Transcript

Note: This transcript is automatically generated and has been reviewed, but it may contain errors.

Host (0:05): Thank you. All right, everyone, welcome. Thank you for taking the time to be with us here today. We have a great panel assembled for you, and our host, Warren Griffiths from Orah, is going to take you through a presentation and a generative conversation with our panelists. I'm going to turn things over to him now, and he will walk you through the flow of the next hour or so. But I did wanna say a huge thank you to Warren for joining us and our three panelists, Dimple, Laura, and Bruno. So over to you, Warren.

Warren (0:44): All right. Amazing. Thank you so much. And thank you everyone for joining us today. Big thank you always to the CAIS for hosting us this session. As — my name is Warren. I'm part of the sales team here at Orah. Some familiar names in the room, so hello everyone who knows me from my past life. Today we are being joined by Bruno, the IT director over at Ridley College, as well as Laura and Dimple, who are the Vice Principal of Student Success and the Vice Principal of Student Experience at the Bishop Strachan School. And together we're gonna discuss how their schools manage daily attendance and emergency preparedness with Orah, and what has changed since they have adopted, and what they would tell other independent schools considering Orah as a school safety tool.

Warren (1:22): Please share your question in the chat as we go and we'll try and get them answered definitely before the end. And if there's anything we can answer as we go through, we will certainly do so. So here's a quick look at what we're gonna cover today. I'm going to start with a very short overview of Orah, and just for those who are coming in and don't know what Orah is, hopefully you'll have a better idea. And then we're gonna meet Laura, Bruno, Laura, and Dimple, and they're gonna walk you through what life looked like before Orah and once again, their day to days today.

Warren (1:46): This is really for those people who are coming in completely fresh. So Orah is a student safety and school operations platform that gives staff a simple real-time view of where every student is and who's on campus at any given moment. And at its core is location awareness. So as students move throughout the day from their homeroom, classes, buses, excursions, sports, boarding houses, Orah keeps an up-to-date picture of where students are expected to be and where they've been checked in. So staff always have an accurate view rather than relying on memory or scattered spreadsheets.

Warren (2:40): And that visibility feeds directly into attendance management. Instead of treating attendance as a once a day roll call, Orah lets schools take attendance continuously across the day, per period, per activity, per bus, and automatically flags discrepancies, like a student who's marked present in first period but is marked absent in the second. So this turns attendance from a compliance chore into an early warning system for whether a student is actually where they should be. And Orah is not prescriptive about how you're capturing attendance and location. It works however your school operates. Teachers can take roll attendance via a browser extension.

Warren (3:27): Students can check in on a tablet kiosk. Staff can take roll also on a mobile app. And we also can interface with things such as RFID, NFC, barcodes, QR codes, magnetic swipe cards, name searches. So all of these can be used at specific locations. So whatever the input, it all flows to that one record.

Warren (3:51): So no manual exports, no spreadsheet syncing, no stale data. One place, always current. And think about every place that a student can be that isn't their scheduled class. Field trips, sports practices, the library, a nurse visit, off for lunch on senior privilege, after-school pickup, off-campus activities. Every one of those is a blind spot in a school's setup. Orah captures all of these scenarios and maps them back to a single student record. So no matter where a student is or what they're doing, you have one accurate up-to-date answer to the question: where are they right now? All right, so that's a little bit of a high-level overview of what Orah is.

Warren (4:38): I'm going to stop sharing that screen, and I'm gonna actually ask if our wonderful panelists can introduce themselves. And why don't we go alphabetical by first name. So Bruno, you are up.

Bruno (4:55): Hi, my name is Bruno Pattini. I'm the Executive Director of Strategy and Innovation at Ridley College, a boarding school in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Warren: Thanks, Bruno. Dimple?

Dimple (5:06): Hi, everyone. I'm a Vice Principal of Student Experience here for seven to 12. I oversee a lot of the co-curricular programming as well as all the things entailed with student experience. And yeah, I was one of the lead people for implementing Orah.

Warren: Thanks, Dimple. Laura?

