Note: This transcript is automatically generated and has been reviewed, but it may contain errors.
Warren (0:05): Hi, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Warren. I'm an account executive here at Orah. And today we're joined by Dr. Paul Cable, principal at Greater Atlanta Christian School. Dr. Cable — who I heard is Paul's father, so I'm gonna call him Paul from now on — has been an ongoing champion of Orah, and we're thrilled to have him joining us today. It's great to be here. Thank you. Greater Atlanta Christian School has recently onboarded with Orah, and they rolled out automated attendance across the community of sixteen hundred plus students. And he's here to walk us through what that looked like in practice, from getting the team ready to what's changed in the day-to-day. For everyone joining us online, please share your questions in the chat as we go, and we'll use the end to answer as many as we can. And for everyone joining us online, just keep on sharing those questions and we will answer them. So for those coming in fresh that don't have any background in Orah and don't know what an Orah is, let me just spend about five minutes doing a very brief review of Orah. So Orah is a student safety and school operations platform that gives staff a single real-time view of where every student is and who's on campus at any given moment. At its core is location awareness. As students move throughout the day — homeroom, classes, buses, excursions, sports teams, boarding houses — Orah keeps an up-to-date picture of where students are expected to be and where they have been checked in, so staff have an accurate view rather than relying on memory or scattered spreadsheets. 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 marked present in first period but is marked absent in the second period. This turns attendance from a compliance chore into an early warning system for whether a student is actually where they're supposed to be. And Orah isn't prescriptive about how you capture attendance. It works with however your school operates. Teachers can take roll via a browser extension. Students can check in at a kiosk. Staff can take roll on a mobile app. And we can use RFID, NFC, barcodes, QR codes, magnetic scanners, name search. Whatever is used at your specific locations, whatever that input is, it all flows to one record. No manual exports, no spreadsheet syncing, no stale data. One place, always current. But think about every place that a student can be that isn't their scheduled class. Field trip, sports practices, the library, nurse visits, senior privileges, after-school pickup, off-campus activities. Every one of those is a blind spot in a school setup. Orah captures all 83 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, thank you for that. And now I'm gonna stop sharing this and go over to Paul. So Paul, once again, I'd love you to just quickly introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your school.
Paul (4:05): Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me, Warren. Really appreciate it. Yeah, so I'm Paul Cable. I'm the high school principal at Greater Atlanta Christian School. We're a six weeks old through 12th grade school right outside of Atlanta, kind of north, northeast of Atlanta a little bit. So yeah, larger Christian private day school with about 1,600 students across our campus. I joined GAC now 11 years ago as a Latin teacher, baseball coach, and I had some background as well in theology and so was teaching in some of those areas. Eventually got into some online school administration, got into our brick-and-mortar school administration, and now am the principal of the high school. So I oversee our high school, which has around 700, a little under 700 students just in grades 9 to 12. We've enjoyed — we're a matter of weeks, a little over a month into our actual application of Orah this school year, and yeah, I'm excited about what it's doing, what it could do for us. We're already seeing some of the effects of some of the changes that Orah's allowed us to make, so grateful for that.
Warren (5:03): Great. Thanks, Paul. So what did attendance and student tracking look like at Greater Atlanta Christian School before joining with Orah?
Paul (5:03): Yeah, so we were taking attendance just within the LMS that we used. But also, to account for — you just laid it out there — some of those edge cases that are no longer edge cases because of how many students have them, right? They happen every day. We were capturing those in different ways, whether it was through Google Sheets or through some parent emails. Just a lot of streams of information about where students were going to be, where we expected them. And there's a lot of manual input, which can lead to whether it's human error or missing things. So we weren't as tight as we would have hoped that we could be on that. And so that's kind of how it looked. And because it looked that way, we felt like, all right, it's time to look around for a way to make sure that we know whether students and how often students are in front of our teachers. That's the basic thing. As me as a principal, my job is to make sure that we pursue our mission and with everything that we do. And with our teachers, even as we surveyed them about what is one of the main things that you think is holding us back from that mission that we can improve — one of them was, can we have more accountability for our students being in front of us? Because, man, the magic happens when students are in front of teachers in the classroom. And so that's what we were trying to maximize, and that's why we started looking for something to be a little tighter with that.
