Transcript

Note: This transcript is automatically generated and has been reviewed, but it may contain errors.

Emily (0:05): Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name's Emily, and I'm part of the customer success team with Orah. And today we're joined by Ryan Escow, Associate Dean of Students at Georgetown Prep, and Dana Harper and Alicia Hunter who are the front office manager and attendance manager from American Heritage School. And together we'll discuss how their teams manage daily attendance and emergency preparedness with Orah, what has changed since they started adopting it, and what they'd tell other Veracross schools considering Orah as a safety tool. And now please share your questions in the chat as we go along. There's no need to wait until the end. As you think of something, jot it down in the chat. I will get to them at the end of our session today. We do have some dedicated time for questions. Either me or our panelists will get to them at the end of the session. So here's just a quick look at what we'll cover today. We will start off with a brief introduction on Orah for anyone who is new and maybe just hearing about Orah. We'll then have introductions from our panelists today before we dive into what life looked like before Orah, rollout and adoption, what it looks like having Orah and Veracross in practice, and then of course, some lessons learned along the way. As I mentioned, we will end off with some Q&A.

So for those who are new here, here's a quick overview. Orah is a school safety platform that gives your staff a real-time view of where every student is, who's on campus, who isn't based on a number of different actions and automations that happen throughout the system. So instead of just once a day roll call, you can take attendance throughout the day by period or by activity, and Orah flags gaps automatically, like when a student is present in the first period but then absent in the second, or who starts off the day absent. So attendance becomes an early warning system and not just a compliance task. It also works the way that your school already does. So teachers can use a browser extension or a self-serve kiosk, a mobile app or automations, like a tap of an NFC tile or a QR code or RFID card that then automatically registers a student's location. So it really is all about student location awareness, this full picture of knowing where students are based on their coming and goings, based on the classes that they have throughout the day and which feeds into the emergency side of things as well. It does plug right into your student information system with a two-way sync. And so today of course most of you here would likely be Veracross schools, but we also integrate with Blackbaud, with FACTS and others. Your data comes in automatically and attendance writes back, so there's no double entry. Any time a pass or absence is put into the system, there's no double entry to then enter that into your student information system. It is automatically applied to the attendance record. And so beyond the classroom, field trips, the nurse, pickups, dismissals — Orah maps all of these scenarios back onto one student record so that you always have a good track record of where that student is and where that student has been throughout the day.

And with that, we'll keep it brief in terms of this introduction to Orah. With that, we will hand it over to our guests today. Thank you all so much for joining us. I know I work really closely with Ryan and his team at Georgetown Prep, and of course we've crossed paths with Dana and Alicia as well. And so I'd love to pass it over to you to just introduce yourselves and your role and just a little bit about your school. Maybe Ryan, you can start off first if that's okay?

Ryan (4:34): Sure. I appreciate you guys having me on. My name's Ryan Escow. I'm the associate dean of students at Georgetown Prep, which is right outside of DC in Maryland. We're both a boarding and a day school. We've got 500 boys. About 130 of those 500 are in the resident program. My office or our office, there's three people. There's a dean of students, there's me, the associate dean, and then we have an assistant dean as well. And the three of us pretty much oversee anything pertaining to those 500 boys. So yeah, that's kind of where we're at. And we're a Veracross school. We also — we made the switch to Orah, or we added Orah, I wouldn't say we made the switch — about a year and a half ago.

Emily: Thanks, Ryan. And Dana and Alicia?

Dana (6:00): We are American Heritage School. We're a private K-12 school in American Fork, Utah. We have about 1,300 students across all grades, so we service from age five up to age 18. And I'm the front office manager, and Alicia is the attendance manager. I focus mainly on students nine through 12. I've been at the school, this is my seventh year, so I've had a lot of interaction with Veracross, and feel very grateful for the change that we've made to Orah.

Emily (6:38): Thank you all again for joining us today. Now, I'd love to hear, before we chat about the changes that you've seen since adopting Orah, I'm really curious to hear more about how your schools approached attendance and student safety before Orah. What are some of the big changes? Dana?

