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Warren Griffiths (0:05): Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Warren Griffiths. I'm an account executive here at Orah. Today we are joined with Peter DiDonato, chief information officer at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy. Peter has been an ongoing champion of Orah, and we're thrilled to have him joining us today. Peter's gonna walk us through how Springside Chestnut Hill Academy rolled out Orah to teachers, and how they approached faculty onboarding and change management, and how Orah worked alongside their student information system, Blackbaud, to simplify attendance and student safety workflows. For everyone joining us online, please share your questions in the chat as we go. We'll leave some time at the end to answer as many as we can. For those of us coming in fresh, let's start with a little bit of background on Orah. Orah is a student safety and school operations platform that gives staff a single real-time view of where every student is and who's on campus at any given moment. At its core, the location awareness as students move throughout the day — their homeroom, classes, buses, car line, excursions, sports, their boarding houses — Orah keeps an up-to-date picture of where students are expected to be and where they've been checked in, so staff can have an accurate view rather than relying on memory or scattered spreadsheets. And that visibility feeds directly into attendance management. Instead of treating attendance as a once-a-day roll call, Orah lets schools take attendance continuously across the day — per period, per activity, per bus — and automatically flags discrepancies like a student marked present first period but is marked absent in second period. And that turns attendance from a compliance chore into an early warning system for whether a student is actually where they should be. And Orah isn't prescriptive about how you capture attendance. It works with however your school operates. Teachers can take roll via a browser extension or a mobile app. Students can check in at a kiosk. Staff can take roll once again on a mobile app. This can be done through RFID, NFC, barcodes, QR codes, and name search. All can be used in specific locations. And whatever the input, it all flows into one record. No manual exports, no spreadsheet syncing, no stale data. One place, always current. And think about every place a student can be that isn't their scheduled class. Field trips, sports practices, a library, a nurse visit, senior privileges, after-school pickup, off-campus activities. Every one of those is a blind spot in a school's setup. Orah captures all of these scenarios and maps them back to a single student record. No matter where a student is or what they are doing, you have one accurate, up-to-date answer to the question: Where are they right now? All right, so thank you. That's a little bit of the background. I'm going to now ask Peter, our wonderful guest, if you could just introduce yourself, Peter — your role and a little bit more about Springside Chestnut Hill Academy.
Peter DiDonato (3:36): Sure. Thank you, Warren. Appreciate being here today with everyone. And we were talking a little bit in the pregame. For those of you who are on the webinar, thanks for being here. I know personally how busy of a time of year it is right now with faculty coming back and students coming back, so appreciate this half hour or so we have. I am the CIO at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia. We are the oldest independent school in Philly. We are the product of a merger. About 16 years ago, we had a girls school and a boys school that were across the street from each other. We merged. We're now SCH Academy or Springside Chestnut Hill Academy. We're located on 62 acres of campus. We have 16 buildings, and we have numerous city streets that weave in between our campus. So safety, location data, all very important to us at our school. And for me, I sit at the intersection of — I like to, maybe it's not being so humble, but technology's often involved in everything, whether it's strategic planning or daily execution. And part of what my team does is IT and technology, and we are helping, whether it's the business office automate processes or faculty and administration figure out better ways to know where students are. That's all what my team does. Laptop programs, databases, cloud, all the fun stuff. And we get lots of opportunities to speak on behalf of vendors. And I will say one that we always say yes to is Orah. They've been a tremendous partner for us, and it really has solved some huge business needs for us.
Warren Griffiths (5:20): Oh, thanks, Peter, for the kind words. So I'll piggyback on that. What was attendance and student tracking like at SCH before the partnership with Orah?
Peter DiDonato (5:30): Yeah, it wasn't antiquated. We do continue to use Blackbaud, and we were using Blackbaud's attendance modules, but it was really clunky. And I guess the analogy I like to use is pre-merger, we were two smaller schools of around 500 kids, and now we're a school of 1,300. But at times, we would still think of ourselves as that scrappy school of 500 rather than the school of 1,300 kids on 62 acres with all these buildings. And what we were finding is taking period attendance became something that teachers did optionally. And we even had the point where we had the main receptionist calling classrooms 10 minutes after a class started to make sure that they were putting their attendance in. 'Cause if we had a fire drill, we could honestly, we couldn't track those kids. Or, heaven forbid, a true emergency. And we also had our deans stuck in this two to three-hour morass every day of trying to reconcile attendance once the day was done to figure out — was a kid really absent from AP history, or were they just, like, attendance didn't happen? Were they at the nurse? Did they leave early for a sports game? And our deans — really, this ate up the majority of their time, and it was pretty painful. And for us, we weren't getting the kind of dynamic interaction with kids that we're supposed to have in an independent school. And that kind of led us down the path of there's gotta be a better option out there, I think is how we started it. And we eventually found Orah probably at an ATLAS conference or something like that, and then began our discussions of, "Okay, could this work for us?"
