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Webinar Recording
Tiago: We're very excited to have Peter here today as a well-regarded expert in the independent school space. He's worked with a lot of reputable schools across the US, and we're excited to see what he's got in store for us. And then obviously our own Matt Varley, who's going to be taking us through the findings of the State of Independent School Safety Report.
I'll put the link in the chat shortly to download the report -- it's a 50-page report commissioned by Orah in partnership with ATLIS. It covers nine different dimensions of school safety that we asked the independent school community about. Without further ado, I'll pass over to Matt to kick us off.
Matt: Thanks, Tiago, and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining, and a big thanks to Peter as well. I'm looking forward to not only sharing the report findings, but also addressing the follow-up question we've been hearing: how do we actually operationalize this research and make it happen within our organizations? Very excited for the second part of this webinar.
Just a quick 30 seconds on Orah. Orah is in over 500 independent schools, including some of the best in the world -- Phillips Exeter, Crossroads, Windsworth, and others. Orah answers the question: where is my student right now? Student movement creates gaps throughout the day -- in the boarding house, at after-school activities, early dismissals, hall passes, period-by-period attendance. Orah collects the student's location, either via the teacher or the student checking in, to answer that question in real time. That's obviously critical during an emergency, large or small, when you need to pinpoint where a student is and account for their safety.
All right, let's dig into the findings.
The research was conducted in consultation with ATLIS, with an external party called True North conducting the research at arm's length from Orah. We commissioned this because we believe independent schools deserve the same rigor around safety data that typically exists for academics, enrollment, and fundraising.
About the research:
Key findings:
Incidents are not theoretical. There's a tendency to think safety incidents happen at other schools -- larger schools, public schools, schools in different neighborhoods. The data puts that to rest. 76% of independent schools experienced a safety incident in the last 12 months -- three out of four schools surveyed.
The most common was medical emergencies at 54% -- anaphylaxis on a field trip, a concussion at practice, a student having a seizure in the dining hall. These are not edge cases. 35% dealt with severe weather events. 19% had unauthorized people access their campus. And one in five schools experienced a lockdown in the last 12-month period.
Beyond formal incidents, there's also the day-to-day duty of care -- being able to account for a student's whereabouts at any given moment.
Emergency response is generally slow. 93% of schools run drills regularly -- the intent is there. But the outcome is only as good as what it produces. When we asked how long it takes to confirm the safety of every student, only 21% can do it under four minutes, and just 2% under two minutes. What we found was that many drills weren't being measured at all -- no feedback loop, no start and finish time, no way to understand whether performance was improving. That lack of measurement around emergency response was a key finding.
Campus visibility is a significant gap. Only 41% of schools are highly confident they know who is on campus at any given moment. Nearly six in ten schools aren't sure. Think about a student's actual day: they arrive late, go to class, leave for a sports fixture, come back, visit the nurse, get picked up early, or sign out at lunch as a senior with off-campus privileges but never sign back in. Every one of those transitions is a moment where the picture can break down.
Accounting for students -- by the numbers. The average time to account for all students in an emergency is 6.3 minutes, and 42% of schools took longer than that. When a student has an unexcused absence -- no parent call, no explanation -- it took over half of schools more than 32 minutes on average to confirm the student was safe. Half an hour is a long time. It could be minor -- they've gone to the bathroom, they slept in. But the whole point of a safety system is that it works for the one time it isn't routine. Most schools have a cohort of students on a watchlist who are at varying levels of risk, and an unexcused absence for those students is not something you can afford to sit on.
Welfare checks. 44% of schools cannot reliably confirm a missing student is safe within an hour of an unexplained absence. Notably, 27% were unsure of their own process for what to do when a student doesn't turn up -- a significant black hole.
The forces shaping safety decisions. School safety decisions don't happen in isolation. Four forces are at play: board and leadership oversight, regulatory compliance, budget and resource constraints, and -- the one that stood out most -- balancing safety with school culture. There's a real continuum here. Some schools use real-time physical location tracking at one end; others have no tracking whatsoever. Where a school draws that line depends on their culture, parent expectations, and local community -- and that was a key theme throughout the report.
There's a QR code on the final slide, and a download link in the chat. I'd encourage you to download the full report -- that was a quick whistle-stop tour. Auditing your current school safety plan, or simply going through the key locations in your school and asking "do we actually know when a student is present here?" is a tangible next step. I'm now going to hand over to Peter to cover how to operationalize all of this.
Peter: Great. Thanks, Matt. Fascinating data -- there's a real opportunity to develop strategy as a result, and today we're going to talk about how you actually do it.
We'll focus at the strategic planning level, where student wellbeing and safety would likely emerge as one of the pillars or projects inside a strategic plan. At the end, Matt and I will take one of the report findings and think through how to operationalize it together.
