Note: This transcript is automatically generated and has been reviewed, but it may contain errors.
James Showers: Hello, everybody. Think we are all set. Thank you all for joining our webinar. We have Ray here from Brooklyn Friends and Bernie from Windward School, both New York schools. We are gonna be running through how Orah works, how they have been using it as well the different use cases.
But first, I'm sure that there are a few of you that are not fully aware of what Orah does and are coming in relatively blind. So I'll just take a minute to quickly run through exactly how Orah works and what we do. So some foundational understanding around our product is we have a bidirectional sync with your SIS, being Blackbaud, Veracross, FACTS, PowerSchool. We're building others for next school year, but the main goal there being that we're able to pull the schedules from the SIS, take attendance, and write it back to the SIS. This is the primary means of location awareness through the day, but we're also taking stock of any non-academic location updates, so late arrivals, early dismissals, full dismissals program that Bernie's going to be working through with us later on in the call.
But the goal is to have a real time view into where your students are at all times. There's plenty of attendance reporting as well that comes with that, but from a safety perspective, we want to know where your kids are so that if there is an emergency, you're able to accurately account for them.
So as we are collecting this location data through attendance, non-academic location updates and so on you will be able to reference the same system to account for everyone in your school, students, staff, visitors as well. There are a couple visuals here that we can run through. Our origin story as well, we started in boarding. The first 10 years of our existence, we just started with boarding schools, and the amount of oversight and the duty of care that comes with being responsible for students 24/7 we were able to bring into the day school space once we built these integrations with the SISs. We've been working with primarily day schools for the last three years, but still have a whole heap of our boarding schools on with us.
And now that we're able to bridge that boarding environment and day environment, it's been that much more helpful to our boarding school partners as well. So like we had mentioned, there are many different ways that we are taking stock on where your students are. The Chrome extension for teachers taking attendance we have self-serve kiosks for students to check themselves into class, and also non-academic spaces. Our mobile app for PE teachers or for taking ad hoc rolls if you're on a field trip and so on, and also for managing the dismissals at the end of the day. And then we have QR- Reading and RFID reading for students to tap into various spaces as well. The idea is that there are no blind spots, and you can take this as far as you want or just root it in the attendance to start off.
All of our schools have different levels of visibility into where their students are. You can have the hall passes that track them as closely as going to the bathroom or to the health center, or just have eyes on where they're moving through the school if you're day attendance and you're just taking that roll one time, and then the entries and exits.
We'll go through the dismissals process with Bernie at the end. It's a new module that we released in the summertime and we'll go into greater detail, but we're really excited about it. We've had a number of schools come on with us that we're continuing to program with them, and every school has a different dismissals process, so working with you guys to make sure that it suits your school.
And then just working through what it looks like from the staff side, from the parents side, as well as actually managing the understanding of who's still on campus and who's exiting the relationship with the after-school programs and so on. That's my intro and now I'd like to start by handing it over and just doing a quick intro and having these gentlemen introduce themselves. So Ray, if you wanna go first and then Bernie you can introduce yourself too, please.
Ray Shay: Sure. Thanks, James. My name's Ray. I'm the director of technology and auxiliary programs at Brooklyn Friends School. Our school's a two-year-old through 12th grade Quaker independent school in downtown Brooklyn, New York. I just started my third year here at BFS, but it's my 23rd year in independent school education. Previously, I spent eight years at Princeton Academy in New Jersey in a few roles, including director of technology and assistant head of school. And prior to that, for 12 years I was at my alma mater, La Salle College High School in Philadelphia.
James Showers: Wonderful. Thanks, Ray.
Bernie McCormick: I'm Bernie McCormick. I'm the CTO at the Windward School, which is a second through ninth grade program for students with language-based learning disabilities. We have three campuses. We have a dedicated lower school space campus in Westchester, dedicated middle school space campus, different location in Westchester, and then we have a full service building in Manhattan. And none of them run the same way. That was a big part of how I ended up with Orah, is just the logistics of maintaining all of those different needs and all of those different geographies was pretty daunting approaching this problem. Oh, I was supposed to say something about me. So I've been in non-profit education for 15 years, and non-profit technology for about 33 at this point.
James Showers: Wonderful. Thanks, Bernie. Bernie, I'm actually gonna start with you. Prior to bringing Orah on, what was the landscape at the school, and how were you getting a picture of where your students were through the day from tip to tail?
