially made the decision to go in that direction and use Orah. And then from there, he handed us off to Z, who was fabulous, and he did all of the onboarding for myself and Amelia, who works in my office and is actually the attendance manager for us. So we did probably six, eight trainings via Zoom where he walked us through everything so we could get a really good understanding.
Kendall Crummy (6:43): And then in December, early January, I brought on the faculty, and that was a piece of cake. It was so easy to tell my teachers exactly what to do to take attendance. We did it in 30 minutes with them. And then we went live in January of '26. So we've been using it for a full second semester at the end of the last school year, and then we just started our new school year with it.
Warren Griffiths (7:06): That's amazing. Getting the staff and faculty trained and also the communications out to your community mid-year, which is maybe unusual.
Kendall Crummy (7:16): It was very unusual. And again, I knew that, and so I wanted to just take my time. I wasn't really in a hurry. I already had FACTS. We were using FACTS. My teachers were comfortable with that. But we wanted to just take our time and be intentional about rolling that out in the right way. And end of semester one, beginning of semester two felt like the right time to do a phase one. This year we have rolled out phase two, which is our check-in kiosk in our front office for students.
Warren Griffiths (7:46): As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day, and it sounds like you had a plan. In retrospect, Kendall, is there anything, knowing what you know today, that you would have maybe done differently?
Kendall Crummy (8:04): I felt like for our circumstances, it was a fantastic approach because of the complexities of what we were working with our schedule. If I had it to do over again, the only thing I would have done differently is learning about Orah sooner. If I could have started at the end of the previous year, going through all of that — just learning the program, learning how to use it, learning the reporting features and all that — then we would have started fresh in August, and that would have been ideally, I think, for schools the best time to roll out something new like that. But considering what we were working with, I think what we did was great.
Warren Griffiths (8:53): What did your day-to-day look like before Orah? Let's go back a little bit in history and how have things changed since you've adopted Orah?
Kendall Crummy (9:01): So we consolidated our attendance process quite a bit. Our attendance process prior to using Orah had three to four touch points. Our front office secretary was managing most of the attendance. School counseling was managing all of the parent contacts and student appointments when students were chronically tardy or absent. And so our front office secretary was calling parents manually every single day. She would print out a report from FACTS, and she would pick up the phone and spend an hour and a half or so calling parents in the afternoon. So it was a long process. It was a tedious process. And then the reporting side of that, which was really the selling point for me, was the reports were just very hard to read from FACTS, and we just could not find exactly what we were looking for. I wanted to be able to zero in on the attendance concern specifically — whether it was an A period or first class tardy that a student was just chronically late for, or whether a student was missing one specific class every week. I wanted to be able to really zoom in on that. And so prior to using Orah, we were just like taking shots in the dark in hopes that we were addressing the attendance concerns. There was a lot of frustration from our teachers about it as well. And so it was discombobulated at best. We were just multiple hands in the pot just trying to do what we could do to make it work.
Warren Griffiths (10:40): Roughly for administration, how much time are we saving on the administrative side of the school now?
Kendall Crummy (11:03): Let's look at it on a day-to-day perspective. We were spending about an hour and a half on average per day making, pulling reports, making parent phone calls, dealing with the emails that were coming in from parents about the tardy passes and the excuse notes and the doctor's notes — all the things. We were spending easily an hour and a half to two hours a day just working through all of that stuff. Today, Amelia, who has taken over our attendance manager role here at Snyder, I would say she spends roughly 30 minutes at most pulling the reports that she needs. We are able to automate our communication with parents through that reporting system, which makes it a huge time saver for all of us. And then again, we're able to really zero in on what the specific attendance concerns are, and so we're targeting the right students, we're having the right conversations. And I would say overall we've cut our time by at least half or more, depending on what it is we're trying to do, whether it be a student appointment or a phone call to a parent, an email. Orah has really streamlined the process for us.
Warren Griffiths (12:09): That's amazing. In your time since you've adopted Orah, has there ever been an instance where a student wasn't where they're supposed to be? And if you could walk us through how Orah can factor in getting a little bit more visibility of student location.
Kendall Crummy (12:32): Yeah. So on the Orah interface, I'm able to see exactly what room a student is supposed to be in. There has been a couple of instances where a teacher may have taken attendance at the beginning of the class period, and the student came in late or didn't show up for that class period. And so I'm able to see — the teacher usually will email us or just shoot us a quick message and say, "Not in class. Do you know where they are?" So we're able to track back and see whether or not that student checked in on our front office attendance kiosk, or whether they had an absence pass that had been already previously put in. And teachers have access to see all of those things right on their roll as well, so it makes the communication between the office, the school counseling, and the classroom very cohesive. In terms of finding students and where they are, I am able to see right on that student's profile what classroom they're assigned to be in and where the last place that they checked in was. So it makes it very easy to keep track of our students around the campus.
