Two very different independent schools sat down with Orah to talk about what changed when they moved attendance, emergency response, and student check-ins onto one platform.
Springside Chestnut Hill Academy spans 18 months to 18 years across 62 acres, 15 buildings, and public streets running through campus. The Kiski School is a boarding school running grades 9 through post-grad, accountable for students 24/7. In this PAIS-hosted panel, leaders from both schools share how they got started, what their first 30 to 60 days looked like, and where they are heading next.
What they cover:
- Why each school chose Orah, and how the rollout went with faculty and parents
- Cutting attendance reconciliation from hours of manual work to automated alerts
- Using passes, check-ins, and NFC tiles to keep an accurate picture of where students are
- Running a cell-phone-free campus without losing location awareness
- Consolidating multiple systems and reducing app fatigue for parents
- Practical advice for schools weighing Orah, including how to build the internal team to support it
The session closes with key findings from Orah's State of Independent School Safety report, produced with ATLIS across 85 US independent schools.
Note: This transcript is automatically generated and has been reviewed, but it may contain errors.
Mary McAndrew: [00:00:00] Okay. we are gonna go ahead and get started so we don't hold anything up, and I think we'll probably have a few more people joining as we get going. But good mo- good afternoon, everyone. No, it's not morning. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Mary McAndrew, director of engagement at PAS.
I have Deb Borden, my colleague, with me today, director of programming and research at PAS. And we are thrilled to have Orah with us today. Orah is a valued PI sponsor and a leading school safety platform. they work with independent schools K through 12, maintaining real-time visibility into student whereabouts throughout the everyday processes that schools are already using.
I'm gonna pass it over to Tiago, Penteado today, marketing manager at Orah. But before I do that, I also want to mention that we have two PAS member schools, representing, on the call today. They work with Orah, and we're thrilled to have Pete Donato, chief innovation officer at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, and Brian Serbin, assistant head of school at The Kiski School.
so thank you both for joining us today, along with Orah. and we're looking forward to this, and we will open it up to Q&A at the end. The recording will go out at the [00:01:00] end, in addition to follow-up materials. So Tiago, I am passing it over to you at this point.
Tiago Penteado: Awesome. Thank you very much, Mary. we are excited to be here.
And again, I want to thank, Pete and Brian for taking the time to join us on this, panel discussion. before we get to the panel questions, I just want to put it out there that if you have questions at any point in the, discussion, you can just put it in the chat, and, Emily, my colleague, who I'll introduce in a moment, will put them to Brian and Pete at the end of, the webinar or near the end of the webinar as well.
but before we get to the panel section, I was just going to go through, a few of the key findings from our, state of twen- oh, let me see if I can move to the next slide somehow.
This happened. You know what? That's okay. And for some reason I'm not able to move to the next slide, but I'll just give you a brief overview. We- we've had [00:02:00] this,state of independent school safety report put out earlier this year. it's a 50-page report, where we surveyed, about 85 different independent schools.
I will put some key findings in the chat, as we go along, and as well as the link to download the full report if you'd like to grab a copy of that. but I'm happy to move on to the panel discussion, and if I can get the tech working, maybe I can do a little, a bit at the end instead. so I'm gonna pass it over to Emily, to introduce herself and then maybe introduce Pete and Bryan as well, and then, go into the discussion.
Emily DeRoche: Great. Thanks, Tiago. hello, everyone. My name is Emily, and I'm seeing some familiar names, in the list, over on the side here. And so hello if we already know each other, if we've already worked together. I am a customer success manager with Orah, so I work closely with schools to, reach their goals, that they've signed up to, to use Orah for.
And, Pete and Brian, come from fairly different backgrounds when it comes to the story [00:03:00] of getting started with Orah. And so my hope as we get started, Pete and Brian, is if you could share just a little bit about that. What was your reasoning for going with Orah in a couple, and, very briefly, and, where do you see...
how has that evolved since you originally got started? Maybe Pete, if you wanna go first.
Peter DiDinato: Sure. So our, our origin story, if you will, is we were in a meeting,a management team, senior admin, whatever you wanna call it, last April, and the content in the meeting was a little dry. I'll just say that.