Warren Griffiths (7:29): That's great. Okay, thanks, Peter. Was there any particular event or was it just a series of understanding inefficiencies that made you decide that we had to do something differently? Or was there anything in particular that happened at the school that was like, "Okay, now we've got to do something here"?
Peter DiDonato (7:44): Yeah, I think what happened was towards the end of the '23-'24 school year — or maybe it was the '24-'25 school year, I kinda almost don't remember at this point. We had an issue towards our final exams where we realized that we had a number of kids across different subjects who tended to be absent on test-taking days. And this only bubbled up because we had five or six people in a room who all taught the same student, and it was like, "Hey, wait, Pete missed my exam too." Or, "Oh yeah, Pete missed two exams this year for us." And it was a light bulb moment, I think, for our head of upper school who thought that we should've been able to intervene with this student and their family sooner. And if we had better accessibility to data, we could've done that. And I think that was the tipping point for us where we said we're gonna go all in with Orah, and we've set up a multi-year plan to do that through early childhood through 12th grade. But the first year was a laser focus on upper school and eliminating these lags in communication and having hopes of having deeper and better access to student insights and data so that we could intervene early, we could communicate to parents, we could recommend outside resources perhaps to help with a student if they were having issues coming to school and showing up or anxiety around tests. And I will say, spoiler alert, that definitely came to fruition for us and really worked well last year.
Warren Griffiths (9:28): Oh, that's amazing. That's good to hear. So we've gone through an evaluation with Orah. This has become the solution to move forward with. And then we get to the next step. Okay, how are we going to roll this out? So how did you get teachers on board with Orah, and was there much pushback along the way?
Peter DiDonato (9:48): Yeah, and ironically, we are in the process of launching Orah for middle school families right now, so we're in the same place we were with the upper school last year. And I will say that having gone through this a second time, our concerns are much less than they were last year. So what our process was like — initially, our head of upper school and myself did a webinar or had a meeting with our Orah team. We decided yes, this sounds like something we need to bring to a larger group. We then expanded it to include — and I would really stress this point before you get to the faculty — to build a really good team. For us, that involved upper school administration, it involved our registrar, it involved multiple people from tech so that we could really be just the support for both our internal community and for parents if needed. I mentioned our deans and perhaps a couple of key people like the assistant to the upper school division. So we had maybe seven or eight people that met with Orah a number of times to configure our system, and this was easy. These were working meetings, like 30 to 45 minutes. Many of them are with Zohab. So if you end up with Orah and you get to work with him, just know you're really lucky because he's wonderful, great disposition, super technical too. But he stepped us through and really held our hand to make sure that the attendance codes in Blackbaud mapped perfectly to the attendance codes in Orah, that our synchronization was in place. And once that was built out, it's set it and forget it. It's not something that me and my team are spending time in, really at all. It's only if someone from upper school or a parent submits a support ticket that maybe we have to resend their invite or something like that. But once we had that core team built and they were excited about it, we then moved it into talking to our faculty. So our upper school faculty is around 70 people — much too large of a group to try to have make the decision. So the decision was made, but I think the way that we approached it with them was through the lens of empathy. "Hey, we know that taking attendance is a pain in the neck." You want time with kids, you wanna teach, you want them to learn, you want the interactivity. You don't wanna have to do 10 or 11 or 12 clicks to get to the right place and mark people in each period. By the way, you can now do this with a Chrome extension that doesn't require you to log into our Blackboard environment. You can take attendance right through the right-hand pane in your web browser. It literally takes maybe 10 or 15 seconds and you're done. We also had some other teachers who piloted the tiles in their classroom where students could tap with their phone and that would do attendance. We ultimately moved away from that because of the no phone policy that we now have in our high school. But the rolling out with the teachers was really about saying, "Hey, if we have better data, we can more effectively put strategies together to help kids. We can save you five or so minutes in every class every day," so that could be a half hour realistically for anyone, and just make this a non-issue where it's higher level work that's being done by the deans and our head of upper school now. And the deans aren't spending two hours at the end of the day trying to figure out, like, did Warren go to a game? Did Pete cut class? Was he somewhere else at that time, but I didn't know because the teacher didn't email and say, "I have Pete, he's with me right now." Teachers learn how to create their own passes, and it really was one of our simpler rollouts. Probably the trickiest part was when we did the training for faculty in our pre-first day meetings — they couldn't see our data because our school year wasn't live. So we were training on sample data, and there were a lot of questions of, "How is this gonna work?" Or, "I don't see my kids in there." So what we did was we identified floor captains for Orah who would be the first level of problem-solving if anyone had issues on the first day, 'cause our upper school was in multiple buildings, multiple floors, science buildings, math buildings, that kind of thing. And what we learned really is after a couple days of doing this, the typical reaction was, "Oh, that's all I have to do." And once we pushed the Chrome extension out to everyone, it was really pretty seamless.