Warren Griffiths (13:28): What advice would you give to other schools that are considering Orah?
Kendall Crummy (13:36): Definitely do your research and ask a lot of questions. At the time, I did not really know what to ask because there was so much that Orah was able to do for us. We would learn something new and it would be like this aha moment like, "This could really work for us," or "Wow, this is gonna make our lives so much simpler," in terms of communicating with families and teachers and the reporting and all of those types of things. So I would say do your research, see how it can support you. Think of it less as something to replace FACTS and more as a partnership with FACTS. We still use FACTS as our grade book and our student information system. But for attendance purposes, Orah was able to go above and beyond what FACTS was able to do. I think it just amplified what we have on our campus. I would say don't wait. It has been such a great asset to our systems here at Snyder. Definitely do your research, ask your questions. Orah is great about being very responsive. And the entire Orah team — I think there's something to be said about the fact that I know people's names at Orah. I have met multiple people. I know Gabe. I know Z. I know Alexis, Prateek. These are the people that have walked with me along the journey of integrating Orah. So for a company to be able to, for me to be able to know people in the company, I think that's spectacular. I love that about Orah.
Warren Griffiths (15:29): Kendall, you mentioned before about having lots of conversations. If you're thinking of advice you want to give to other schools about conversations they want to have internally, who do you think you'd want to have involved? What questions would you want to ask to make sure that this is the right direction for you?
Kendall Crummy (15:54): I think every school is gonna look a little bit different, but I'll tell you who we brought in on those conversations and how we rolled it out. My office, our school counseling office — I have one other school counselor that works with me, and then we have an administrative assistant, Amelia. So both of those ladies were in on those conversations because we are the boots on the ground dealing with students and their needs and concerns. We also brought in our principal and we brought in our IT guy, and we brought in our dean of students. So we have a fairly large admin team here at Snyder. And those are key positions that either have direct student interaction or have in some way dealt with attendance concerns. So that's where the conversation started. From there, I took it to the entire admin team. We meet weekly, and I began to ask questions of the admin team about if they could change anything about our attendance process, what would it be? We also talked to several teachers of different grade levels and different styles of teaching and that kind of thing. We did have some conversations with teachers about their frustrations. If they could change something, what would it be? And again, we were hearing a lot of that without initiating a conversation. So I had that background knowledge going into it as well, and I knew that teachers were looking for something a little bit more cohesive. I took all of that into consideration as well when talking with my team.
Warren Griffiths (17:15): That's fantastic, Kendall. We have just about 10 minutes left, so I'd love to shift a little bit and get some questions from the audience answered. First, from Caitlin: "Are you using NFC tiles or tablets for student attendance in classrooms? Are you having the students check themselves in for attendance, or are the teachers still taking attendance through Orah?"
Kendall Crummy (18:02): The teachers are currently still taking attendance through Orah, and they can do that in one of three ways. They have a desktop version, we have a Chrome extension version, and then they have a mobile app. So we leave that completely up to the teachers, how they do that in their classroom, whatever's easiest for them. Many of our teachers use the mobile app. They like being able just to carry it with them wherever they go. And then I would say the rest of our teachers are using the Chrome extension. Our students, the only checking in that they're doing is when they arrive late. We do have a couple of iPads in our front office that we use those as tardy check-in kiosks. And the Orah team has helped us set up passes to do exactly what we want them to do. But our students will come in tardy, they'll check in on the kiosk, and then it auto-populates to the teacher's roll. That is where we are right now. We are probably looking at rolling out a couple of other things in the future, but at this time, our teachers are still taking their own attendance.
Warren Griffiths (18:56): Another question: walk us through what happens step by step when a student misses a check-in, and who gets notified, and how fast is that?
Kendall Crummy (19:13): It depends on who you want to be notified. You can notify anybody you want through Orah. So for our team specifically, if a student does not show up for a class, they're marked absent. Amelia will go through, and she just monitors that throughout the day. And then at the end of the day, if there's any discrepancies, she'll follow up on those before she makes that parent contact. Again, it's all automated for us, so she is monitoring it throughout the day. Our teachers will also email us, "Hey, I see that so-and-so has been here all day and they didn't show up for class," and so we will track them down at that point. We have about 500 students on our campus, grades 9 through 12. So we're not super big, but also not super small, so it's a little easier for us to keep tabs on where everybody is at. But yeah, that's kind of the process and what that looks like.
Warren Griffiths (20:12): Did any staff push back on the new processes, and what changed their minds?