And I got a text during the meeting from our head of upper school, Matt Norcini, who was saying, "How can we improve the way that we do attendance?" And that just sparked a conversation A week later, I was at the ATLIS conference. I met Paul, for the first time around then, and it was very short order after that we partnered up.
So for [00:04:00] SCH, we are a school from 18 months through 18 years. We're spread out on 62 acres, and we have 15 different buildings, and we have public streets that run all through our campus. We also allow certain kids in upper school to leave campus at different times, and we found that taking attendance had become very difficult and the, reconciliation process incredibly onerous at the end of the day.
Essentially, that was our four upper school deans. That was what they were doing for, an hour and a half every day, trying to reach out to parents, figure out where people were. And, and we also had teachers who didn't always take attendance in Blackbaud. That was another kind of piece of this that was very challenging.
So that led us down, down the path of talking with Paul, which then became Zohab and then Emily, and I can't say enough about the Orah team. They've been really a treat to work with, and [00:05:00] I mean that, not just nice people, but also very responsive, very technical. And, yeah, we were off and running. I think we were a little nervous at first about getting off the ground because we couldn't really train on the data until the school year started.
And, as you could imagine, faculty who were getting a new way of taking attendance in our opening meetings were a little bit anxious of, "How is this gonna work?" But it got off the ground and worked really well
Emily DeRoche: it sounds like it was just meant to be. All, all lined up perfectly in terms of those initial conversations and,connecting with Paul just when it, was top of mind for you.
we are very happy to have you on board and thoroughly enjoy working with the team, at SCH as well. And then, Brian, I know your story is a little bit different because you started off, on the boarding side of things. would love to hear a little bit more about that.
Brian Serbin: Yeah. Yeah, no problem. so I- obviously at Kiski we're a little bit different.
We have... We're a boarding school, grades nine through [00:06:00] post-grad, so we have our kids here 24/7, so we need to account for them 24/7, which is quite the task. and we actually started just by using Orah for our dorm checks in the evenings, and just this past year we switched to using the attendance for class as well.
and now we use it for class, for athletics, for meal check-ins, and for dorm check-ins, which has been fantastic. I was a little hesitant because we were using Blackbaud for class attendance, before switching over to Orah for class. but since we've done that, it's been fantastic. It's been seamless.
I work closely with Alexis. She set us up really well to do that this year, and any time we had questions about things that, that were going on, she was right on it and able to help us. I think, the thing that really stuck out for me this year when we started using class attendance was just the ease of use for faculty.
before when we were using Blackbaud, they had to sign in, they had to find their class, they had [00:07:00] to do the roll manually. and Orah has a Chrome extension where they can just click a button and their roll pops up, and it's just... I knew it wasn't gonna be a problem when after the first month I didn't hear any complaints from teachers.
So it was good
Emily DeRoche: It's always great, right? And, if they're not saying anything, you know that something's working well.
Brian Serbin: Yep.
Emily DeRoche: And so it sounds like the common thread here is just that need to know, where your students are, right? That importance of knowing where your students are, whether that is, from 18 months to, 12th grade o- on a large campus with streets running through it, or whether that's a s- a smaller group of boarding students, really needing to know exactly where, where they are.
And you spoke to it a little bit, Brian, but- ... what did attendance look like, that bigger picture of attendance, look like before Orah?
Brian Serbin: yeah. Before Orah,what it looked like is, teachers having to go in manually and sign into [00:08:00] Blackbaud, put that in. a lot of times they would forget to do that.
and one of the features on Orah is after five minutes into class it'll send an automatic email reminder to them to do that. but before that it was a lot of, weight on my back to follow up through Blackbaud or go find a teacher or email a teacher if a kid's missing. and now it's set up that if a kid gets marked absent, I get an email, several other deans here get an email.
so it's just much more automated now. a lot less, I would say manual labor, human labor on that end, which has been good.
Emily DeRoche: Yeah, drawing your attention where it needs to be as, as opposed to having to go searching for it sometimes.
Brian Serbin: Correct.
Emily DeRoche: And, would you say similar things, Peter?