Dana (6:45): I can go first. I'm not sure how many of the schools that are currently joining are using Veracross, and if you have experience with Veracross, then you know what is involved with taking attendance there. My personal opinion with Veracross is before it was quite tedious. Emily, you spoke of double entry. Often that was a big pain point. I felt like I was doing double the work. The safety part of Veracross, I felt like it wasn't always up to date, and Orah has provided a means for us to tackle that and keep it accurate. And tracking students was very difficult, too. We had separate spreadsheets that we had to run parallel to Veracross just to know who had logistics requests and if they had left and everything, and we were working off of Veracross as well as our own system to try to just keep track of where students were, because you couldn't pin their locations like Orah does.

Emily: And so now there's, you have this layer that lives above Veracross that brings those pieces together. Yes. That's fantastic. And Ryan, how about you? How did attendance look at Georgetown Prep before Orah?

Ryan (8:25): Before Orah, I actually was just a classroom teacher, honestly. And from our side, we would hop on the computer, check everybody as present or absent or tardy, and then we would just hit submit. And on the Dean of Students side, they could run a manual report after every period if they wanted to, but that was a little bit of a clumsy way to do things. So they would pretty much run a report at the end of the day. Some teachers are better at taking attendance than others, and so there would be a lot of people that maybe even didn't take attendance because it wasn't — like the information wasn't being received in real time. They would run a report at the end of the day, then they'd see who was absent for the day, tardy, that sort of thing, and there wasn't really great tracking throughout the day. A lot of things slipped through the cracks. When we added Orah, all of a sudden we had real-time information that could hold both the students accountable, the teachers accountable, and we have a much firmer grasp of where everybody is at any given time. The health center at our Prep was also — that was one of the hardest parts on campus to tackle in terms of making sure that we knew where students were. It was a pretty easy excuse for students who were late to be like, "I was in the health center." And it was easy for teachers to then be like, "Okay, tardy excuse, I get it." Now that's a lot harder for a student to do. So just in general, Veracross is great. We need Veracross. It's a great information hub for everything. Orah allows us to more effectively run a day-to-day operation that is on top of the students, on top of Veracross, doing a little bit more of a specified job with a lot more capabilities.

Emily (10:39): That's what we hear often, is Veracross and student information systems in general, they are these beasts, these things that can do so much. And they are the system of record, and they are the filing cabinet at the end of the day. But they're sometimes not built with the most user-friendly workflows and listening to the ground in terms of how folks need to be accessing this information just day to day. And so I think that is where we really come to supplement and to work together with Veracross. Now, I'd love to take a step back and discuss just what the rollout looked like. So how did your teams prepare for this change of moving to Orah? Ryan, if you wanna go first.

Ryan (11:05): I see you smiling, and I'm thinking back to our onboarding journey, and it was certainly a unique one. It wasn't standard by any means. We onboarded on a single Friday where we said, "We wanna get started for next week." And I said, "Oh, okay. I have an open day." Our onboarding was very quick and there was a lot of back and forth in those first few weeks. But I think it's a testament to the ease of Orah to kind of get a handle of it, to have allowed us to basically do a rollout in a week's time. Our dean of students at the time made the decision to add Orah to our repertoire. And then our assistant dean of students and I — the dean of students says, "Hey, it's your show. Figure it out." And so we rolled out the attendance piece first. We started using about maybe 25 to 30% of what Orah's capabilities are. That was really the package that we started with. And as we got our feet under us, we realized that, hey, we should add this piece. It would be a lot more effective. And so we added the emergency roll and we figured that out. Then we decided, okay, this is working really well. Let's add the next piece of the Orah puzzle. And as we went, we added more and more. One thing that I would say — being able to access knowledgeable people on a regular basis to help us with that rollout was critical. If we didn't have a 30-minute check-in pretty much every week for those first few weeks, we would've been treading water. We would've been really lost. Neither one of us are really tech people. So we would've been working blindly through Orah. And I think the best part of the rollout for us was the fact that we could have a person — Emily — to help us through those challenges. So we had a weird process. It was extremely fast. But we also were able to accomplish a lot in a small amount of time because we had a lot of support from the Orah team.