Kendall Crummy (20:20): I really expected some staff pushback. I really did, and I did not have any. I was pleasantly surprised. I did not have any staff pushback. Z hopped on a webinar with us with my staff. Took us about 30 minutes. He highlighted some of the key features. Again, we did not go into every nitty-gritty detail for our teachers. I just told them what I wanted them to know and what they needed to do to take attendance. The part that I heard over and over from our teachers was, "We love the mobile app. We love the Chrome extension." And so that was the selling point for them to have that, 'cause previously FACTS, they were just taking it on their desktop. They would log in at every class period and just take it like that. So I think it was very user-friendly, and our teachers loved that. So I didn't have any pushback. I was really surprised.
Warren Griffiths (21:11): How was the communication to parents and your community outside of your staff? How was the adoption? How did you word it, saying, "Hey, we're bringing this in, and here are the reasons why"?
Kendall Crummy (21:34): It was so easy, and I used Orah's — they sent me an entire slide deck and resource library of email templates, forms, all the things that I needed, and I just tweaked it to what I wanted it to say specifically for Snyder. So that part of it was really easy. I just used Orah's email templates to roll it out to our families. As we have rolled out the phases again, we have a biweekly newsletter that we send to parents, so I include updates in that and communicate with them that way. But it was very easy. I just used what Orah sent to me. So I wasn't responsible for creating all of the content. So it was great.
Warren Griffiths (22:13): We have a question from Kathy: "Can a student check out of class when going to the restroom, locker, or whatever? And when they check back in, are they checking back in through Orah, and will it record the in-out times?"
Kendall Crummy (22:35): It will. We don't use Orah that granularly. So our hall passes are not done through Orah. If a student needs to go to the bathroom in the middle of a class, the teacher will sign a quick pass in their planner or whatever. The only thing we're really using Orah for is our day-to-day attendance, class period attendance, and tardies. And so the hall pass in and out of class, we don't use that. We don't use Orah for that 'cause it would just be a little bit too granular for our needs. But it can, and the Orah team is able to walk you through all of that and make those passes exactly what you want them to be. So we've created and tweaked and recreated and changed things with our passes multiple times. So they're able to make it what you need it to be for your specific context and location.
Warren Griffiths (23:24): Another question: does Orah replace anything you were doing manually in FACTS before, or does it run alongside it?
Kendall Crummy (23:32): It runs alongside it. I can do everything that I can do in FACTS in Orah. So from the automated calls to parent communications, I can do all of that through Orah, so I don't have to go back and forth and use both systems. I am using and I am keeping my eye on both systems to make sure they're synced properly, and they are, but I am not using both to do the same thing. I'm using Orah to track attendance and communicate attendance. And our parents actually — we were talking about it earlier today — our parents are getting notified when students check in tardy. They get an automatic email, "Your student has checked in at 8:05," in the front office, so parents know when their student arrives to school. So that's coming directly from Orah, not from FACTS.
Warren Griffiths (24:09): I do see that a few people have just joined recently. One question is, what does Orah do? So Orah is a solution that works in tandem with FACTS. It does not replace FACTS. What Orah is designed to do is give you more visibility into student location, more visibility on your movement of students throughout the day, but also to help out with the administrative tasks, such as having parents have an easy way of telling the school a child is gonna be late, they have to leave early, they're not gonna be there at all that particular day. Also, things on automatic alerts — if we have a student that doesn't show up, we haven't heard from the parent, how are we gonna get notified? How are we gonna notify the parents? Tracking things such as tardies or absences. If we have policies at the school that a certain amount of tardies means a detention or a certain amount of absences means no credit or a grade reduction, Orah can help the schools be proactive with that as well. All leading to better outcomes when it comes to safety, because if we know where our students are, if we had to move into an emergency situation, we know Warren's parents already said Warren's not gonna be there today. We're not chasing after Warren. We know Warren is not around.
Warren Griffiths (25:36): I think I just answered that question that just came in from Stephanie. Once there is an abundance of tardies and absences, do we get notified? Yes, you do. You get to set the number of whatever your school is comfortable with tardies and absences. You get notified, and you get to determine how you want to be notified.
Kendall Crummy (25:57): And for us in particular, we look at the activity board every day, our dashboard, and we're just able to, at a glance, see who has an attendance concern open for them because of whatever the parameters are that we've set. But it can vary from school to school, whatever you're comfortable with.
Warren Griffiths (26:32): We have another question from Caitlin: "Do you know if we were to use in/out hall passes, what that would look like in FACTS, and would it mess up the original attendance?" The answer is no, Caitlin, it will not mess up your original attendance, but obviously we're more than happy to chat with you around that and show you what Orah can do at your school. And I think we're just about out of time. Thank you so much, Kendall. That was great. We really appreciate working with Bishop Snyder, and we're looking forward to a long relationship.
Kendall Crummy (26:55): Absolutely. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Warren Griffiths (27:00): All right, take care. Thank you, everyone. Bye now.