Peter DiDinato: Yeah, and I would say also, too,I, I'm sure it's the same, experience for Brian, that it allowed us to better track and f- find patterns, identify issues much earlier and much more easily in the school [00:09:00] year so that we could have those, important conversations with students and sometimes parents about kids being absent, what the impact of attendance on grades could be, or perhaps students who are, tend to be absent when we're giving, a test.
that was another metric that we were tracking. And, the idea that our deans, our head of upper school can be doing strategic work with families around student success is way better than them ch- contacting parents to find out whether or not their kid was supposed to be at school that day.
Emily DeRoche: Yeah, taking some of the time spent, it used to be spent on, manual tasks, inputting information, and, having them be able to have those face-to-face conversations. That's what we hear from a lot of schools as well. And thinking back to your transition of getting started with Orah, what would you say the first 30 or 60 days looked like for you?
Was there anything that came as a [00:10:00] big surprise, either positively or negatively?
Maybe Pete, if you wanna jump in first.
Peter DiDinato: Okay. Sure. I wasn't, I was, biding my time there. I would say- the biggest surprises for us were how seamless it was and how on board our parents were from the beginning. We had been coming from a world of an email address that parents would email into or perhaps call the upper school assistant, and we put a lot of effort in late August and early September into a communications campaign of saying those,formats will no longer be monitored, that Orah is the way that we're, you're putting in passes, we're doing attendance.
So there is a parent partnership piece for us, for sure, 'cause our kids are going home every day. and, we were pleasantly surprised of that first month how few issues we actually had. And I think a direct quote from one of ... our [00:11:00] lead dean on this project was, "I will add that the transition was more seamless than I thought it would be.
Any new app has a learning cur- curve, but fortunately, a majority of SCH faculty and parents were on board right away. The automatic alerts definitely helped."
Emily DeRoche: that's so great to hear. Love that. And, what would you say, Brian, in terms of that first 30 to 60 days? And I know,your transitions came in two parts, right?
G- transitioning onto use with boarding, and then again with attendance. So whichever one sticks out in your mind.
Brian Serbin: Yeah, I think it was just the ease of use for our faculty and then just the time that I got back- from, chasing kids around in the morning. being a boarding school, most of the kids are here, but we have a significant day population as well.
and parents were really quick to, if not putting a pass in early if a kid was gonna be absent, to email us even quicker when they knew that we were using Orah. it was just, it was, I was glad to have some time back early in the year.
Emily DeRoche: Yeah. And [00:12:00] I know we've talked a little bit about parents putting in passes and alerts going out.
and I n- I see some familiar names on the call today, but, also some that I don't think are Orah users yet. And, if you could share just a little bit more about what type of information you're gathering from parents through those passes. what are they able to tell you about, in terms of their student absences?
But then also, what type of information are you pushing out to parents about those absences?
Maybe Brian?
Brian Serbin: Yeah. Yeah. yeah, they're able to let us know if, it's a doctor's appointment they have or if it's, a lot ... Now with the rise in club athletics, some of our students are out for things on Fridays, whether they're playing with their club team or things like that, so they're just able to communicate a lot more clearly in the past.
They can put an excuse in there. if we need to follow up for a doctor's note or something like that, we can put that and communicate all that right through Orah, which has been nice. [00:13:00]
Emily DeRoche: And what type of things are you alerting out on, in terms of attendance?
Brian Serbin: in terms of attendance, we're just, alerting out once in a while about, if there are things that come up, right?
Once in a while, students, whether they're being, they're out sick or a late doctor's appointment or something like that, we're able to put something out to parents through announcements, monthly, just reminding them how to, get, get that information to us just so we don't need to follow up after the fact, which has been
Emily DeRoche: good.
Brian Serbin: Yeah.
Emily DeRoche: And Pete, are there any specific, trigger points that you're using to set up your alerts that go to, say, parents or staff, things that you would, previously have to go searching for to, to identify?
Peter DiDinato: Definitely. and this kind of gets to a recommendation that I would make for any school who's thinking about Orah, is to build a robust team to support it.
