Transcript
Tiago [0:05]: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this webinar on the 21st of October here in North America. We are excited to be joined by Chris Joffe and Hayden Steele from Joffe Emergency Services, as well as Matthew Varley, our CEO here at Orah. I'm gonna give everyone a few minutes to come into the room, get comfortable.
We have a very good session lined up for you today. We are gonna be going through the Orah Atlas 2026 Independent School Safety Report. Matt's gonna be sharing the key findings there, and Chris is gonna be sharing the same from their 2026 School Safety Report as well. I won't take too much away from Matt and Chris to introduce themselves, but before I throw to Matt, I just wanted to put this out there — we have an author in our presence. Chris has published this book called All Clear, which we have obtained a copy prior to this webinar. So we're gonna be giving away three copies of this book to various people at the end of this webinar. If you have any questions as we go through, we've got a long Q&A section later on. Put through your questions as they come up, and we'll pick three people at random to send a copy of that book to.
Without further ado, Matt, I'm gonna pass to you to give a brief introduction.
Matt Varley [1:40]: Thanks, Tiago. It's good to see people coming in — some familiar names there, so welcome to those who are already existing Orah customers, and for those that are new. I'm Matt Varley, CEO of Orah, and thanks for joining us here today. A bit about me first — I'm based in Melbourne, Australia, and I've got three daughters in school, so the work that we do at Orah isn't abstract for me in terms of how it relates to me personally. When a school knows exactly where a student is, that's something that I care about, not only as a parent, but also as CEO of Orah.
Orah started actually in New Zealand over 13 years ago in 2014, building tools for boarding schools originally. Fast-forward to today, and we work with around 500 independent schools — both boarding and day schools — across the US, Canada, and then other parts of the world as well. What we do is pretty simple to describe. We help schools know where every student should be, know where they actually are, and get alerted when those two things don't match. This covers things like attendance, passes, leave, dismissals, student safety and wellbeing. It's all in one place so staff aren't stitching together from spreadsheets and radios.
Really looking forward to today — a collaboration with Joffe Emergency Services to share some of the findings from both the Orah School Safety Report and also to understand the Joffe school report as well. Thanks, Tiago.
Tiago: Awesome. And I'll pass over to Chris.
Chris Joffe [3:03]: Thanks, Tiago, for having me and really to the whole Orah team for this partnership. My name's Chris Joffe. I'm the founder and CEO of Joffe Emergency Services. Our professional work started almost 20 years ago. I was an EMS, and so I was responding to 911 calls in the community, and I was finding that it took us about eight minutes to arrive. From the time somebody called to the time we got there was about eight minutes. And persistently, I found that people hadn't taken action in that eight minutes while we were working to get from the station out to wherever this call came in. And I was frustrated by that, because over and over again, the patient outcome wasn't as strong as it could have been if people had just done something.
I asked people regularly, "Why didn't you take more action? Why didn't you do something while you were waiting for us?" And unsurprisingly, I got some of the same answers that you probably are thinking now. "I didn't know what to do." "I was afraid that if I got involved, I would make the situation worse." And the third most common reason I heard was, "I was afraid if I got involved, that I would get sued."
I became really frustrated by those responses, and so I started a training business to simply focus on those eight minutes. What would you do until help arrived? Coincidentally, I started training schools. I wish I could say it was on purpose, but I fell into it. And as I began training schools, the business grew because schools had more questions than just, "What do I do when there's somebody having a medical emergency?" They said, "What about when I'm waiting for the police to arrive because there's a security emergency? What if the police or fire department or EMS agencies can't arrive because there's been a regional emergency like an earthquake?" And so we began to really ask and answer these questions — how can schools take advantage of the minutes that they have?
A lot of our work is framed in time. The first seven minutes after the emergency occurs, the first seven hours after the emergency occurs — they all have a prescribed outcome that you should be working toward, and that's really become our work. Today I'm proud to share that we support about 2,000 schools across the US. We opened our first office in Belgium this summer, and so we are officially an international firm today. I could not be more grateful to get to do this work, both preventatively, proactively before the emergency happens, and in response. We are grateful to be among those that you call when you're in the emergency itself, and to have the responsibility of holding your hand to and through a successful outcome. So thanks for having me.
Tiago [6:00]: That's amazing. We're very honored to have you here today, Chris. I'm looking forward to hearing Chris's presentation on the safety report later on. But first I'm gonna throw to Matt just to give a high-level overview of the findings from the Orah Atlas 2026 School Safety Report.