Warren Griffiths (14:46): That's great, Peter. So what advice would you — especially now that you're doing this a second time — we did hear some of the things and some of your alerting moments, but what would you have done differently back then knowing what you know now?
Peter DiDonato (15:01): Yeah, for sure. There's always things you would do differently. There's always ways to be better. No doubt. Two things come to mind when I think about that. One is never underestimate how much stress your parents are in at the beginning of the year. So over-communicate to them about why you're doing this, when the email invite is coming, and if they don't get it — if they don't get it, I'll just say it that way — or if they need a refresher or something, make sure they know easily how to get help. So for us, it was emailing the parents and then learning, okay, when we do this for middle school, we're gonna email them three times before we launch it. The first time would be the why, the second time would be the how, and the third time would be a reminder. And then at the exact time that we tell them that we're gonna send them the invites, we will send them their invites. So that's our plan actually for this afternoon. That's one piece. Parents are doing a lot. They're trying to pay bills, and we're all very good at schools of sending them to one app to pay their tuition or one app for attendance or one app for putting money on their cafeteria account or whatever it might be. So just lots of communication, lots of clarity. And then the second part that we would do differently, I should say, is a couple of months into the school year, we decided our upper school assistant would become the first person to triage if kids were absent and perhaps the parents hadn't put a pass in, of just opening up some communication lines with those families or helping to get them all and put them in the system when parents are saying, "Pete's not gonna be here because of a dentist appointment," or whatever it might be. But I also would recommend you be very strict in not supporting your old systems. So if you had an email address or a phone number that parents are using for attendance, to say, "Hey, we're not doing that anymore. You have to create your Orah account." And if you're not comfortable, as long as we have your email address, you actually don't need an account. You can still log in and create a pass for your kid. So those would be my tidbits. I'm sure there's others that I'm not thinking about from the registrar perspective or perhaps a dean's perspective. But in short, over-communicate to the parents, and then develop someone in-house who's like your Orah expert. 'Cause this is a solution that's very easy to manage, so sometimes those systems become one that sort of no one owns because it just works. But having someone who is the go-to person, and have that person be more on the front lines of your academic division than the technology end, would be my recommendation.
Warren Griffiths (18:04): Great. Thanks, Peter. And now that we're starting to get our community — we've got our community bought into Orah as well, no more email boxes, no more phone lines. If you could put a number on it, how much time or admin effort do you think it has saved?
Peter DiDonato (18:19): Yeah. That's, for us, I think we immediately said we were saving at least 10 hours a week just for our deans who were trying to reconcile attendance, and that number's huge, right? So there's however many weeks there are in a school year. If it's 45 or whatever it might be, that's over 10, 11 weeks of work for the year if you think of it like that. But for us it was also not the time we were saving, but it was the elevated conversations that we were having about kids' attendance patterns and being proactive and out in front of it. And we weren't, like, taking that data from Blackbaud, exporting it to spreadsheets, and then manually updating it. I didn't even count, calculate that in the time saved, but I know that for us it really helped us with kids who were having issues in terms of attendance. And it, when you can provide the data to parents — I know I have a quote written down here from one of my upper school admins about automating reminders and alerts to kids and parents. In the past would've been individually constructed emails on a daily basis. Orah helped us clean up attendance, and it facilitated all this necessary but burdensome work. And another piece that I had was just in terms of quote, this is from our head of upper school: "My big takeaway from year one is that Orah is helping to streamline data and communication so that the upper school team is spending less time in the daily grunt work of attendance management and allowing them to reallocate that time to engaging families around student support, which is evidenced by attendance patterns and spending more time looking at patterns over time rather than check boxes of daily resolution." So there you go.
Warren Griffiths (20:15): That's pretty amazing. That's impactful. Thanks, Peter. For sure. Now, you touched on this a little bit. Was there a time since you've rolled out Orah that it has helped you? 'Cause where it comes down to attendance is really a safety function, it's not an admin function. So has there been a time since rolling out Orah that has helped you track down a student or handle an ongoing attendance issue?