Laura (5:23): Hi there. Laura Posey, VP of Student Success at BSS. I work really closely with Dimple, who's the instigator in bringing in Orah, but also that didn't have much trouble convincing us. My purview is all things academic and attendance.

Warren: Great. Thanks, Laura. Question for all three of you, but maybe Bruno, we'll come back to the beginning. We'll start with you. So how did your school build a picture of where your students were before Orah? How did it look before the adoption?

Bruno (5:55): Sure. So we've actually been with Orah for almost eight to 10 years 'cause we've been using that application as a boarding application for the houses. So we would, before Orah and the integration of all the attendance, we'd have Orah doing specific roles and responsibilities within the boarding house. We would have our student information system Blackbaud doing specific activities. And then, we'd have coaches and extracurricular activities on the weekends. We'd use things like Stammtisch, Genius or Google Forms and MS Forms. So magically all those systems would somehow come together with someone like Laura and the team to understand everyone who's taking attendance and bringing all that information together to really get a portrait of where that student is on or off campus.

Warren: Great. Thanks, Bruno. And Laura and Dimple, same question for BSS. So how did your school build a picture of where your students were before Orah?

Laura (6:52): Yeah. So Dimple and I have split the questions up, so I'm gonna take this one. So before Orah we were — and again, we're in the same boat as Bruno and Ridley, where our boarding population and dean of boarding, they've been using it for several years now. But the day school, we were using Blackbaud and it was cumbersome. So it would be looking up if a student wasn't in class, it would be literally having to go and search. It took a little bit more time to figure out if that student was actually in the system yet.

Laura (7:33): There wasn't a comprehensive view you could see to see where students were, where several students might be, what the patterns were. So we would have to search student by student. Athletics, field trips, it was a filling in, like you say, Bruno, a little bit of a — it was either a spreadsheet or a Google survey or just sending a list of students to our attendance coordinators and going from there, and having to farm it out in different ways. That was not all one space.

Warren (8:03): Amazing. Amazing. And what challenges led your team to consider adopting a new tool? So I'm gonna keep that with Laura and Dimple, whoever's gonna handle that, and then we'll come back to Bruno.

Laura (8:23): I can start, and Dimple, maybe if you wanna jump in if I don't cover it all. I think mainly it was the reporting capabilities of Blackbaud were not what we needed. We wanted to see big picture. We wanted to type in a class and see what was happening. Or, our supply teachers, our on-call teachers, we were having to have a different system for them to be able to take attendance 'cause they weren't part of Blackbaud. They couldn't be assigned to a classroom that way. So really it was we knew that Blackbaud wasn't serving our needs. And so we started to look into what would do that plus. So I know we're not talking about nurture notes today, but that was part of it, the pastoral note capability.

Dimple (9:06): I'll also add that the attendance coordinators — probably with Blackbaud, the amount of time and chasing if attendance wasn't done or if there was discrepancies was high, and it was to the point where it was a lot for one person to manage, and so we added a second person to our reception area. And some things were taking place on paper because it made more sense, and some things were taking place within the system. And so those were some other additional challenges that we were facing.

Warren: All right. Thank you, Dimple. Bruno, I'm gonna ask the same question of you. So what challenges led your team to consider adopting a new tool?

Bruno (9:45): Sure. We were just having some discussions 'cause we meet with all of the division heads and the leaders in the school and just looking at attendance in general. And really for us, attendance is, we want the students to know where they're expected to be. It's not an operational concern in the sense because we are a boarding school or any school, it's really about safety and duty of care. And then we started to really dive down and look at all the different systems we had in technology stacks and how much work individuals like Laura and individuals at our school would have to do to chase down this. And I really thought to myself, "It can't be this difficult to just take simple attendance and make sure that we have this information all together so that we can start correlating it and using it in an effective way to make some decision base to see if there's any type of behavioral patterns."

Bruno (10:31): Because just like BSS, we use Nurture as well too, which is inside of Orah. So to have that single technology stack that would be pulling from multiple systems and provide that holistic view really was something that really piqued everyone's interest, not just from the efficiency of really just using one platform.