Matt Varley [6:34]: Thank you, Tiago. So our 2026 State of Independent School Safety Report — we commissioned this report earlier this year in February/March in connection and collaboration with Atlas, the Association of Technology Leaders of Independent Schools, and True North, which is an independent research organization. We wanted to know what leaders across safety operations in independent schools within the US were thinking about school safety. We covered the whole picture — attendance, student movement, dismissal, visitors, emergency drills and response.
We asked about real incidents, the technology schools use, where things are still manual, and the specific challenges that schools face. What came out was a clear view of where practice and policy line up and where they don't, quite frankly.
Sometimes emergency preparedness can feel hypothetical — something that you plan for that you hope never happens. This data says otherwise. 76% of independent schools had an incident in the last 12 months. Three in four. Obviously not every emergency is categorized the same. You've got medical emergencies at 54% — allergic reaction at lunch, a concussion at practice. Severe weather came next at 35%. And then those harder numbers — 19% of schools went through a lockdown in that 12-month period, and 19% also had someone that was on campus that shouldn't have been. One in five roughly on each of those last two. The takeaway is for most schools the question isn't whether something will happen — it's what happens in the first few minutes when it does.
If the alarm went off at your school right now, how long would it take to know every student is safe? Most people give a number that sounds pretty reasonable — couple of minutes, maybe three. But here's what we found through the research. On paper, schools are well prepared. 93% of independent schools run emergency drills regularly. That's a good number. But only 73% measure how these drills actually went. So roughly one in four schools runs a drill, everyone goes back to class, and no one records how long it took or what actually went wrong.
That really shows up in the results. Only 21% of schools confirm every student is safe in under four minutes, and 42% take six minutes or longer, and 29% take more than eight. Eight minutes. Think about what that looks like in a real event. Parents calling, a teacher standing on the field with a paper roll, someone's walking the hall checking bathrooms, and for eight minutes, nobody can say for certain where every student is. The issue is effort — schools are practicing. The issue is that practice without measurement doesn't get faster. You can run the same drill 10 times and get the same eight minutes 10 times. But the good news is it's very fixable. When schools time their drills, track who's missed, and look where the delays happen, the numbers come down.
If I may ask — right now, at this moment, do you know who is on your campus? Not who's enrolled, not who was marked present at 8:30 this morning, but who's actually on site right now. Only 41% said they were highly confident. That means for most schools the honest answer is "mostly" or "I think so." It's easy to see why. A student signs out at 10:00 for a dentist appointment. A contractor's in the science block. The soccer team left for an away game at lunch. A parent's waiting at reception. Two students are in the nurse's office. Each of those are probably recorded somewhere, but they're recorded in different places by different people at different times. When you need that full picture, someone has to go and put it together. It's fine on a normal Tuesday, but it's a very different story when that alarm goes off in reality.
Here's a scenario every school deals with. It's 8:45, the student hasn't shown up. There's no call from home, no note, nothing in the system. What happens next? Only 56% of schools reliably confirm that a student with an unexplained absence is safe. And even when they do, it takes time — on average 32 minutes. On average, it takes independent schools 6.3 minutes to account for every student on campus, and 42% of those schools it took longer than six minutes.
Why don't schools just fix these gaps? Schools are complex environments. Safety decisions are never made in isolation. Four things came up again and again as drivers of safety decisions: board and leadership oversight, regulatory and compliance requirements, budget and resources, and balancing safety with school culture. That last one was really interesting — no one wants their school to feel like an airport where everything's so tracked down to a T where there's no true color coming through of the school's culture.
That's it from me. There's a QR code on the screen. It's a free report. I distilled Orah down to one slide — student location sits at the core. Attendance, absences, late arrivals, early dismissals, hall passes, dismissals, insights and alerts all feed into a student location, so in the event of emergency you can account for students in real time. We work with 500 independent schools that trust Orah. Thank you very much.
Tiago [16:05]: Amazing. Thanks, Matt. I'd encourage anyone to write down your questions and put them into the Q&A. Remember, there's a few books up for grabs. I'm gonna throw over to you, Chris. I'm looking forward to hearing your findings.
Chris Joffe [16:25]: Thank you again for having us and giving us a chance to walk through a similar report. What we did is not dissimilar from the approach Orah took. We went to the US primarily and wound up getting about 350 responses. Not all independent schools — about half are independent schools. We looked across everything from health and cyber to prevention.
Most schools have an emergency operations plan. For those four percent that don't, I think you ought to. Even if you just go to our website, download the template, and put your own name on it — that's a step in the right direction. Most schools run fire drills — that's a requirement by most states. About ninety percent are doing training of some sort.