I know for us it was not just the head of upper [00:14:00] school and the deans, it was also a couple of people from tech, it was a registrar. and the registrar was really helpful in saying, "These are the triggers we've built in Blackbaud that we have to now build in Orah." And we were anticipating that to be more difficult than it was, honestly.
and I know Zoha was incredibly helpful in doing that. So if we, if we set a threshold of three latenesses in a quarter equals a warning or, a detention or something like that's all happening in an automated way versus us counting that stuff in a spreadsheet and then saying, "Oh, wait, no, that was Q1, not Q2.
That one, that absence doesn't count, so we have to start over." Now that's all happening, more easily. And while I would say definitely a boarding school and an upper school is more complicated, I know that my division heads in lower school and middle school are now in the pipeline to move their faculty to doing attendance on [00:15:00] Orah, in the future because of the ease of use, not just for faculty, but also with the communication and ease of use for parents
Emily DeRoche: Yeah. We're finding, schools that make good use of those alerts have said the same thing, is that, going from those spreadsheets to just having these things be put in front of you automatically has saved a ton of time and, people power to, manage. And so speaking of time, can you share any other ways that Orah has saved you time?
Anything that comes to mind?
Brian Serbin: Look at my notes here.
Peter DiDinato: Yeah,
Emily DeRoche: that's
Peter DiDinato: it.
in some ways I, I would draw an analogy to the AI conversation, where there's one camp who feels that AI is gonna do and replace people, and there's another camp that says, if AI can do more of the [00:16:00] mundane things, we can do higher level work." And I think that's the way we've experienced Orah this year.
It's allowed us to have more white glove, interactions with parents, more thoughtful strategic conversations about the success of students in their academic journey, things that are just, they're hard to do when you're busy and there's a pile of things on your desk. And to Brian's point, you spend, a significant amount of time every day trying to reconci- reconcile where actually the kids were, and if they're able to leave campus and tap a tile with their phone, great.
that means we don't have to have a fire drill and say, "Where is Emily? Emily's not here." We can just see in Orah that, hey, she's, she checked out at this point, so we know she's off campus. and for schools like ours who are, doing away with kids having mobile phones next year, there is an iPad option for this where kids can sign in and out, the old-fashioned way with their fingers [00:17:00] o- on an iPad, no phone needed
Emily DeRoche: You mentioned two things there that I want to dig into a little bit. so you said, tapping a phone and curious to hear, Brian, how students on your campus are, able to, h- what kind of inputs do you use to tell you,the coming and going of students?
Brian Serbin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, all of our buildings have an Orah tile in them, but we are a cell free, a cell phone free campus during the academic day.
this was our second year being a cell phone free campus. but that's just from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM during the day, and then after that they get their cell phones back. they can ... Outside of that, they use their phones to check in on tiles, whether it's coming on or leaving campus or if they're going to different buildings.
but during the day it's all, teacher input as far as attendance goes.
Yeah.
Emily DeRoche: And just to paint a picture, as, students are tapping in and out, as attendance is being taken in [00:18:00] Orah, these all act as inputs to update our last known location for a student. and so Pete, I know that you have set up the, you've been working with NFC tiles a little bit as well, so that's the tapping.
anything else that you're exploring?
Peter DiDinato: We are. So we, at this point, we've created a three-year plan for Orah. The year one was upper school attendance, and we've started the emergency pilot, in the last quarter of this year. In year two, we're gonna bring middle school in for attendance and do the emergency for middle and upper school.
And year three, perhaps sooner, we will move the lower school to attendance, emergency, and dismissal, 'cause we're using Pick My Kid as the dismissal app now. And our idea is if Orah could do attendance, emergency, dismissal, and visitor management, we could effectively replace four different things with one.
and that's very appealing, not just for us [00:19:00] internally, but trying to lead with what is the parent experience, what are we asking of parents. I think there's a lot of conversation around portal fatigue, app fatigue, login fatigue, and where we're asking parents to put money on a lunch account in one space and log in to see grades in another, pay their bill in a different portal.
our goal for the next 24 months is to consolidate that experience and, identity management as much as possible so that they're logging in ultimately someday with one user account
Emily DeRoche: and so much of what you just said in terms of those dismissals, attendance, emergency management, it does come down to that, awareness, right?
A location awareness. Where is a student, relative to where they are supposed to be.