Peter DiDonato (20:34): So it definitely has helped us with ongoing attendance issues. I think I've illuminated a couple of those. We've learned that we've had some kids who — I don't pretend that we're unique, so I imagine other schools have this issue — where we have some kids who have anxiety about coming to school. And sometimes, as a parent — and as a parent myself — having the data shown to you is much more impactful to understand, okay, this really is an issue. I thought maybe my son or daughter is just missing a day here or there, but it's not really a big deal, and they're staying up on their work. But when you look at it and say, "Hey, your student is missing 13% of school days," that sounds much more significant than a couple days a month or however you might word it. Now, we do have a multi-year plan to roll Orah out, and this year we're rolling out the emergency and visitor management pieces along with middle school attendance. And our reason for that is our schools are very separate, and they were using different solutions when we partnered with Orah for upper school. And our thought process was work with the upper school, it's gonna be the most complicated. Once we get that working, then we would look at installing visitor management so we could track our visitors during an emergency. We're doing that right now. And also launch attendance for middle school. So we did upper school attendance, we're doing middle school attendance, we're doing visitor management, and then in about a month or so, we're gonna begin the Orah emergency piece so that we can track kids in a true emergency, whether it's a lockdown or fire drill. And that will be year two for us. That will be this year. And then our third and final year we expect to bring our lower school into the mix, as well as our early childhood program. But we have some other apps that we're using there that we have to figure out how to transition them, 'cause again, we want to simplify the parent experience for dismissal pickups or visitor management or attendance, and that will be our trajectory. I hope we never really need it in an emergency, but at least now we feel confident about our data, whereas before we didn't feel confident, whether it was for staff or for our students. 'Cause there's always times when our seniors can leave campus, or employees might leave to go to the doctor, and there's a fire drill, and then all of a sudden, or a lockdown, you're saying, "Oh, I think he went, I think he left to go to the doctor," or, "I think they went to our local stores, Wawa." We think they went to Wawa to get a hoagie or something like that, but we don't really know. Now we know, which is when you're responsible for minors is really important.
Warren Griffiths (23:29): All right, thanks, Peter. We have about five minutes left. We did have some questions come in, so we'll try and get through as many of these as possible. So this was just — how long did it take for teachers to get comfortable with Orah? I know we touched on that, but...
Peter DiDonato (23:44): Yeah. I would say definitely it took the first week. It was, the first day it was conceptual to them, but not real. So I think that first day was — the first two days were just a realization of, "Oh yeah, it is as easy as you're telling me." It's not like any other great tech invention that we've said is gonna change the world. This was one that actually just makes your life easier. And by the end of the first week, I felt like people were genuinely comfortable using it on their own. And the tickets we were seeing were really from parents who were saying, "Please send me my invite. I never set my account up."
Warren Griffiths (24:22): Gotcha. Gotcha. One more. So this school says we have teachers who are a bit adverse to change. What did you do to change minds for people who maybe were the same?
Peter DiDonato (24:49): I think for us it was leading with the point of view of giving you more time back to spend with your students, that we recognized our attendance process was clunky. And we love Blackbaud. We've been a Blackbaud school for a long time, so I'm certainly not saying Blackbaud is not a good solution. But I think the way they explained it to me is, "Hey, we have a couple of developers who are working on attendance. Orah is an entire company that's working on student location awareness, I should say, not really tracking." But so whatever they're developing is probably gonna be a better user experience than what we're doing. And for us, it was just communicating to teachers that this will simplify your life. If it does nothing else, it'll save you five or so minutes in every class period of taking attendance. If that's the bottom of the barrel, then you just saved a half hour a day. And from there we can really scale up in terms of what the benefits were. I do not think the teachers looked at this as some other technology changes that have happened in the past of being as adverse to it, because who doesn't like to save time?
Warren Griffiths (25:53): Yeah, agreed. Agreed. I think we all could say we use saving time. I do have one more question that's just come in. It's more of a high-level tech question. Is there a SSO, a single sign-on from Blackbaud for faculty and parent logins?
Peter DiDonato (26:08): So for faculty there is. We use our Google SSO, and again, that was configured in one of our sessions with Orah support when we were onboarding. It's something you just basically follow their KB article. You turn it on, and you can have it done in probably 15 or 20 minutes with your door shut. It wasn't entirely complicated. For parents, though, they have the ability to create their own logins once they get their invite. They're not within our domain, so we don't control their login options. And honestly, I don't know if there's like a Google or Outlook SSO on the parent side. I just don't know that.
Warren Griffiths (26:48): Thanks, Peter. I think that's it for the questions that have come in. So Peter, I really wanna thank you for your time today and letting us know about all the great work that's happening over at SCH. And everyone else who has joined us, we appreciate it. You will get a link to the recording, and it will be posted on the Orah website for review later as well. All right, thank you very much everyone. Have a great day.