Warren (6:40): That's amazing. That's a great story. I'd like to actually just focus on — you brought up the teachers and the size of your staff, which is you have a large teaching staff. So where did you start when planning onboarding? 'Cause we're not talking a few staff, we're talking quite a few.
Paul (6:40): Oh, yeah. One thing that I love about our teachers is that they think carefully about what's happening in their classroom. They are always looking, and we have a value at GAC — obsessed with finding a better way. So our teachers think like that. And so they love to have a voice in, okay, how can we get better as a school? And attendance records and streamlining that and tightening that up was a big suggestion, a big piece from them. And so they were involved from the very beginning, even as early as last summer. So we really went fully operational in August. We started school in August, early August here. So even as early as last summer we started gathering that information, began looking at different options, getting requirements together. And teachers were involved in that process as well. And then once we settled on Orah, we were able to deploy it and we did a limited pilot, a volunteer pilot with some teachers. We gathered data with them throughout the kind of end of the spring. We worked with your team, and I'll say this in other elements of this webinar too, but the team was amazing of just helping us learn it, helping us understand how to adapt it to our policies and processes. And so over the summer then we took all the information and the feedback from that pilot from the spring with that limited number of teachers. And we actually, during the summer we set up some dummy classes with some students like my kids and a couple of our administrative kids. There were students in there that got a lot of detentions for being tardy a lot of times. But we did some dry runs and went through over the summer and put it through its paces in terms of the edge cases that we see a lot of here at our school. And we can talk about — we have a lot of hybrid students, maybe non-traditional ways of interacting with campus. And so we put it through its paces over the summer and by the time we got to the end of the summer, we were really confident with making it as simple as possible for our teachers to use. Prioritizing not bothering them while they're teaching, letting them do as little as possible while they're actually teaching to make sure that we know where our students are and are able to get great accountability and data around attendance. And so we rolled it out. Really nothing but positive from our teachers from the very beginning. And then when we did have feedback, there was great responsiveness. So it was a kind of spring, summer, and then deploy in fall type rhythm with a pilot and then some testing.
Warren (9:00): Gotcha. Okay, so you didn't receive much pushback at all. It sounds like everyone was very happy with the pilot.
Paul (9:00): Yes. It was solving a real problem. And they knew that the problem was relevant to them and relevant to our mission. And so we were always articulating it like, "We wanna do this because we wanna get students in front of you, because we value what's in your classroom." That's where the magic happens, is out there in those classrooms, and I wanna get as many students to experience that as possible. And we do that with policy, we do that with process, but we also have to have the right system. And so we attacked it in all three of those areas. We changed some policy, we changed some process, and we also got a great new system that allows us to deploy that.
Warren (9:46): Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing. Now that we've gone live, just to reiterate, how does attendance — like how it was compared to how it is now? So how is it now looking for Orah now that we've gone to a live state?