Warren (10:52): Thanks, Bruno. And I know Ridley has been like BSS, a long-term client of Orah's in the boarding school, but I know this is now developing into the day school as well. So what did that rollout look like? How did you prepare your team for the change?

Bruno (11:15): For us what we were doing is with Orah, we were using capabilities within the boarding. So anyone in our upper school or middle school really had a lot of knowledge of using boarding to begin with because they're an advisee or they're a boarding house counselor or they have some connection to a boarding house. So they were already using Orah. So then that natural progression moving into the attendance piece we thought would be very simple.

Bruno (11:33): But what we decided to do was really delineate a clear line. So in June of last year, after we left PD session, we advised everyone that we'd be moving to a new attendance system through Orah, just to get people braced for it and prepared for it. In August, we had PD given to the teachers, faculties, coaches, anyone that was touching Orah or doing type of attendance. And then we created champions, and really our two dean of boardings, Jess Rout and Andrew McNiven, really led that initiative throughout the whole school. And then we did check-ins. So even like last week, we've even deployed this out with visitor management in September. We still have little drop-ins and check-ins for PDs, just for things that come up with people within our community that maybe are not so active in Orah on a day-to-day basis.

Warren: Amazing. Thank you, Bruno. Laura and Dimple, do you want to add anything for BSS? So how did the rollout look like for you? How did you prepare the team for change?

Dimple (12:38): Ours was slightly different. So last May, we put together the proposal. The proposal was initially for 9 to 12, but then the interest grew. So then we looked at it from a whole school, and like Laura mentioned, we had it in boarding. And then we partnered with our school data team and our tech team. And then we implemented Orah in phases. So we had a core team, and we still actually have a core team where we check in. It's become a space where any inquiries or questions or concerns that come up from teachers or any other users, we come together and strategize and figure out what our next steps are.

Dimple (13:00): But our first phase, we implemented between last September to November, and it was within the team and our use of it, and just adjusting and configuring the accounts, the permission settings, the attendance codes, the different passes. And then also working through the navigating of Blackbaud and that syncing and what that looked like. And of course we had great support from Orah to help us personalize the needs, 'cause the needs in junior school, middle school, and senior school all look different.

Dimple (13:42): And of course with senior school, the added layer is our kids do go out for lunch and they do go out for rec, and so we had to work that into junior school, who don't have kids leaving the building. Then our second phase happened last November, where we led a PL to get teachers on board, and they were exposed to it, but then they were also told to download the extension, which was a game changer for a lot of teachers in comparison to Blackbaud.

Dimple (14:10): Then our third phase was the parents. So last January of 2026, we sent out our newsletters, had the parents on board, very easy sign-in, especially with Google accounts or whatever accounts that are listed in our Blackbaud. Had Zoom sessions to help them with the transition. We had some parent feedback, so we were able to go to the parent association and ask them how it was going, and they said it was pretty seamless, and it was easy for them to add the attendance.

Dimple (14:29): And then our fourth phase just took place in September, which was getting the students for nine to 12 on board. And it's again for the location settings and that safety aspect because we do, in senior school, have students leave. And so we have the tiles, we implemented the tiles at our entrances, and now have gotten the students into the habit of tapping in and tapping out. And we've had a few fire drills, as I'm sure many schools have. And it's helped us really figure out where students are, especially if they are on spares, to quickly check to be like, "Okay, yeah, like they're actually out of the building." So we did it in a four phase and it took well over a year. But it's worked for our team and made it more manageable as we worked through the different phases.

Warren (15:28): So Dimple, I heard you mentioning about attendance, that it was a bit of a game changer. So if you could put a number on it, how much time is Orah saving the staff and the faculty each week?

Dimple (15:44): It's really hard to put a time, but I can share the impact.

Warren: Yeah, please. That'd be great.