Bernie McCormick: Yeah, so we had a daily arrival attendance that was getting a lot of support, direct support on a human level. But Veracross was our system of record, and we had policy deadlines, and then we had the time that the school was getting it done. And our attendance in the morning was not usually the challenge, it was really our PM logistics around dismissals. And I can tell, like really honestly, like one of the pieces that started our conversation down this road was we had an unexpected fire alarm literally five minutes before dismissal was about to start, and the entire process got short-circuited on one of our campuses. And it led to bedlam and kids getting home late and lots of tears and phone calls. And ultimately, that was somebody at the school saying, “There has to be a better way to do this.” So that fell to me to find, and that's how I got here.
James Showers: Wonderful. Thanks. And Ray, what about yourself at Brooklyn Friends?
Ray Shay: Yeah, so we had four challenges that led us to adopting Orah in the upper school. The first challenge was upper school class attendance compliance was really low. IB teachers work out of their IB specific platforms, not necessarily our SIS. We use Blackbaud. So at the beginning of class, they weren't in there for delivering their content, but needed to quickly jump in just to do the attendance. And so the Orah Chrome extension made that significantly easier. They already had the Chrome browser open to deliver their content, and they used the extension and everything synced back to the SIS, which was so important for us. The second challenge is that when colleagues would cover a class or a substitute teacher would come into the school, there was no good way of having them take attendance in our SIS. So Blackbaud is a little clunky. You would have to assign them as a teacher temporarily to the class, which would mean either the upper school office or the tech team was doing a whole bunch of work and lots of it last minute trying to get them into there and into Blackbaud, and it often didn't work.
And if there wasn't enough time or it didn't work, we ended up needing to send an email with attendance and then have somebody input it, which, with the office and the tech team, we didn't have time to be adding that to our daily routines. And so sometimes it was even the head of upper school was jumping in to enter attendance, and it was just not a situation you want. And with the Orah Google Chrome extension, it's very easy for our colleagues to jump into another class that they're covering or for our substitute teacher Google accounts, which we've made secure with multi-factor authentication with some fobs, USB fobs, and some things that we do on campus. And they, those things that we already were doing worked perfectly with the Orah Chrome extension.
So it was nice that we were able to launch that. And then our families needing to remember multiple email addresses to notify school of an absence or a late arrival or early dismissal, and even once we made an email group so that they didn't have to remember, they just had to remember one email, that still is tough when you have kids in multiple schools and, you're on the subway and trying to let school know. So the mobile app for families really has helped us in that area for our upper school. And then later on once people were doing it from the classroom, all of a sudden our coaches who were classroom teachers or coaches who are substitutes wanted the Orah app for their athletic teams. And then we started to realize that the challenge in athletics was everything we were feeling for classroom teachers, but multiplied. And so getting the mobile app for coaches really helped us address that challenge.
James Showers: Nice. Okay. That's great insight. Bernie, I'm gonna come back to you. And this is, I'm sure that we have a few schools that are looking to onboard shortly or in the midst of onboarding and I know that you will be very honest with this as well. But if you could walk the crew through what to expect through the adoption process, what your experience was like, that'd be great.
Bernie McCormick: Yeah. So Orah has a fairly principled and well-versed onboarding process for their core product. Dismissals was a whole new creature because in a lot of ways the needs are much more highly customized to the school that the platform is being implemented with, right? And part of when I went to Atlas back in April and connected with Orah, I was looking at the whole market. I talked to a number of different vendors, and every time I went back with the same pitch. It's like I have an impossible dismissal set up to handle, right? Because I have three different campuses, I have buses and car lines in two, and I have a Manhattan campus where I have buses, car lines, Ubers, and people picking up and kids self-dismissing, right? And I need all of that to run at the same 40 minutes in three different geolocations at the same time and make it go. And that took a lot of work. And there were places in which our practice was not aligned with how Orah was configured to presume how dismissals ran. And it took a lot of meeting and a lot of work with us and Orah to get it right.
But I will say in 30 years of nonprofit tech, I have not ever worked with a developer who has been more agile in trying to meet the needs where they were, right? 'Cause they understood the stakes. This is not something that we could play around with. It wasn't something like, “Oh, we'll get to that in six weeks.” It's like, “No, I really need this now.” It's visible to our parents, it's visible to our students. And but overall, like we have a system that can encompass all of those complexities. We've managed to find features in the system that were not originally intended for the uses that Windward is putting them to, but we've been able to get our entire community onboarded. I didn't mention Windward has about 1,000 students, right? So this isn't a small community of use.