Emily: And there's a lot of your onboarding experience that was unique, right? The usual process does take four to six weeks of consistent meetings. But the thing that carries through for any school that's onboarding with Orah is that personal — that person, see? There's someone who is there hand-holding when it needs to be held and helping support that way. And I'd love to hear from Dana and Alicia. I know that your onboarding experience was very different than Georgetown Prep's.

Dana (15:00): Ours was different in that we made the decision to adopt Orah at the end of a school year. It was May. And we did have all summer to try to tweak some things, but you really don't know what you're getting into until it goes live. And it only goes live a week before school starts, and there's a lot of trickiness in customizing a program to school's preferences. Every school has a different attendance policy, different programs, different terminology, and it's tricky. To be honest, the rollout is a bit rough. However, like Ryan said, there's so many resources. You've got your AI help button if you just have a general question. Your AI assistant can help you. If the AI assistant can't, there's a live person right behind you to hop on an email and answer that question. If that doesn't work, weekly video chats get things going. We had some particular bugs in the system that were proving to be difficult, and Orah actually flew our rep out to spend a day with us about four months in, and she spent the day here so she could see exactly what we were experiencing, brought that back. Then we had weekly meetings with a higher-up, Grant, customer service manager, and developers to make sure that everything we needed was happening for us. And it made all of the difference to have that support and to feel like we weren't just left floundering. And once all of those things that were unique to attendance policies across several grades — obviously attendance for K-5 is gonna be different than attendance for high school — we had a lot of unique circumstances that needed to be addressed, but they were. And this year, this is our second year, it's working like a charm. It is life-saving. We found that we were overstaffed. We had to reassign a couple of front office people because we just didn't have enough for them to do, where that was not the case when we were only using Veracross. Everybody was up to their eyeballs trying to keep track of students. And it has saved so many hours that we've had to restructure our front office.

Emily (17:30): This might be a ballpark range, but if you could guess how many hours you think you've saved as a team, what number would you put on that?

Dana (17:35): I was thinking about it, and I'm thinking at least 20. At least 20 hours a week. Between all of us and everything that we have to do, at least 20 hours a week. We had one person who was working about that much that we've had to reassign her work role because we just didn't have the work for her anymore, and that was not the case before Orah.

Emily: And Alicia, in the high school end alone, that's where attendance is the trickiest.

Alicia (18:15): I would almost say that it has cut my — my workload really in half because I'm not double entering. It's one stop shop. Everything is right there where I need it, and the query capabilities are really comprehensive, that by noon I've pretty much caught up with following up with students from the day before.

Emily: Is there a certain screen or area of Orah that you find you are always going to or you find particularly helpful? Like, what's your favorite screen?

Alicia (19:12): I would say the insights page on the attendance — Attendance Insights, yes. The nice thing is I'm able to go into that feature, configure it for my needs, and it's usually the day before. And it brings in all the information for students and how they were marked. Absent unexcused, truant, tardy. If a pass gets ended early or incorrectly by a teacher, I'm able to go in and see all of that information.

Emily: For schools not on Orah, the attendance insights — it's a pie chart. It shows you percentages of tardies, absences. You can do it by student or by grade level. You can customize it, where you just didn't have access to those attendance records in Veracross. It's like a set of widgets. Some of them are lists, some of them can show you students who have been most frequently marked truant, for instance. Teachers who regularly don't take attendance. Things like that. Fully customizable — everything is customizable. And Ryan, same kind of question for you. Is there a screen that you find yourself going to all the time?

Ryan (20:26): I think there's three for us now. The passes — we're on passes all the time. The attendance insights, I'd echo that's a very frequent, that's probably on my screen throughout the day very often. And then since we added the nurture section of Orah — the pastoral summaries, or really just the running ticker of pastoral notes — that's a huge area of our daily tasks. So we're on that a lot, too.

Emily (21:22): And of course, we've talked about how Veracross is this big beast of a piece of software. How are you finding they work together? It's not Orah by itself, it's Orah with Veracross. How do you use Orah alongside Veracross in your day-to-day?