Dimple (15:50): So we have five receptionists across three divisions and four of them oversee our student attendance. So three entrance points where students can be picked up and dropped off. And our protocol is accounting for each student in that period, and hopefully within that period time. So we have 75-minute periods. The impact was definitely felt by our attendance counselors because there was a reduction in the number of phone calls that we would have to do to remind teachers to input. With the Orah passes and parents implementing them, there was less traffic to our senior attendance emails, and then there was less follow-up.

Dimple (16:23): I'm gonna say there is still follow-up, but there is way less follow-up that our attendance coordinators do. So they're not actually picking up the phone for 25 parents within one given period. That's probably reduced to a handful per period. And maybe even less, depending on the day and if the seniors have a fun event planned or something like that.

Dimple (16:44): So the frequency of what all of those pain points for our attendance coordinators has reduced significantly. Teachers say it's quick and it's easy. The extension helps because then they can just take the attendance and also have their lesson posted, whereas with Blackbaud they had to have two separate windows and it made a big difference for them. So I would say most of our time has been saved on the chasing. And now we're focused on addressing the unexcused absences because of the new ministry mandate, and the discrepancies have just been less overall.

Warren (17:28): All right. That's amazing. Thanks, Dimple. Bruno, I would love to actually do the same question for you. Now, I know the rollout to the day program is a little bit more fresh, but I'd love to know what are the effects you are seeing?

Bruno (17:43): Yeah. I think Dimple made a very valid point about our implementation. I think we were able to move quicker in the summers because we were using Orah across the whole organization quickly, and we already had teams that were assembling, so it just seemed like a natural add-on, and we were just pushing the attendance component to it. But I did ask around, because I thought this was interesting, just from a group that meets every few weeks to tweak the attendance and passes, just like Dimple and Laura mentioned.

Bruno (18:05): And they thought from a teacher perspective, the Chrome extension has been much more effective, and they couldn't really put a time. And they said, maybe an hour or two. But we're really seeing the instant feedback or the instant rewards from this program is that from all of our attendance and our boarding and our heads of house, they say that now they have better visibility across the whole campus. So it gives them the accuracy and the accountability and the peace of mind. So there's less chasing. I'm sure like most schools in the morning, like Laura will be running around the school trying to chase the student and connect with somebody. That's pretty much at every school that way.

Bruno (18:42): But now someone going into Orah can see the day pass, can see if they're at a sport, if they actually have leave from their parent in one view. So consolidating all that information really quickly, and I think that's what saves the time. And then also if a parent has put a pass for them to be off campus or anything like that. So that consolidated view has given us better visibility and accuracy and gives everyone peace of mind, right? Knowing where those students are on campus or off campus.

Warren (19:01): Thanks, Bruno. And one thing I always discuss when I'm talking to people about Orah is at the end, it really is a safety platform. So can you tell me a little bit of how it might be helping day-to-day in your emergency operations? So attendance being, student location being important, but has it affected also things such as your fire drills or your emergency musters?

Bruno (19:22): So for us, that's gonna be our January phase. So maybe I'll take you a little bit of the journey about that. One thing we were looking at holistically as a school is you always look at the problem or the opportunity statement, not the technology. And over the last year, we know that our emergency response system is tied to mostly, like most schools, to a phone system, to PAs and things like that.

Bruno (19:39): So I was really keeping my eye on a product called Singlewire or Omnicast out of the States and doing that partnership. But then through Orah and understanding their progression, they really helped us out by making that partnership on behalf of us, because technology like that can be quite complicated. And a lot of schools may not have that talent or those skills to make those implementations. And really I always looked at student safety as being the basic — if we don't have proper attendance or know where people are supposed to be on campus, being visitors, staff, faculty or students, it doesn't matter when it really comes to the safety system that we're looking at.

Bruno (20:36): So what we're doing now in January, after we've rolled this out, we're taking the opportunity to look at our existing emergency response system plans and processes and really taking an opportunity to see if those are still viable or necessary for an organization like ours. So I think that's what Orah's forced us to do. Even with implementing a technology, and Dimple kind of put this on and working with Orah, would question some of the settings that we would have in Blackbaud or why are you doing this? And a lot of the times it'd be, "It's 'cause that's the way we always did it." So it's also a great opportunity to look at how you're doing your internal processes, and I'm quite excited to see what that brings.