And I'll give a great example of one of the things that was emergent after we launched, right? 'Cause it's not like we launched and then development went away. We had this sort of like really clear line between like the people who are picking up and students at the end of the day have the Orah app. We're using the parent app. It gives them lots of control and lots of visibility. And then all of a sudden it's like what about the nanny? And it's like the parents are not usually the one picking up, it's the nanny. It's like, okay, we can invite the nanny into the Orah app. That's easy to do. It's like but now the nanny has access to change things, which isn't really the intention, right? And so within a three-week period we went from, okay, here's the simple fix, to Orah pushing out a way for people, families to be able to designate pickup contacts on a permanent basis. They could always do it on as an ad hoc basis, right?
Like you get stuck. Ray has a great example, like getting stuck on the subway. I'm gonna be 20 minutes late. Can you pick up my kid? 'Cause I know you're gonna be right there. Like the parent app lets you do that. This is more of a durable thing, right? Like my nanny picks up Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday every week. You don't want to... The parent doesn't want to have to do that every day, right? So give people that ad hoc access to be able to pick up the kid. And it is amazing how quickly we have been able to move that from pen and paper and phone calls and bedlam to, I think our average dismissal right now is 12 and a half minutes in New York City, which is like astounding and not what we used to do.
We've been slow peddling some of the things that Ray's talking about with athletics. We are using it for our clubs and after school dismissals. Athletics already had such tight protocols that we were afraid to touch it, but we're getting them warmed up. And the system can do it, it's much more of a training issue. But we're gonna get there pretty quick, I would say within the next month. Because you got to remember folks, this is only the end of October and we launched this 60 days ago.
James Showers: That's great. I'm happy to hear, Bernie. And Ray, your experience with the onboarding process. I know that you and your team you guys have been on for a little bit longer, but what was that like for you guys?
Ray Shay: Yeah. So our associate director of technology for data systems led our rollout. So if people are interested I can definitely put them in touch with him, 'cause he can get into the nitty-gritty of working with the developers at Orah and making sure that the settings match to our school and our culture. For me, at the rollout and adoption level, it was a lot of making sure our school didn't just repeat the same problems that already existed in our database, and took the opportunity to fix those. I think our school conflated excuse and excused, right? And those are two things that you know, really when we wanna look at the data, we wanna have clarity around, okay, a reason doesn't make something excused, right? And so it was a good opportunity through the adoption and rollout for us to have those conversations and try to get on the same page as an institution, and maybe clean up things that weren't as visible before. But now that we're making them visible, we really need to have our house in order.
James Showers: Nice. Excellent. So speaking to how Orah's working in actual fact Bernie, the dismissals, if you can go a little bit more in depth. You had just touched on it, but what do your dismissals look like in the different areas? What does the attendance look like? How do the two speak to each other? And if you could quantify it how you were doing it before versus now what is the time saving difference? What's the manpower difference? Speak to that a bit.
Bernie McCormick: Sure. I'll start with the people power difference. We... It requires a small army to dismiss several hundred students across those very channels that I was describing, right? That has not changed. We have a fewer number of people at each station, but we still have an enormous number of people just helping to keep the flow with our students going. What is great is that the coordination of those student flows and parent pickups is now transparent to several different people at the same time, right? And dismissal used to be an awful lot of people yelling on the PA system and yelling into walkie-talkies, and there's a period of 30 to 45 minutes a day where it was just constant, “What about this kid? Is this club meeting? Has that kid shown up there?” Back and forth and back and forth.
And what we've gotten to now is much tighter, where at least the people who... 'Cause we still need... We have kids who wander the halls, we have kids who aren't where they're supposed to be, but it's now really clear where those kids are, right? So Orah's created a dashboard that shows the dispensation of any given student at the school at any point in time, right? And that is aware of any attendance changes that occurred because of the student's arrival, right? We have a kid that's out sick, the dismissal system knows the kid's out sick, so nobody's looking for the kid and holding the bus because they didn't know that the kid was out. If we have a student who was supposed to be at a sport but instead is leaving early 'cause they have to go to the dentist, that's in Orah.