Ryan (21:30): In our day-to-day, I'll be honest, we don't use them super side by side. We use Veracross as a back end. Our day-to-day is really solely Orah at this point. That's not to say that they don't communicate — they communicate a ton every day. Our registrar's office makes sure that the schedules are updated at the beginning of the year. Veracross takes all that information and the student information and pulls it into the Orah system, and then Orah basically spits back the attendance numbers, and we have the record on the back end. So at the end of the year, we can go into Veracross and see everybody's daily attendance numbers. So really Veracross is like the information hub, and our day-to-day is pretty much solely on Orah because that's the level of specificity that we need and the speed of the information. We get that on Orah. Back end Veracross, day-to-day Orah is pretty much how we utilize it.

Dana (22:30): We would agree with that as well. As long as Veracross is accurate, Orah's accurate. At this point, if we're finding discrepancies, the discrepancy is not in Orah, it's in Veracross, and we go to our database manager, she fixes whatever needs to be fixed, it syncs over, and voila, everything's solved. They work together seamlessly. Orah and Veracross sync every 24 hours just automatically, but we also have the option to run a manual sync if something's changed and we need it right away. Within a few minutes, that information is pushed to Veracross also.

Emily (23:29): There is a question about double entry and how soon will Orah data be synced to the Veracross side. As Dana was just saying, there is a sync that happens once every 24 hours, and that's to pull information over from Veracross into Orah. We can manually sync those sooner. But pushing back to Veracross happens much more frequently — every five to 10 minutes where we're queuing and pushing over. Just in terms of lessons and advice, looking back, what would you say went well, and what would you do differently if you were to roll out again? Is there any advice that you would give to another Veracross school considering Orah?

Dana (24:30): I think we would have done differently is really giving the teachers time to learn Orah before we just gave it to them two days before school started, so they understood the importance of attendance taking and what can make everybody's life so much easier if it is taken and taken properly versus what happens if they don't. Because a lot of this is contingent upon teacher buy-in. It's an attendance system, and if attendance isn't taken or taken accurately, then you're setting yourself up for problems. So I would say bring the teachers in early and make sure that they know what we're doing. It's not just an office program. It is a whole school program with every teacher.

Alicia (25:30): I agree. Learning a new program comes with its challenges. I am not good with change, so it was hard for me to move from Veracross to Orah because I was so ingrained in Veracross. It would've been nice for me to have more time as well, because then you see what Orah offers and you're able to do and finish — it really is a great time-saving program. But the beauty is there's the ability to not notify parents of what's going on. You can deactivate notifications, so when you're figuring stuff out and stumbling and fumbling through, you turn off notifications. The parents have no idea what's going on until you are ready to push it out to parents. And that was really helpful when we were learning the new program and mistakes were being made on our end and then fixed. We were able to keep it internal before we pushed it out to parents. And I think that's a really beautiful feature.

Ryan (27:10): I would echo what Dana said about the teachers. Having been on the teacher side, having those personal relationships with a lot of the teachers, I sat down with all 70 of our teachers within the first two days of school. It's very simple to introduce, but I did every single one of them individually to get them set up on Orah and to understand what it does. I wish we had a little bit more time so I wasn't running around like a chicken with my head cut off those first couple days. One piece of advice — I don't think it's even possible to get a full grasp of Orah until you actually start school. They can simulate whatever they can simulate, but until your school is going through it and operationally working, you don't really have a full picture of the application of Orah to every school. You need to see how Orah works for your school to fully understand the problems that you're going to run into. And so my advice is just to lean into the discomfort. There are gonna be problems, and what the Orah team has done really well for us is help us solve the problems that are unique to our school. It's not something goes wrong and it's not — as long as you don't look at it like a game-ending issue, the issue will be fixed and it will be tailored to your school. The real world application is the only place that you're going to get the information that you need to tailor Orah exactly to your school's needs.

Dana (29:30): That's the difference. Veracross is, "Here's our program. Here you go." Orah, "Here's the program. How can we customize it to your specific school's needs and your school's policies?" Now, that takes time, but I would say 90% of what we need for our school's policies has been met by Orah. The additional changes that Orah made over the summer addressed another 5%. We're sitting at this much that is not customizable to our school, and I'm sure that's even gonna come. And so the responsiveness and the reactiveness to make a program fit different schools is a challenge that I think's being addressed beautifully, where you're not just handed something and saying, "Make this program fit your school." It's actually the opposite. "Here's our program, how can we make it work for your school?" And the support has been great.