So excited to go on that journey with you and bringing those, systems together into Orah. And how does that resonate with you, Brian, in terms of, the, using one, one system?
Brian Serbin: Yeah. Yeah, definitely resonates with us.
We, we're still [00:20:00] using Blackbaud and Orah, and I think there, there is certainly fatigue. as a parent myself with kids in private school, there's three, three or four different platforms I'm using, so I definitely understand trying to streamline that, and Orah has been fantastic, for Kiski in able to do that with attendance, at a boarding school, and I think next year we're looking to, potentially bring, discipline under that umbrella as well, 'cause we've been using Blackbaud.
and I think, that would definitely make my life easier and all of our deans' lives easier. so that's something that we're looking forward to next year as well.
Emily DeRoche: Okay. So adding that, those pastoral or behavior note- Yep ... pieces.
Brian Serbin: Yep.
Emily DeRoche: Yeah, so it's a, something that we're seeing across a lot of schools, especially those that are Blackbaud schools where, there's just certain limitations within Blackbaud- Yes
as we have heard. and so just looking at my ... I know we provided you with some questions here. I wanna make sure that I'm not going too far off, off script here. [00:21:00]
Mary McAndrew: And- Emily, could I just jump in? I wanted to point something out that, was a big- when we partnered with Orah that was a big thing for us, is your focus and expertise in independent schools.
I think understanding the uniqueness of each school, and I don't know if you can speak to that a little bit or Brian and Pete, but for our PIS schools, we, I think that's a huge plus for them to know that someone understands the independent school, environment. And I know that's that's where your expertise and focus is.
Emily DeRoche: Yeah. We work exclusively with independent schools, independent and private schools. with a kind of an origin story in boarding schools, it has always been our focus. One of the things that, this allows us to do, I think, is just to develop these really close relationships with the schools that we work with and to be fairly nimble in terms of, meeting their needs.
So if we look at, our product now as opposed to even [00:22:00] a year ago, a lot of those changes, they have been guided directly by that work with, independent schools. and, maybe Thiago you have more to add on this?
Tiago Penteado: Um, not, not too much. I think i-i-it is central to what we do. We focus on independent schools, and that's ... it guides, the product decisions we make. which I think at the end of the day, means it's a product very, very custom-built for independent schools. And because of the history of boarding schools having such a much more complex workflow,than even Pete said before that a, than a day school might have, it means we've had to build in a lot more customization, ability to customize different processes, that now means the schools that fo- where independent schools have to,
you tr- trying to sell a very specific experience to parents as well, means to cu- to customize it to how their school runs is a big [00:23:00] plus for a lot of customers. actually one thing that did come up as, Pete, you were talking before, that I was interested to dig into a little bit, was around the parent experience too.
Because obviously for a lot of independent schools, that's a big thing when bringing on Orah. Like, what is the experience gonna be like for, for parents? Would either of you be able to talk t- a little bit to kind of have you experienced those
hesitations when looking at Orah and then how you went about rolling it out to parents and what that experience was like
Peter DiDinato: I don't know, Brian, if you've had, if you use it with parents?
Brian Serbin: yeah. we do as far as, passes go. really that's their limit, here, just putting in passes when kids are leaving campus. we send a training out to all of our parents, late in the summer just to get them on board, get them online.
and it's really super easy for them to kinda get it [00:24:00] figured out. It's very intuitive. it's not really, not many questions come up from them. It's really "Oh, what is this? What is it for? Oh, now I figured it out," and it's pretty seamless for them on their end. back to what you were saying earlier, Thiago, one, one thing I certainly appreciated at Kiski is Orah's ability to ask us for feedback on how things are working, and work with us and customize things as we need them.
sometimes I felt like a little bit of a guinea pig just because Alexis was asking, what do you need? How do you do?" And it's just, she's wonderful in making sure that we get what we need out of Orah. So it's been good.
Peter DiDinato: Yeah.
I think it, one of the nice features of the parent launch was you can see right in the dashboard when you send your invites, like who's accepted, who hasn't, and you can just have a regular cadence of reminding people to join. And, I would share that list from time to time with the upper school so that when they were having conversations in a, like [00:25:00] an advisory capacity with the parent, they could say "Hey, did you get your Orah set up yet?