Paul (9:46): Yeah. We — there's a lot of angles that are different. One is that we are able to get consistent and reliable data on where students are, but also how often certain things are occurring. Whether how often are they arriving to campus late? How often are they not getting from one class to another? And so what we're able to do, because we knew we would have those data points, we were able to firm up and even create some new processes and policies around, okay here's a number after which we're gonna check in with you, right? So before we couldn't really do that because we had so many different streams of data that it was hard to collate and get alerts when a student would be, "Hey we've gotten to five of this kind of thing or 10 of this." We just didn't have a system that could read all that and alert off of those things and let our team, our deans, and our student support folks know when it was time to check in with the student, when it was time for kind of a consequence to trigger or something. We didn't have that ability, and so we could only do it when we noticed it. And now we are receiving that information proactively and able to jump in. So where it was very manual and reactive with the ways that we were having to do it before, now we really have a better view of it, and so we're able to hold to some policies that we really couldn't have. And you can't put a policy out there that you can't enforce. So we weren't able to do some of those things. Now that we can say, "Hey, here's what our values are. Here's where we'd like you to be," then now with Orah we're able to say, "Okay, look, here's what we'd like and here's where we are with that." And that's with students, but it's also with building consistency with our teachers in taking attendance. I think we all know, a teacher's there to teach. They're not there to take attendance. They're not there to monitor passes. But there is a safety thing there. It's very important and they know that as well. But if they aren't confident that the system they're inputting data into is going to do a good job with the data, is gonna action off of that data, is gonna gather it, and analyze it in a reliable way, there's not gonna be a lot of motivation to continue to give that system a lot of data. So now that they know, goodness, our administration's gonna be able to respond when this student is not in my class — man they are so much better with attendance. We actually created an attendance survivor island where teachers stay on the island until you miss an attendance. And so we've had a good time with that, and we still have almost 30 teachers that haven't missed a single attendance and we've been in school for a month and a half. So it's really started us over afresh with that, and I think our kids notice. And again, magic happens when students are in front of great teachers, and we have great teachers, and so we wanna maximize that time.
Warren (12:38): Yeah, that's amazing. Oh, I love that attendance survivor. I think if anyone takes anything away from today's webinar, attendance survivor. I love that.
Paul (12:38): Yeah, it's the only one.
Warren (12:38): Yeah, exactly. So now that we're being, as you mentioned, we're not being reactive, we're being proactive, and once again, the size of the staff, the size of the school population, if you could put a number on it, how much time has Orah saved you, your staff, your faculty? Maybe like per week. How much time are we saving?
Paul (12:38): That's a great question. In some ways there's a lot. So our attendance staff here in the office are freed up — there are multiple hours per week where they're reconciling attendance from the different streams where, email and this Google sheet here and this email from this coach here, and then having to input it into our SIS and LMS manually. So there's a lot of time there and multiple hours per week for sure. But the more, maybe the harder thing to quantify like that would be what we weren't able to do that we would have wanted to spend time on that Orah now allows us to spend time on. Orah certainly streamlines the attendance process, but really that's not its main contributor. We're happy to spend time on attendance, but now we're able to spend time on reliable interventions that need to be made and so those hours are better spent helping students succeed, intervening when there's a need there, checking in at the right times. So while it's saved — it certainly saved our attendance manager time. What it's really allowed us to do is spend time with students in the right ways, the right students at the right time.
Warren (14:08): Great. Great. And was there a moment maybe even like early on where that showed you that the switch to Orah was worth it? Give me one example of something that happened where oh, this is fantastic. This never could have happened before.
Paul (14:30): Yes. So I think, the easy one is when we had 100% of our teachers take attendance the first day of school. Every class, every teacher took attendance. That seems like that's a low bar, but if any of you guys out there that run a school, getting every teacher to do anything all the time — that's, 100% compliance is rare. And we haven't had that every day, but seeing that happen, it was like, okay they're noticing a change. They feel this is worth it. They understand the why of it. And so that was a moment where it's like, man, they're doing it. Like they believe in it and it's working. I think for us the passes — once parents started using that link and we have a time where, a lot of our students, we have a time on Wednesdays, we have a lot of kind of different ways of interacting, very complex kind of ways that students may be on and off campus throughout the day, hybrid students and enrichment times where certain students leave campus. And during one of those times it's very common for large numbers of students to check out at a given point in the day. And so the parents, it was a long line. It was 50 people in line and we were checking them out. And when it took us like seven minutes the first week of that with Orah and with the passes, even though we had a couple of parents that were still trying to figure it out, we're like, "Okay, that's moving the needle some." So it wasn't perfect. We continue to — we're helping parents understand it, helping them see the value in it. And they do. But that was — there were a couple of times there early where it was like, "All right, this is gonna be good for us."
Warren (15:59): Amazing. So you mentioned how sometimes having to talk to parents about how to use the application. So what advice would you give another school preparing to onboard with Orah based on what you've learned about it?