So when the sport team gets called down to go to practice, the coach who's doing the pickup knows that kid's not there, right? So there are visual cues that help show this, and then our front desks at each campus is the sort of switchboard control, 'cause they're the ones making calls home if there's any conflicts. So they have this sort of centralized view, not only to be able to see where any of the exception cases might be or anything that needs to get followed up on, it gives them an immediate... Like, when they make a change and they're like, “Ah okay, this kid's going home with that parent,” or, “This kid's actually getting on the bus,” they've made the change, and that's now live to any of the people at the dismissal points who are on an iPad or their device.
They don't have to hop on the walkie-talkie and then tell three different locations “This is what's going on with that kid,” right? Anybody who sees that kid can see it, and I think the materials had a little screenshot, right? You have a chip for the kid. It has their picture. It shows, in color-coded ways what any of those exceptions might be, as well as what the default would be for the kid that's crossed off, right? So normally Billy would be on the bus, but Billy's going home with somebody else and going to D&D club, right? That's all showing up on this little one-inch chip. And some of the features in that chip were part of my onboarding with Orah, right? Where that was not how their product worked out the box, and then I started working with our teachers and our administrators and these were the things that they felt that they had when everybody was working off of a printed list, and we figured out how to integrate that back into Orah. And again that responsiveness and that ideation was really a rapid turnaround.
James Showers: Excellent. Thank you, Bernie. And Ray, outside of the better delineation between an excuse, a reason, and an excused absence and the data that you're able to derive from our system what other ways has the post-adoption life improved the day-to-day of the school and what other areas has Orah been helpful to your teams?
Ray Shay: Yeah. So the upper school daily attendance and upper school, that's our only learning community to take class level attendance have both dramatically improved in terms of compliance and accuracy. But upper school office passes have been a huge addition and just so helpful. I think when I was polling, how many hours per week, they were saying between 5 and 10 hours are saved by us not doing the paper and inefficient processes even when they were digital that we were existing with before. And I think when attendance doesn't skip a beat when someone's out, that says a lot for me about the platform. Whereas before everything came to a halt. And it just so happens I'm in my third year, but in that upper school we've had three different people in charge of attendance in these three years. And so having something that has provided the stability and not made it all about one person in practice has been really great.
James Showers: Excellent. Pardon me. Through the onboarding process and Bernie you've gone through this a little bit already as well. But what do you think could've been done differently or what would you do differently if you could speak to someone that's going in the midst of the onboarding right now? What insight would you give them if you were to go through it all over again?
Bernie McCormick: Yeah. I think that I will certainly own the sort of capacity thought was not planned out entirely when we went live and we were able to pivot pretty quickly to get to where we needed to be. But we had mapped out all of the things that the school needed, right? How are we running our logistics? How are we doing this on a day-to-day? And we did it at the start of a school year, right? 'Cause we wanted to set the beat and say “Okay, this is how we're doing dismissals from now on. This is the new normal. Let's get everybody on board.” And then traditionally the beginning of the school year is a bit chaotic with dismissals anyway, right? Families are figuring out their schedules. Maybe the bus is the way to go. Maybe they're gonna drive in. There is always a couple of weeks where things are chaotic. So we're like, “Okay, this, we're just gonna add one more piece to the chaos. It's not gonna be that big a deal.” The reality is that it added a tremendous piece to the chaos for those reasons that I mentioned earlier, right?
We hadn't thought through the family side and how many nuances there were on the family side in the exception cases, right? And down to I'll give an example. It's a very frequent thing that we had planned for that a student is picked up early, but we didn't have a clean thing in place day one the first time it happened when a student got picked up early and then got brought back to school when they were intending to be gone for the rest of the day, right? And then suddenly they show back up. It's like, “Oh, the doctor's office was really fast. Like they're gonna be here for the last two periods of class.” It's like, “Oh, okay. I guess somebody at the front desk will override that.” Like we had to figure that piece out. So if I were to do it over, I would actually do all the same logistics pieces we did, you know, really carefully workflow diagram how dismissals are running to what Ray was saying, don't repeat the same mistakes. Don't carry over the things that are bad. Make it a new thing. Make this the opportunity to provide improvements and to streamline those workflows but do it at a point when your dismissal's actually normalized. Don't make this the extra piece of chaos.
We did a tremendous amount of lead-up training. We had Zooms open for a week. We did a parent session. We had lots of materials that we sent out, and it really didn't get paid attention to until it was like, “Oh, wait, I need to have a QR code to pick up my kid?” What is this whole Orah thing? We had families like three days in that were “I need an app?” It's like, wow, we've been talking about this for weeks, so getting that messaging out in a way that reaches parents at the beginning of a school year when their priorities are very different isn't the best way to do it, right?