Where we found the gaps — and I'll start with what I consider to be the biggest gap and the biggest problem our schools face. About 19% of schools practiced reunification. About one in five have practiced the process of giving their students back after an emergency. The reunification process is giving students back to families after the emergency occurs. It's the best part, if I'm being honest — it's the part where you get to see that moment of joy where a parent realizes their kid is safe, the kid realizes their parent is there. They hug, they go, and they head off campus.
Truthfully, it's the single part of the emergency that will happen during every major emergency. Why? Because that's the promise we make our families at the beginning of the day. At the end of the fire, the earthquake, the lockdown, the person that's on campus that doesn't belong here — our promise is that we're gonna give our students back. This was the big insight we were looking for. I needed data to support the championship I've been running against this problem over the course of the last ten years.
A reunification exercise is not something I think you should go out and do tomorrow. If you're not doing fire drills, pull the fire alarm. If you don't have an emergency plan, download the template. You can do those things in five seconds. The reunification plan is probably a two to three-year effort. It's the part of the emergency that encounters parents. It's the scariest to practice because it involves all of the other elements.
But I have seen hundreds of schools go through emergencies, and schools who do better reunification have higher attendance at school the next day. If you do a great job reuniting your kids and families, you build confidence in your community, and you increase attendance the day after the emergency occurs. And maybe more powerfully, especially for our independent schools, those who do good reunification actually have higher enrollment the next fall. So if attendance and enrollment can be driven by getting this part right, I cannot come up with a good reason not to effort this area. I see this as one in five today, and I want to see this as at least two in five next year.
How do you do this? You need to have your leaders trained — not just tabletop exercises, full-scale exercises. I'll tell you a non-school example. I was in Chicago helping them run the marathon a couple of weeks ago. I took the aid station captains through an exercise — "If there's an emergency, this is what we'll do first, this is what we'll do second." Everybody nodded. Then I said, "Now let's go practice." I took them to the parking lot, and sure enough, there was a deficit between what we learned in the classroom versus what we were actually capable of doing. I see this play out with schools all the time. We discuss it in the room, we feel confident in the room, and then as soon as we get to the parking lot, things look and feel different. All of those things need to not just exist on paper but truly be brought to life.
I was surprised to see that most schools have a threat assessment team — three out of four schools roughly. But in practice it's probably more like one out of four schools who actually know how to use that process. The difference between a small school and a large school from a resource perspective is massive. The smaller your school, the more hats each person needs to wear.
Less independent schools practice lockdown drills than public schools. I think it's tied to options-based training. What we saw in the post-Parkland era from 2018 to 2020 was a lot of options-based training — run, hide, defend — and I think some of those got really scary. Between that and COVID, independent schools in particular didn't do as much practice. I want to encourage you that you don't have to always do options-based defense tools, but you can absolutely start to do some practice and get back to level with our public schools.
I'll leave you with four questions to ask your team. One: What are we actually practicing? What have we brought to life, not just on paper? Two: Who needs to be brought in? Who are the people not currently engaged who ought to be? Three: Where do we have concerns? I start all of our school safety assessments with a simple question — "What keeps you up at night?" And it's amazing — school leaders just tell me what I need to know. Write it down. And then do something about it. Four: We can't do it all. The best thing we can do is something. Pick one area and take one step at a time.
Tiago [28:37]: That's amazing. That's incredibly insightful. We'll share the slides afterwards too. I'm excited to go to a bit of Q&A. Christine has put a question in the chat.
Christine's question [29:16]: "We are a new school in New York and new to Orah, but we are loving it and finding new ways for it to work for our needs. One area I would like advice on is doing a lockdown in a multi-building campus. Students do not have phones, so if this lockdown is called when students are in recess or between buildings, we may not be able to account for all students. What suggestions do you have?"
Matt Varley [29:57]: The way that we've solved students not having phones on campus is the introduction of things like RFID scanning into classrooms. They can tap their existing student cards. As they're checking into class or checking out of a building and going to another building, they're scanning their student IDs. The more signal we've got of where that student was last seen, the higher resolution the picture of where that student is. You'll at least know that 30 seconds ago they tapped out of building A, and they're somewhere between building A and B. You can also integrate third-party door access systems like Vecarda or Salto to call into the Orah system.
Chris Joffe [32:11]: Every campus is truly specific and unique. Often I see campuses that are fenced completely, so for a fenced campus, step one is that external perimeter — hitting lockdown, getting that external perimeter stopped, and then you wanna continue almost like concentric circles inbound. Next, buildings. Next, classrooms inside those buildings. Then closets or other subspaces. That applies in concept no matter what the building structure looks like.