Emily (31:47): That's such a good piece of advice. Thank you, Ryan, and thank you Dana and Alicia for working with us as we went from those initial configurations and then also making tweaks and making product updates along the way as well. I know we are just about to the end of our time here and we do have some questions. Dana, you touched on one of them — can attendance notifications be automatically sent to parents?

Dana (32:00): Yes, they can. They are sent out based on trigger points that you set, so can be based on a student not showing up to one class. Could be based on a certain threshold. They can be sent out immediately after a delay, at a certain time of day. Lots of different options there.

Emily: Is there a particular attendance alert that you are finding helpful at American Heritage?

Dana (32:35): I would say the tardy notifications. We have a policy set up for students that have three or more tardies. They are obligated to attend a study hall. We call it attendance school. So if they accrue three or more tardies in any given week, it's helpful I think for parents. I think it's an opportunity for them to say, "Hey, what's going on? Why are you not getting to class on time?" And I think the parents appreciate it because it's an opportunity for them to touch base and help support us, support them in getting students where they need to be.

Emily (33:30): Are you using the summarized alerts as well to send kind of that list of tardies?

Dana (33:45): For high school, it's when a student hits three or more.

Emily: I always love seeing the different alerts that people have set up, because there's so many different options for what you can be alerting on. You can customize your alerts to your own school's policies. Mary Fitzgerald had a question: "Do teachers take attendance in Orah or Veracross?"

Dana (34:05): They take attendance in Orah. It's really important that they take attendance in Orah. That becomes the working system where all of the information is held, and then the final record is what gets brought over to Veracross. Of course, it can be updated as updates are made in Orah.

Emily (34:20): Another question: "Have you found issues with Orah automatically creating passes, like early departure for the day after a teacher marks a student absent from just one class, and if so, what was the solution?"

Dana (34:30): Would Orah create a pass automatically? No. The only time that Orah would create a pass automatically is if it is a recurring pass, where we created that pass initially. But it would automatically create the recurrences. But yeah, not — would not be a case of that.

Emily (35:00): Basically with Orah, you decide what automations you want set, whether they are automations related to location updates or related to passes and how they are activated or ended. But not for creating passes.

Dana (35:10): You can also set up which passes you want to approve. We have it set up if a parent is saying their student's going to be absent all day, we don't have to look at that or approve it. Obviously, their child isn't gonna be here. And so you can even set up which passes you want your fingers on and your eyes on, and which ones you can just let go through.

Emily (35:30): There's a lot of customization. And that transfers nicely into the next question, which is do parents submit their students' attendance in Orah?

Dana (35:40): They can submit passes or absences. Schools call them different things. At Orah, passes is ingrained in my vocab, but parents can input absences. And just like Dana was just saying, you can decide which absence types a parent can submit and what that workflow looks like beyond the parent actually inputting it into the system. Does it automatically get scheduled and flow through, or does it need eyes on it first to get approval?

Emily (36:15): I think that is all for questions. Any final thoughts from American Heritage or from Georgetown Prep before we wrap up for today?

Dana (36:20): I would just end by saying once you get Orah working well for your school, it is a game changer. There's no more excuse notes or tardy slips or calls to the school. It just runs itself, and it is a huge time saver and it's a beautiful complement to Veracross. The attendance side of Veracross, this just takes it up a notch and simplifies your daily workflow and gives you information that you can't get from Veracross easily.

Ryan (37:10): I would agree. I'd echo that. I think that it is a perfect complement to Veracross. Veracross is critical to our record keeping and our operations. But Orah has allowed us to take our consciousness of student safety to the next level. When our team gets — it's almost information overload, but in our line of work, I think the more information you have, the more power you have. The greater your ability to stop issues before they happen and to be able to be on top of issues as they arise. And I think Orah has allowed us to do that. And I think that's been invaluable to taking our office kind of to the next level.

Emily (38:15): Thank you all for joining and for your kind words and your thoughtfulness as you relive that journey of what attendance and student location awareness looked like before Orah and that journey of getting started with Orah and how things look today. I can speak for the team in saying that we are truly lucky to work with so many amazing schools that we think of as partners in this journey. And thank you for being our partners and for joining us today. And thanks for everyone who joined in.