Bruno (21:04): Because with Orah we have the Orah student app, and then we also have the Orah for families, right? Who do the day passes and weekend passes. We're gonna take a look at opportunities of how that emergency management will be broadcasted to students, not just through their PA systems or fire alarms or phones, but maybe by mobile devices and maybe SMS messaging as well.

Warren (21:35): That's great. Thanks, Bruno. Dimple and Laura, same question. How is Orah helping with that emergency operations, that emergency preparedness? Or is it?

Dimple (21:45): We haven't explored the emergency platform through Orah. But we had a fire drill earlier today, and in all the fire drills we've noticed the hardest group that was difficult to account for was the students on spares. The students who hadn't been on campus because they had an appointment or something. And Orah, like I always have my laptop out there or my phone, and I'm able to see here's where the student is. They're all good. They checked in. We have a little area that has Starbucks, which is really popular amongst the 9 to 12s.

Dimple (22:21): And we can tell, okay, they're in the Ville. And so that kind of in real time during a fire drill, it's reduced the number of time that we spent just based on them checking in and checking out using the tiles. It's reduced the number of time we were scrambling through papers of who's on spare right now. Are they here in this area? And so that's actually been quite helpful to see where they are, or they have a parent pass for an appointment.

Warren: Yeah. Thanks, Dimple. That's great. And Dimple and Laura, looking back at what worked well, what would you do differently if you had to do this all over again?

Laura (23:03): So I think we made a few notes about the rollout in particular. I think, and I'll throw it over to Dimple 'cause she really was the lead on that. But I think it had to do mostly with the timing.

Dimple (23:18): Yeah. I reflect on — so when we got approval and then the implementation, if it needed the different phases or — I'd love to know from other schools if they just went all in with Orah on like the parent, student, and faculty staff front. I don't know if doing it midyear...

Dimple (23:37): So we had a touchpoint in September, November, January, and then September again for students. And I don't know if the midyear works. But with students, when we told them on the first day of school this is happening, it was smooth. And so I reflect back on like whether we needed to have those phases, but we did, 'cause at the time when we're starting the school year it's busy and there's testing that needs to be done, and I'm thankful that we did the testing 'cause I play around with a lot of the Orah settings and sometimes I...

Dimple (24:17): Actually, last week Laura and I had 75 emails because I was playing around with the settings and then I had to deactivate it. So that testing phase does really — is really incredible and it helps to tease some of this out. We made parent and student accounts to work through some of the kinks.

Dimple (24:34): I also would add that the tiles made a huge difference for us. Kids are so used to tapping. And so that, like them tapping out during spares, rec, or lunch has been incredible. And now what we're doing is phasing it with our arts rehearsals, so that takes place offsite. And we're going to test it out in November with our Remembrance Day assembly, and so we're gonna see — what would happen was students would go to the rehearsal and then go again to Starbucks or The Ville and then not go to class as they're instructed to. And so now we're gonna be able to track who those students are and have a better and accurate follow-up.

Dimple (25:21): So that's something I'm looking forward to in November 'cause the chase after an arts rehearsal was timely. And we have them five or so times a year, and so it is gonna help us hopefully reduce the amount of follow-up that we have to do.

Warren: Yeah, amazing. So just helping out with those little discrepancies.

Dimple: Yeah.

Warren (25:40): Perfect. Oh, good. Thanks, Dimple. Bruno, once again, what would you do if you had to roll it out again and start all over again?

Bruno (25:50): I think we did a great job in the sense that we have quarterly meetings with specific departments, just understanding what pain points and what's happening. But when we decided to really go all in with Orah, we decided to create this team, a project team, with a project manager who would really lead this through June to the September launch. Because just like Dimple said, we wanted to make sure it was at the beginning of the year and not disruptive in the middle of the year.

Bruno (26:16): And then we really just sat down and said, "What are we gonna deploy in September? What do we need? What is our biggest achievements or gains that will show some big wins for the organization and make people's lives easier, and also our customer, our parents' life much easier when they need to check in?" So by breaking down the phases, I think that was important 'cause you can't do everything at once.