What I find in New York in particular is multiple buildings truly on a city block that are separate, where travel between buildings might involve going out into the public — the sidewalk. There are two key strategies as it relates to lockdown. The first is lockdown — close doors, lock them, turn off lights, close windows, close blinds, and rest in some position. The second is options-based — run, hide, fight. For K through 12 campuses, we generally use lockdown as the primary. Only for high schools do we look at options-based. For those in urban environments traveling between buildings through the public, you might choose to use options-based when between buildings, and traditional lockdown when inside a building.
Tiago [33:56]: I want to know if there was any trend that stood out to you from the other dataset that was surprising.
Matt Varley [36:25]: For Orah, it's that gap between practice and performance. Measuring what matters — you gotta start there and understand what metric matters to you as a school to improve on. Unless that's actually tracked and refined over time, you're just going through the same motion without real continuous improvement. Everyone was prepared, doing drills, but it's almost just going through the motions as opposed to what element of this is better from last time. And that reunification stat of 19% shocked me as being super low.
Chris Joffe [37:54]: It's a frustrating insight to me because it's so possible and it's so important. You don't have to spend money to do this. You do have to invest time and energy and build a work plan. The insight I had in both was similar — the difference between practicing and practicing well, and then the difference between practicing and changing that practice. When we measure things they do improve. Step one — track how quickly we evacuate. Step two — track how quickly we take attendance. The faster we evacuate and take attendance, the more time I have to organize as though we were about to practice reunification. We're so close because 90% plus of our schools are doing some form of drill. The challenge is how do we turn that drill into doing something other than the thousands of drills we've done already.
Tiago [39:46]: Are there any other gaps or drills that you would recommend school leaders look into?
Chris Joffe [40:04]: The way to decide what drills to do is to run a risk assessment. Ask yourself, what are the potential things that could happen? Start with a whiteboard. Your CFO is great to have in this room. Start with what are all the bad things that could happen to a school, and try to land with a whiteboard full. You should end up with a list of 30 to 60 items. Then rank order by likelihood and severity. We want a plan and drill in place for anything that scores 5/5 — most likely and most severe.
There's a fast pass — there's a standard response protocol with five core responses: evacuation, shelter in place, secure campus, lockdown, and classroom hold. Those are really the only five responses you can cause the entire community to take. They will serve you well against other incidents — fallen aircraft, pandemic, mountain lion on campus — we're gonna pick the best of those five responses.
Tiago [43:54]: What is one practical step that someone who's watched this webinar to completion could go and do next?
Matt Varley [44:13]: Time your next drill. Write the number down. Not an estimate — actual time to account for students. Write the time down when you start, write the time down when you finish. Just get that habit of writing it down.
Chris Joffe [44:48]: I second that — that's the first step. I wanna give you the last step. Chart a goal for three years from now. Whether it's conduct your first reunification drill, or conduct your first lockdown drill, or build your threat assessment team — be building towards something so that the steps you take this year are working you toward an ultimate goal. And if you're willing, I would love for that goal to be a reunification drill.
Tiago [45:14]: We'll give away a few copies of this book. Last question — an anonymous question about AI in school safety.
Tiago [47:51]: Just to close this out — Chris, if anyone wants to learn more about Joffe Emergency Services, how do they engage with you?
Chris Joffe [47:57]: Go to our website. More importantly, there's a free resources tab. Every month or week, depending on your level of engagement, we'll provide free tools, resources, access to materials, templates, tools. We try to give you exactly what you'll need in the now, prepare you for what we think you'll need next, and put something on your mind that will move you forward later. I strongly encourage you to get on that email list — it's totally free.
Matt Varley [48:49]: Download the report — there's a link in the chat. Download both reports. If there's something you'd like to know, we're gonna be doing the report again for next year, so there's gonna be a 2027 report. If you'd like to get involved and fill out the survey, the more responses we've got coming in, the richer the data will be next year. Check out Orah.com. For those Orah customers on the call, if you'd like to provide feedback on how we can help you run your emergencies better, please reach out to the team.
Tiago [49:43]: Everyone, I'll share all this afterwards — you'll get the recording, all the links and the slides. Thank you Chris for joining us today and taking time out of your busy schedule to share your insights. It was extremely valuable. And Matt as well. Everyone who came on and watched through to the full hour — good job. I hope you got a lot out of it. Thank you so much.
Chris Joffe: Thank you, Tiago.
Tiago: Thanks, Chris. Thanks, team. Have a great day, everyone.