Paul (15:59): That's a great question. We're only six weeks in, so I don't wanna pretend that we're the experts on it. But certainly one thing that I think was great about it is that our teachers always knew that Orah's not there for just to get a gotcha for the kids. Who is in education for a gotcha moment with a kid? It's there because we value the time in front of the teacher. We value what the teacher's doing in the classroom is unbelievably valuable, and it's an expression of that. And so as long as that's clear to our teachers that, "Hey, this is enacting a value that we have for the time that I get to spend, that I've planned, that I've been careful to craft this moment with my students," let's express that value in keeping great data, 'cause you measure what matters, right? So we measure the time that students are in front. So keeping that in front of teachers, that why, and starting that early and helping them understand that and keeping that in front of you as you figure out how you want to deploy the data in, whether it's consequences or interventions or things like that. Keeping that mission, that kind of big picture why we do attendance in front of the teachers, the students, the parents in a positive way really lays a great foundation for the rollout because people are bought in. "Yeah, that makes sense. We would want that." Rather than it being like a, "Hey, this is a compliance thing, a gotcha moment for a kid" — trying to catch a kid in something. And we wanna try to make the right thing the easy thing, and I think Orah helps us do that. So my advice would be, keep that in front of your teachers, in front of your staff, in front of your parents and students as to why you might be rolling a thing like this out and whatever attendance policies or processes you might be changing along with it. And then just weather a little bit of the change. Change management — you gotta have a why in front, and you gotta weather a little bit of the first learning curve with patience. And you know what? Parents kinda get that you would want kids in class, they get that. And they respect that. But there is a learning curve. I might say one other thing is that as simple as you can possibly make the setup for teachers, the better, right? I was deeply involved in the background. Our attendance manager, Crystal was deeply involved in the setup and how we put the passes together and how will the alerts work and all that. And early on we realized, goodness, if I tell my teachers all of this stuff and help them try to understand all the logic of Orah based around the student and the location versus the reasons and all that — they're gonna glaze over and it'll never work. So you gotta make it so that there are two, three principles that teachers follow when they use Orah. And the background is set up as complex as you need it to make it as simple as you can get it for them. And that would be the advice — to make it as simple as possible for a teacher who's just here to teach and wants to have an easy way to make sure the kids are in front of them.
Warren (18:53): Yeah. That's amazing. Thanks, Paul. Let's shift over. We're getting some questions coming in the chat, so maybe what we'll do is we'll turn it to the audience. So first question came in. It says, "How long did onboarding take from kickoff with Orah to going live?"
Paul (18:53): Big picture, we started in March. We started the pilot in March. We piloted for about six weeks with 20 teachers and their classes. In terms of onboarding our whole staff, really it took about two to two and a half hour-long sessions to help them understand here's attendance and here's kind of the passes. But we have three rules that we use for Orah. The way we've set up Orah, our teachers abide by three rules, and that's it. That covers every use case, and so we were just going through and helping them understand what to push where, what to mark, how to enact those three kind of principles that we have. But with our broad teacher group, not very long, just a couple of sessions in what we call launch, our pre-planning period. And continual reminders at times through the first couple of weeks. Once you get over the hump of the honeymoon period with it, you gotta continue that cruise control. But with some reminders. But not too long. We did start the pilot in March and then we did the testing throughout the summer, so about eight to 10 weeks of that testing period throughout the summer as we stress tested our setup. And then about two to two and a half hours with the staff during pre-planning period to get it rolling.
Warren (20:21): Gotcha. Okay. Another question came in. What student information system do you use?
Paul (20:21): We use Blackbaud.
Warren (20:21): Blackbaud, okay. So you're using Blackbaud. But for the audience, we do also support Veracross, we support FACTS, PowerSchool. So there's a number of different flavors of student information systems that we can connect to. Okay, thank you. Okay, here's another one. What was the acceptance and duration in needing to change the policies and processes in preparation to bring Orah in as a solution? Ooh, that's a long one. So I think what we're trying to say here is from, okay, yes, we're gonna do this, but what was all that pre-work? What did the pre-work before contract look like? I think that's what that question means.