I can help you do that." the majority of our families have at least one person using the app now, but there is a way that you can log in with the email address that's registered without having the app, and I think that made it easy for, the parents who are like, "I'm not downloading that app," "I'm not getting another app," or just maybe never did it.
they still have a way to do it even if they don't have the app. So I think that was helpful, because our parents want a great experience. They're used to opening up the Amazon app, ordering something, and it's on their step within 24 to 48 hours. So we're trying to provide that same level of ease of use, and happiness when they're interacting with our systems.
And sometimes we hit the mark and sometimes we don't, but that's like the direction we're going in
Emily DeRoche: And thinking of,other schools who might be considering Orah,what would [00:26:00] you tell a registrar, for instance, who, is in a similar school and making that consideration?
Peter DiDinato: I'll say that for us, we're, we are a school that's a product of a merger, and the merger was 15 years ago, but sometimes we joke there's still some scar tissue related to that. And one of our challen- challenges has been that we will be 1,300 kids next year. At the time of the merger, we were around 1,000 kids.
So we've grown a lot, but it's not just in, in numbers, it's the complexity of an organization as you grow, whether y- whether that means you're a boarding school and you have all those complications, or you're an 18-month to 18-year-old,student body, that things are complex and we need easy systems.
We have very thin teams. We all wear lots and lots of [00:27:00] hats. We can't really be either super expert in lots of different things or managing a multitude of operations that with tools that are not easy to use and don't enable us to do our job. we are very committed to Blackbaud. We have a strong partnership with them.
but we also find that leveraging add-ons to their system makes everyone's life easier. and Orah is dedicated to doing just this one thing. Blackbaud is committed, like Veracross, to so many different things. It's hard for them, like it's hard for me in my job to be AI, disaster recovery, cybersecurity, one-to-one laptop program, educational technologist, all those different things.
We have to have good partners. And I think the pivot point for us as a school when we're considering things is does this make our job easier and allow us to spend more time [00:28:00] on what our mission is, and that's students. And Orah does that for us
Brian Serbin: yeah. I would just echo that and say it's just streamlined so much for us.
I was initially hesitant to move from Blackbaud Attendance to Orah Attendance, and that, that went away within the first week of school. and now I think back and I oftentimes, we just re-upped with Orah for the next three years, and I think what would we do without Orah, and I don't wanna think about that.
it's pretty, pretty scary to think about that just to a- account for 200 kids in a boarding community without that now, and I think that's... I think about that, I'm like, that's a strong testament to how well Orah is working for us,
Emily DeRoche: that's so great to hear that, that we'll with be, we'll have you for-
at least another three years, and, is, are there any questions that you feel people should be asking, internally before they make that decision to move forward with Orah?
Brian Serbin: the only thing that [00:29:00] comes to mind is, having someone be the Orah czar, right? And be in charge of that. It's important that someone wears that hat and has a team of people underneath them that can support. having that in place I think is important.
Peter DiDinato: Yeah. I echo that. Building a team I think is really important to the success, where you have, someone as the point person, but also multiple people have ownership from different constituencies at the school was really helpful. So it wasn't like a tech initiative or the head of upper school initiative or something like that.
It was a school initiative that involved registrar, upper school, tech, nurses, various people.
Emily DeRoche: And from the Orah side, I can absolutely echo that as well. we always love working with schools where we have a number of connections, a number of people that we're working with on different, working towards different goals.
it certainly gives us confidence that what we're doing is helping, [00:30:00] and, as opposed to having, that just one main, point of contact with the school.
Peter DiDinato: I would say too for other schools if you're considering this, I know that when I get new ideas in June, I, I tend to,start to sweat a little bit because our summer, our next three months are so planned for significant projects that Orah is one if you are interested and had a couple calls with them in June, you could easily implement this for next year.
It is not a big lift from your team. It's probably a couple of, 30 to 45 minute calls now, and maybe one or two in August, and you'd be up and running. and that's just the truth. because we don't want anyone's lives to be more painful. we understand how busy the summer and start of the school year can be.
this is one thing you could do if you had an idea late in the game for '26, '27, Orah's definitely launchable, in that [00:31:00] timeframe without, raising anxiety
Emily DeRoche: Anything to add from Kiski's experience, Brian?