That's what I would say with certainty. But it's done, so I'm not gonna redo it. But for those of you who are considering onboarding, don't do it at the beginning of the year, and if you can slow roll it, do. We couldn't, because we actually share families across our three campuses, and we didn't want to deal with the chaos of having different systems in different places. But, like Ray was saying, if this starts with the upper school, great. If you can see the greatest compliance and the greatest benefit at the lower school, great, do it that way. Get it normalized, get people over the hump. You're not dealing with your entire community at the same time.
We really took it head-on and are better for it, but it was a lot of work and a lot of really intense communication to make that happen, right? So if you want to spare yourself that intensity or you have other things to do make sure that you plan it in when everybody's already set and it's easy to step back, right? If Orah's not doing what you need it to do, you can say “Okay, we see where the problems are. We can still run attendance the way we've been running it all year, and it's not gonna hurt anything, and we'll come back around to this in two weeks once we get the kinks brushed out.”
James Showers: Got it. And this is actually a question to both of you. For this is an apprehension that comes up with every school that comes online with us. How to best deliver the message to parents and as these process change, what did you find worked? What actually got their attention? What did your communication to the families look like? And secondarily, what did the communication to the internal staff, the end users, look like, and how would you recommend that be delivered as you guys are going through the onboarding stages to mitigate any friction with either of those groups? Ray if you wanna start, yeah.
Ray Shay: Sure. And, kinda central to my answer on this is saying I couldn't agree any more with what Bernie just said about the timing. We backed into that. I can't claim that it was, like, my intention to start mid-year, but it was okay, we've hit a point where we... upper school, we have to do something, and we can't wait till September to do it. And so that nicely allowed us to do it mid-year. Move dates of, move start dates of it when we needed to, right? And so we backed into that. I can't claim that we planned it, but I would love to plan that again. And I almost didn't learn from that, because athletics, I started right at the beginning of this year and felt the same pains that Bernie's talking about of this is not the right time of year to kinda be making this massive change.
Bandwidth of everyone, and the communication piece. So getting to your question, James, that's not the right time of year to be communicating something new. And so it's gonna get lost in the beginning of the year training to staff, and it's gonna get lost in the onslaught of communications that happen at the beginning of a year. So I would say that these two things kind of, these lessons go hand-in-hand of timing doing it affects how effective your communications with those groups are. With the teachers, it was pretty, pretty easy. They were so happy to be off of doing it from the SIS that training went really well, and the Chrome extension was great.
For the families, we waited. We waited until we had our house in order and had all of the things working internally in Orah, then invited the families in. And I'm pretty sure Orah gave us a very nice template, and we used pretty much that messaging to send out to our families. And most of them were able to get in without much troubleshooting. And then with our coaches there was a little bit more just 'cause some of them, weren't used to maybe using their Google account even though they had them, and now there was, like, a real reason to use that account. So taking some extra time in person with the athletics coaches was really important for us since their day-to-day wasn't necessarily before in the Google account, and this was key to them being able to deliver it, and to have, make sure they had the right app on their phone.
Things like that, just being in person to be able to troubleshoot those things with the athletic coaches was really important from a communication standpoint. And then communicating the changes that like, hey, we're not using that as excuse anymore, right? That is an ongoing conversation, and it's taking the opportunity to say “Hey, look at this scenario,” right? We have meeting for worship this day, and some kids came out for that. And “Hey, this is a great example of how we should use it this way.” And just finding those moments to say, “Alright, I didn't plan for this to be the communication, but this is a great example for us to teach everyone like, ‘Hey, going forward, this is how we'll do this in this kind of scenario.’”
James Showers: Nice. Thanks, Ray. Bernie, do you have anything to add to that messaging to your communities?
Bernie McCormick: Yeah, two things. One is that I would echo Ray's sort of in-person training makes a big difference here, right? We can send little videos, and we can give people directions that they can print out if they want to, but, we really didn't see motion until we did live presentations and faculty meetings with each of the campuses, and they got to see what it was. They got to ask the questions, right? 'Cause a lot of it is just change management, right? People are apprehensive. There is a lot of pressure on dismissals, right? Nobody wants to make a mistake there. The lens for our community was really about transparency and safety. This is a way for us to more safely dismiss our students, and so that every family knows what's going on with the kid from the time that they're, end of classes to the time that they're at home.