Paul (20:58): Yeah, so in terms of deciding that Orah was the solution, we really were careful to outline what our requirements were gonna be, knowing that nothing was gonna fit those exactly. But how close could we get? But also, an important criterion for us was the level of flexibility and willingness to kind of work with us and help us make a system that would support the processes and policies that we wanted to enact. And that was a big feature of Orah for us. And even as we got into it, the level of responsiveness to, "Hey, could we get this to work this way?" Or, "What if we did it this way?" I would be chatting with Finn the chatbot on the website, and that works unbelievably well. But occasionally an Orah staff member would just break in and say, "Hey, I saw you working with this. What if you tried this?" Just the level of — so that was a big piece for us too, was how responsive is the support gonna be? How close was it to our requirements, and how responsive would the support be when inevitably it doesn't fit exactly what we would've designed from scratch? But how much can we get it to do that? So that was important. And in terms of the policies, it was almost directly drawn from our teacher input sessions over the summer. So what would you as a teacher like to see in terms of attendance policy? So they spoke into that. We had lots of groups of teachers come in and give input and they had great ideas as always. And so we did that very closely.
Warren (22:31): Great. I think we've got one more just came in. In what capacity have you rolled out Orah to your parents so far? So I think you did mention about the parent app — how much buy-in do we have?
Paul (22:53): Yep. So it's a great question. So we decided to, this first year, roll out Orah to faculty for use, and only the link to parents for now. So what we've done is we put the link out for them to schedule a pass with us. And we've set it up where they can do that. That's been really pretty smooth. Parents — we had to change parent practice from emailing us or giving us a call to come check their kid out. We would just guide them to that link. So we put that link on our LMS and they know that. So that's the extent of that so far. Our plan is to, once we get solidified in terms of Orah as a piece of our culture at school and during the school day, to then let our parents into the app part of it that will give them a little bit more visibility. Because even now, even five, six weeks into school, they're going, "Okay, this looks cool. Like, how can I have more visibility into my student's attendance? How can I see the things that I've scheduled for them?" And sooner than later, we're probably gonna start piloting that app with our parents and getting feedback. But we love to do that pilot feedback, get buy-in early with a small number of folks. But that's what we're doing so far — just the link worked well, but I do see the need for some additional parent visibility into the situation at Orah.
Warren (24:00): And did you have much pushback? 'Cause I think parents are so used to emailing or calling, just saying, "Hey, you really have to use this link and here are the reasons why."
Paul (24:10): Yeah. I think that maybe at first there was a little bit of, okay, even from our side, like, how do we handle the parent who calls? Do you say, "Okay, no. Go to the link"? What we did was we said, "Okay, look. Let me schedule this for you. I'm gonna use this link. In fact, you can just do it yourself next time."
Warren (24:50): Perfect.
Paul (24:50): And you don't have to call me, right? So we're partners with our parents, so we don't wanna be like, "Hey, no." So we would schedule it for them. But we would say, "Hey, we're using the link. Go grab it. It's up there for you. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to wait until you want to get your student up — call me, you can just schedule it ahead of time." They're like, "Oh, ahead of time. Sure." And that became pretty easy. If they walk up to our desk, we would say, "Oh, we'll schedule it for you. But see, here's what I'm doing, so you can just do this." And then we only do that once, maybe twice before that parent's enjoying using the link to do it on their own time.
Warren (25:13): Yeah, that's great. Okay, I think that might be it for questions coming in through the chat. So we're just right on the half hour. So once again it's Dr. Cable — I am gonna sneak that in — from Greater Atlanta Christian School. We really appreciate your time today, and we're thrilled to be partnering with you.
Paul (25:13): Thanks, Warren. It's great to be here.
Warren (25:13): All right. Take care. Bye now.
Paul (25:21): Bye, everyone.