Brian Serbin: I- just that I, I think it's been nice. obviously I've been here four years, and each year I'm, diving deeper into the Orah experience and, being able to add on attendance this year was one step. we use it for emergency notification as well.
I think there's a lot of different things it can do, and it provides a lot of support for a boarding community, in a lot of different ways. but, like I said before, I couldn't imagine living without it at this point. yeah, that's probably it
Emily DeRoche: I know we are getting to,to the end of our time together, and this has been really valuable.
And thank you so much, Pete and Brian, for sharing your experiences and being so complimentary. we very much [00:32:00] enjoy working with you both and your communities as well. And, all right, I'm wondering if there's any questions from the attendees today
I don't think... You
Mary McAndrew: did such a great job, there's no questions.
Emily DeRoche: All right. then, why don't I pass it back to Thiago for a minute? I think he has some, some closing words from the Orah side
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, I was gonna say if,I'll share, I'll go run through a few of those key points from the school safety survey, and if while I'm doing that anyone has any questions, feel free to put it in the chat.
Otherwise, we can run that off. but I've also just put in a few links in there, in the chat there for anyone who is interested. but just quickly, managed to get the tech working. this is the State of Independent School Safety report that we ran. we did it in partnership with ATLIS. so ATLIS is the Association of Technology Leaders in Independent [00:33:00] Schools.
a conference that we go to every year with them. that's where we launched it, and Pete mentioned it earlier actually. so the research was run with 85 different US, independent schools. we focused on kind of nine different core areas in this, survey, so it went quite deep, into the different school safety practices that, schools are operating in.
and these are just some very high level key findings. If you want to dig into it, I'll let you go down at the report. but just at a high level, obviously, we will probably know that incidents aren't theoretical. 76% of, the independent schools we surveyed actually did experience a kind of type of incident in the past 12 months.
of those, the emergency response aspect, particularly from the start of a mass school, when the emergency starts, it... Most schools there's quite a big range of, of times that it takes a school to, to account for students in that emergency, but only 21% of them can actually account for all students [00:34:00] under four minutes.
there are a lot of different factors that the report goes into as to what goes into that. but that's at a high level. one thing that I think both now Brian and, and Pete would be able to assert is, only 41% of schools are able to say even who's on campus at any moment.
that, that's essentially the problem Orah's trying to solve is knowing where your students are. So we're trying to, we're trying to,increase that number of people who are confident that they know where their students are. and sorry, I'm just blazing through this, but you can again download the report if you want to get in more detail.
but it, on average it takes, 32 minutes for a s- a school to account for a student if they,marked as unexcused absence. So if a student doesn't show up for school and there's no, no reason for that, it takes that long for the schools to account for them, and lots of them don't have, even a process in place- for that too.
and so that's the, sorry, that's the stat I was referring to. So 44% cannot [00:35:00] rebl- reliably confirm if a student is safe within an hour as well. so again, that's just a high level of what will be the stats. If you wanna download the report, there it is. I can, send this out afterwards as well, along with the recording of this webinar.
but I just wanna quickly say thank you very much to Brian and Pete, and, Mary and Deb as well. we really appreciate the partnership and w- with all of you in different capacities. appreciate your time taken here today to share with the community, your experiences. And yeah.
I will pass it over to you, Mary, if you have any parting words.
Mary McAndrew: Well, thank you. Thank you so much Orah, Tiago, and Emily. we really appreciate your time. Thank you to Pete and to Brian for being on and sharing your experience, and then thank you to all the participants. I will be sending a follow-up email tomorrow with the recording and some of these materials that, Tiago has touched on, the slides, and also their contact information, so any follow-up you wanted to do- I'll have you their con- contact information if you had any [00:36:00] specific questions. But again, we appreciate everyone's time. We know it's such a busy time of year and, thank you, and have a wonderful afternoon.
Tiago Penteado: Bye. Thanks all.
Mary McAndrew: Bye. Thank you.