A bit about me: I'm Peter Baron, and I've been working with independent schools for well over 20 years. Before Moonshot OS, I spent a long time at the Enrollment Management Association. I've interviewed close to 200 heads of school on the independent school business model. Now, through Moonshot OS, I'm focused on helping schools build the right systems and strategy to be financially sustainable not just next year, but decades into the future.
The School Operating System
I'll start with a quote from James Clear's Atomic Habits: "You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems."
From everything I've seen in my career -- and confirmed through those 200 interviews -- most schools don't struggle with planning or developing strategy. The struggle is taking strategy off the paper and making it happen day-to-day. Without good execution underpinning your strategy, what you've developed is just a document.
It makes sense why schools struggle with this. A typical strategic plan has four to five priorities -- academics, student wellbeing, faculty, innovation, financial sustainability. Under each priority, you might have four goals. Under each goal, six initiatives. Do the math and you potentially have 120 new initiatives to complete over a three-to-five year horizon -- on top of everything you're already doing every day. It naturally begs the question: where do I start?
What is a school operating system?
Think about the operating system on your laptop or smartphone -- the infrastructure that makes everything work together, keeps you organized, efficient, and productive. Organizations need the same thing: a way to align people, processes, and tools.
A school operating system, simply put, is the way school leaders organize all of their human energy and technology. It's how people meet, how problems get solved, how decisions get made, how priorities get set.
Every school already has an operating system. The question is whether it was designed on purpose or just evolved.
An unintentional operating system typically evolved without a plan, driven by tradition or whoever is loudest. Signs include silos between offices, unclear priorities, and reactive decision-making -- the shiny object syndrome, where a new initiative causes everything else to be abandoned.
An intentional operating system is deliberately designed. It aligns people, processes, and tools, and creates clear priorities and shared accountability.
How it works in practice:
The structure flows from long-term to immediate:
When setting annual goals, you'll likely generate 10-15 things you want to pursue. You can't do all of them. Strategy requires hard choices. Organize your priorities into two categories: high-impact quick wins and high-impact major bets. Anything that doesn't fit -- thankless tasks, high-effort low-impact work -- set it aside for now. Focus on what matters most.
Even with annual goals defined, the next question is: What needs to be true over the next 90 days for us to hit our annual priorities? Break it into projects with defined owners and outcomes. Every 90 days, review: did we succeed? Did we fall short? Use that data to plan the next sprint. Quarter after quarter, you're compounding progress toward your annual goals.
The weekly leadership team meeting
This is where strategy comes alive. Consider the salaries of everyone sitting around your leadership team table -- it is literally the most expensive meeting on your campus every week. Being intentional about how you run it is critical.
Here's a format that works in 90 minutes (adjust proportionally for shorter meetings):
The platform I use for this is Ninety.io. They have nonprofit pricing. It manages the full operating system -- scorecard, projects, annual goals, to-dos, issues list, and meetings. It's the glue that holds everything together.
What changes when you have an intentional operating system:
Applying it to the report: the 32-minute window
Matt, let's take the finding that it takes an average of 32 minutes for a school to confirm a student marked as an unexcused absence is safe. If a school wants to close that window, what needs to be true over the next 12 months?
Matt: Visibility -- better real-time visibility into where a student was last seen or their last confirmed location. That's a data and technology question. But it's also a culture change: getting staff, students, and parents to actually update the system or call the school when a student is going to be absent.
Peter: So at a 12-month level, what needs to be true is:
That's a big goal. A lot to unpack. So you reverse engineer it: what needs to be true over the next 90 days to get closer?
Maybe it's surveying families around safety and culture. Maybe it's evaluating different technology options. Maybe the technology is already there and what's needed is professional development for teachers. You begin to see the individual projects that will inch you toward the annual goal.
That's the most important thing I can say about achieving any goal: when you look at it at the top level, it feels overwhelming. But when you break it into 90-day windows, it becomes manageable. Quarter after quarter, you're making progress.
Closing thought
I'll leave you with this: a head of school in Vail runs an intentional operating system and told me he can now sleep at night without worrying about things falling through the cracks. That's a big endorsement for what a well-designed system can do for how a school functions.
Tiago: For anyone who'd like to reach out to Peter or have him work with their school -- how can people get in contact?
Peter: The easiest way is email: peter@moonshotos.com. You can also visit my website -- the link is in the chat. I'm always happy to reply.
Tiago: That brings us to the end of the webinar. I appreciate everyone who joined us today, and a huge thank you to Peter -- that was very insightful. Thanks to Matt as well. Cheers, everyone.
Matt: Thanks everyone. Thanks, Peter.