Bruno (26:43): Training. I think the technology — so your organization, the culture, and making sure that people understand why you're doing this and the purpose behind it and how important it is to do on a regular basis because it does feed into all these other areas, and it gives us the purview and also the emergency management component from it.

Bruno (26:59): And I think what we really did well too, was we challenged some of our internal processes before we launched in September. And then the team met every two weeks with those stakeholders to get feedback from teachers to re-challenge the decisions that we've made. And we've made little tweaks here and there. We've changed little settings. We've accepted little proposals and things. So it's a constant iterative process. It's not set and forget it. I would say once you do your training, you have that regular feedback loop where people can give you feedback as you're using it and kicking the tires.

Bruno (27:32): I think one thing that maybe we could have done better was just for organizations, there's little pockets within every school of like coaches that are part-time or volunteers or tutors that you really don't know about and you forget about. So don't forget about those people who take attendance. They need training. They need to be brought along with the journey. It's just not the regular full-time faculty and staff that need it. And then we did do champions across the organization, but I think if I were to go back, maybe divisional champions within the departments. Faculty, staff would go directly to them rather than always trying to go chase the four or five champions within the school. Maybe that would've been a better way to have more champions within the divisions that could be that leader for you.

Warren (28:22): Amazing. Thanks, Bruno. I know we only have a few moments left, so we do have a few Q&A questions. Dimple, actually, I'm gonna ask you. I think Laura had to step out, so you're the star of the show right now on the BSS side. What would you tell a school that's still doing attendance on paper or in spreadsheets?

Dimple (28:38): It is. When I came to BSS, we — like for example, community time, which is something I oversee, we were doing it on paper. And then I worked with our team to put it on Blackbaud, and it made it all the difference in the world. There are systems where the timeliness, especially with student safety, and the efficiency of knowing where a student is, it's much faster to track it on Orah or an attendance system than the paper version.

Dimple (29:09): Another area we've had a difference in is with our on-calls and supply teachers. Laura spoke to that a little bit. But we used to print out from Google Drive these attendances and gave them to our teachers that were coming in covering, and now on Orah they just type in this teacher's name and then their whole class list comes up, and that visibility whether it's for coaching, for community time, for anything, like we're able to step in without even — teachers can just do it. Especially if emergencies arise for a teacher, it's made a big difference. So I would say to venture into the technology aspects of attendance.

Warren (29:50): Thanks, Dimple. Bruno, I'm gonna throw this one out here. What should schools ask at a company like Orah before choosing a safety platform?

Bruno (30:02): I think one thing that I mentioned before is I think before engaging any type of technology, you just have to come up with what your school's safety and accountability problem is. So what's the problem statement? I think you don't attack this from a technology perspective, attack what your school needs to provide and what does that look like from an accountability, and then I would present that to vendors, and that's what we used to do, not just to Orah and Blackbaud. We're also a Totara school as well too in certain areas. So just from that perspective is what's the opportunity or the problem statement that we wanna solve, and then what vendor can help you solve that?

Warren (30:30): Amazing. And we just got another one. I think it's a little bit of a piggyback.

Dimple (30:44): I just wanna say something. I forgot she mentioned — the roles for supply teachers has been time savings incredible. Because as people calling in for sports and activities, if anyone happens to take that over right away, they just type in the class name and are able to take attendance.

Warren: Yeah, it is a sweet feature. So we do have a question coming in: what happens if there's a power outage as part of the emergency that you are managing? Is there still a paper trail?

Warren (31:17): That's — I think that's more of an Orah product question. So Eric, I can actually get back to you on that one. I'll get back to Eric on that one. So yeah, no worries, Eric. I've got you. Couple of questions from my friend Arthur. Hey, Arthur, nice to see you again. First question is, "Can parents enter attendance notes from their end? For example, future scheduled absences?"