At least as far as the school's custody of them is concerned, right? If a kid's self-dismissing in Manhattan, we know when they left the building. That's about as much as we can give the family. But they at least know for sure that kid left at this time, right? Which before, the way that they would find that out would be call the front desk, right? And then have to hunt somebody down, find a few conversation, somebody call them back. Now they can just see that. So I would say that transparency piece is really big on the messaging, both with families and with our faculty, is just “Look, this is gonna help everybody in the long term. It's gonna make a big difference.”
The second piece that I would stump, and we haven't talked about this at all is how this became a sort of unifying factor in our school from an identity standpoint, right? Because we have three different campuses and because they have three different needs and because there's three different processes, everybody looked at it in their own silo, right? And it's “Yeah, okay, they do that in Manhattan. I don't really care. I'm not in Manhattan. I only have to worry about my thing.” And it required us to successfully execute this. We had to get all of the attendance teams in each of the buildings talking together. And in doing that, we actually improved attendance processes in all campuses because of that brain share.
And that's not without turbulence. There were definitely some people who wanted to maintain ownership and proprietary control of their process. But ultimately, we ended up with a stronger, more unified dismissal vocabulary, which was great, and it really reinforced our policies and procedures, which we had written down in family handbooks, but were not consistently applied across all of our campuses, depending on where and when it was happening, right? And this really served as a reset point for us to be able to say “No, really we want this to be uniform,” especially because we do have families that share between campuses, so why should they get one experience in one campus and a different experience in another campus if it's the same school and we are the same school, right? On the other side of the chaos and change management, there was a really good opportunity for like team building and policy awareness, which was great.
James Showers: Excellent. That's great. Thank you both very much. So now I'm gonna open it up to Q&A. We already have one of the questions in here, but please enter any questions that you have. We will do this until the end of the meeting, but knowing more about the emergency rolls and how you're using it during a lockdown or shelter in place if either one of you wanna hop on that and what the emergency management looks like leveraging all of these locations that you're collecting through the day. Bernie, did you wanna touch on that first?
Bernie McCormick: Yeah, because my story is short. This is one of the things that we decided to slow roll, right? So we've made sure that our attendance policies, what Ray was saying is get your house in order before you put the parents in front. We're making sure that all of our faculty and staff are lined up, and then we're gonna do a mid-year rollout for, we started working on it, and we've run one or two tests, but we've not actually run it in a live situation yet. And we will do that sort of campus by campus and work out the bugs, because emergency situations look different in each campus, right? And we know we're gonna hit nuance, we know we're gonna have problems.
But the goal really, this is specifically talking about a lockdown or shelter in place, is just to roll it into the drills that we already have, and it's a way for sort of creating an ad hoc check-in so that you know that all the kids... all these lockdown drills always have something about a kid stuck in the hallway, jump into the bathroom or go to the other place, and it's that gets solved when somebody's doing the door-to-door check as part of the drill. Orah would actually let you know that without anybody ever having to walk, right? It's like, okay, the kid is in this class, but they're on a pass right now, they're in the bathroom, and they're somewhere between the bathroom and the classroom, right? And you're gonna know that the minute that goes in, right? That is definitely part of what we were shooting for. We just don't have it live right now.
James Showers: Got it. And so to speak to the way that the lockdown and the emergency rolls work, just for everyone's knowledge when an emergency is initiated in our system, and we can integrate with a few different other hardware systems that you likely have in your school that can have us link up to the alarm and so on. But when an emergency is initiated, a broadcast goes out to students, staff, parents, any or all of those groups, with directions on what to do next. So if it's an evacuation for a fire drill, the notification will come up for the teachers to start evacuating the school. It'll tell them where to go, and then account for the students when they have gotten to the evacuation place.
And you're going to have the student's name, their current location beside their name, and also if they're on an active pass. So because we're managing the attendance and we'll know who's sick and so on, all in the same system, you're using these live registers to actually account for everybody. So that's what the emergency accountability module looks like. And Mick, I can send you more material after to go through that at greater length. And then as far as the sync is concerned with Veracross, Blackbaud, FACTS it's not through a third party. We have our own integration. It's a native integration that we have with them for the bidirectional communication. And you use Raptor, so wondering if these schools use Raptor. Oh, we have lots of Raptor schools, ex-Raptor schools on with us. I forget, Ray, did you use Raptor? You may have.
Ray Shay: I used Raptor at a previous school. Okay. So I have familiarity with it. We have Verkada for a lot of our security so door access cameras emergency. But it doesn't understand schools the way Orah understands schools. So on our roadmap is really trying to put in place what you're talking about, James, and find a way that we can leverage the data we already have in Verkada, but, utilize that with Orah. Or change the way, and maybe instead of having our students swipe in with a Verkada access card, maybe they use the QR codes, or maybe we print cards that do both, right? So we're in active discussions about, how to do that. Especially because, like in our upper school, students have the option to go out for lunch, right? So that adds a whole nother level of complexity that we haven't even talked about yet on this call.
James Showers: Yeah. That's it's a similar use case. Packer Collegiate is coming on, and they use the door access, and they'll be using... So we're actually able to input the door access information into Orah and use that as location updates for those senior privileges. When students are exiting and entering the building we're able to collect all of that information. And there is info on that on the website, but I can also chat with you about that further. And then for teachers using the system for bathroom use during class, this is more based on what the current systems are in the school, the policies in the school.
We do have the ability for students to check themselves into class using our automated attendance, and we would do this either by using the front-facing camera of a tablet and scanning a QR code or a barcode, and that would check them into class, and therefore right back to the SIS. Or any non-academic spaces, we can also collect the locations that way as well, or using RFID and having an RFID reader attached to a device that would register the students into class or into non-academic spaces as well.
And this is also where you would be able to use hall passes. So if a student taps in once, that checks them into class. If they tap it again, it would give them a list of options to check out of class. I'm going to the library, the nurse's office, the bathroom. These hall passes are configured based on division in the school's needs, and all of that. But it's a level of insight and visibility that we are able to collect if you wish to. All right, Jay. For Veracross schools, in practice, what are teachers using for what? Still using Veracross for attendance, but visualizing in Orah. Would like to understand how the system complements each other.
In order for there to be a live view into where your students are, you're using Orah to take the attendance, and it writes back to Veracross. So all of your legacy reporting remains true, it just becomes more of a filing cabinet where records are kept. But attendance taking and anything that has to do with attendance management is done in our system and written back to your SIS, if that makes sense.
Another note we also use Verkada for many platforms, including access control, cameras, and gates. That's a whole other ballgame, so I'm curious how this all integrates. So we're actively in conversations with Verkada as well. We have integrations with InformaCast, native integrations with InformaCast, that is similar and sends signals. When one system initiates an emergency, they speak to each other. And what we do really well is the ability to account for students, staff, and visitors on your campus, and also send out the broadcast messages. But we want to be able to work in tandem with your alarm system, for instance. We can speak about that. But what the power of Orah would allow is to leverage those real-time locations to really narrow in on where all of your kids are.
Bernie McCormick: James, if I can add to that. Yeah, please. One of the sort of pre-sales channels that I had not considered even in the scope of all the things that we do we've got three campuses, we've got a lot of people coming in and out of campuses. We have Raptor, and we're using that to pre-scan our visitors, but if there's a fire drill, we don't actually have those visitors in an active roll, right? Somebody's telling them like, “Oh, go stand by that tree,” or, “Go wait by that fire hydrant.” And somebody is like, “Oh yeah, those are the visitors that are here for somebody.”
And Orah allows, with that integration piece, working in the visitor awareness component to be able to, in a fire drill, say “Ah, here are the visitors that are in the building,” so that we can honestly say “Yeah, we've accounted for everybody,” when they're out standing on the lawn, right? You're not like “We've got everybody except for maybe one of those two visitors, but we're not sure if they left yet or not,” right? That's not where you wanna be when you're talking to a fire lieutenant.
James Showers: Yeah. We gotta get you onto our visitor management as well, to do those background checks and have them.
Bernie McCormick: We're getting there. We're getting there.
James Showers: Piece by piece. No, that's good. Are there any other questions from the group that you'd like these gentlemen to field? Hold on for a sec. All set. All right, excellent. I think that that can conclude our meeting here today. Bernie and Ray, thank you both so much. Both of you have been so helpful in collaborating with us as you guys have been onboarding and giving us feedback. I'm sure that this has been helpful for everybody on this meeting, so thank you both so much. It was great to see you both.
Ray Shay: Thanks a lot. Always fun. Thanks.
James Showers: Amazing. All right, everybody, thank you guys for joining. If you have any questions, you can reach out to myself. I'm James. I am an account executive here and I will be in contact with you very shortly with your other questions. Thank you guys all so much. See you.