Bruno (31:43): So I think this is like a parent request saying, "Hey, I need to pull the child out of school in a month's time because we're off to Europe." First of all, that's gonna affect their attendance and their participation. But anyways. That's one feature we're actually actively looking at right now, so that's in our January, we're looking at the parent component, but that will be the idea.

Bruno (32:07): And I believe, Warren, with your technology, there's a timeframe of how far passes could go ahead, and that's something that we're discussing, like how far ahead can a parent actually go and book time off. That's something that we're rolling out in January. Again, that phased approach with attendance, and then we're doing more focusing on a marketing and communication campaign for the parents. But I think if any school's looking at that, we'd probably look at a timeframe. It wouldn't be open-ended and be able to book six months in advance. There needs to be some sort of window and then some notification to the faculty or heads of houses that this person's gonna be going away for an extended period of time as well, too.

Warren: Sure, and that will tie into the amount of people that actually have to have their eyes on it before it gets finally approved.

Bruno: Correct.

Warren (32:46): Arthur, to follow up on your second question especially around the reporting purposes, so Orah does have an open API. We're more than happy to share the documentation around that, so if there are other systems that you're trying to get data connected from, we're definitely trying to be friendly with as many systems as possible. But Arthur, I'll follow up with you on that question.

Dimple (33:10): And Warren, I'll just add something in relation to the first question. So we have the high performing athlete program, and so we have for extended absences, especially if a student is going away to a competition, we have a bit of a process where we create an internal doc for the students to go to their teachers and talk through what they're gonna miss. But they can send us the competition schedule ahead of time, and then I would input them. So if they have a competition — 'cause ski season's around the corner, and so some of these, now I'm getting some of the competition schedules for February or whatever, and I just go ahead and input them.

Dimple (33:53): And so we do that on the school's end instead of putting it onto the parents, 'cause we also wanna make sure it's an excused absence.

Warren: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes complete sense. Kishan, when parents are booking time off, do you have to go in and then change the attendance codes depending on whether the absence is excused or not? Do parents have access to certain attendance codes?

Dimple (34:18): So I don't think parents have access to that, but —

Warren: No, that's correct.

Dimple: So we make our codes. So we have the codes, and we have internal codes that we can use, and we have codes that parents can use. So right now the only codes that parents can choose are — it's illness and appointment.

Dimple (34:41): If I could interrupt quickly — an early departure, the external activity. And then the important thing to remember is, and what we've also socialized with our parents, is that they're not excusing the absence, the school is. So we approve. They're just asked to put the pass in and we're the ones excusing the absence, not them.

Warren: Amazing. Or approving, is — yeah. And one more from Kushan. The supply teachers or on-call teachers, do they have access to teachers' attendance list for a set amount of time? How do they get access and how does that work?

Dimple (35:20): All the time. Whenever they need.

Warren: Is that just for ease, just so they can just go in and do it?

Dimple: Yeah. On the extension there's a search bar. It's very easy actually. You just type in — even I do it, like I just type in the teacher's name to see who's in that class and it all pops up. Their daily schedule actually comes up and then you can, when you hover over it, all the student lists will pop up for that class.

Warren (35:44): All right. Thanks, Dimple. So Eric and Arthur, I do have some follow-ups for you from some of your questions. I will get in touch with you. I think that might be it for the end of the Q&A unless anybody has one last minute burning question. Going once, going twice. All right, I think that might be it. I want to thank all three of you and for CAIS for hosting this. This was fantastic. And for anybody who's going to the leadership conference in Toronto at the Hilton, we'll see you there.

Host (36:13): Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, folks, thank you for joining us. Again, the recording is going to be up on the website in a few days, possibly weeks, depending. Heads and Chairs is next week, we'll see. And yeah, thank you. And Warren, I assume that people can reach out to you if they have further questions?

Warren (36:29): Yeah, absolutely. So it's Warren, W-A-R-R-E-N, @orah, O-R-A-H, .com. Happy to chat.

Host: Great. Thank you so much. Good to see everyone. Enjoy the rest of your day. And thank you so much for our panelists for joining us today.

Warren: Thanks everyone. Have a wonderful day. Bye now.