Use Orah Passes (Parent Excuse Forms) to automate Absence reporting in a school. Parents can inform the school that their child will be absent or late, which will update that student's attendance record in real-time–meaning a teacher can know when marking the roll that a particular student is not expected in class that day.
Use Orah's Attendance Insights to get a real-time view of your student's Attendance Rates, Records and more specific to each teacher or school leader. This dashboard is populated with data from your existing student information system, or from Orah Attendance data if you are using the full Attendance Management system.
Use Orah's Attendance Alerts to alert students, parents and staff when a student has been tardy or absent for a specific number of times in a specific period. This feature has many uses for a school. For example, it is useful for bringing parents into the conversation regarding attendance and punctuality if it becomes a problem for a particular student.
Get a demo of Orah Attendance, or sign up for a free 30 day trial of Orah Passes, Attendance Insights & Alerts. After that, Orah Passes, Attendance Insights &Â Alerts will cost $3 per student /year.
As of August 2024, Orah Attendance syncs with the following systems:
Please contact us if your school management system is not listed, we are always on the look out for more systems to integrate with if enough schools are looking for it.
Kurt Meyer: Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm here with Ronan, calling in from New Zealand. My name is Kurt, calling in from Japan. We're here to take you through some key updates around attendance.
Ronan Quirke: Yep. Hey, everybody. Welcome. Kurt, as our attendance guru and expert, is going to be taking us through the latest updates. We've been doing a lot, particularly as we prepare for the start of the new academic year in North America and Europe. We’ve been jamming in those last few bits and pieces that you've been asking for.
And we're still working on some more, which are coming as well. We might touch on those towards the end.
Kurt Meyer: All right. So I'm just going to share my screen, and we can get started.
Okay, so a little bit about Orah for those of you who don't know. We've been around since 2015, starting in the boarding school space, and we currently work with over 300 of the top schools around the world, across 20 different countries. Our mission is to help schools meet and exceed their duty of care responsibilities.
Kurt Meyer: So what does duty of care mean to us at Orah? Duty of care means making sure students are accounted for both physically and mentally. It’s all about helping schools create a secure and supportive environment. Starting from boarding schools, we got really good at helping schools take care of their students 24/7.
And we've been extending that idea across the whole school.
There are really three core pillars of duty of care that we focus on: attendance, well-being, and communication. Within these three categories are really important fundamental questions that schools need to be able to answer every day. So under attendance, they need to know where their students are. For well-being, they need to know how their students are doing. And for communication, they need to know how students are being communicated with.
So yeah, where are my students? How are they? How do we communicate with them? These are some fundamental questions that schools have to answer every day, and we have designed our platform to focus on these three key areas of duty of care.
Ronan Quirke: Good. Just something came up when I was talking to a customer on Friday—they were asking the “where are my students?” question in a slightly different way. So I think it’s worthwhile explaining what so many of you are thinking about: have they attended class? Have they had an absence today? Etc.
From our point of view, if we know where you are—whether you are in class or not—then that fundamentally answers your questions around class attendance, class participation, and all those things. You may ask that question in a slightly different way, but if you fundamentally know where the student is, it answers the question of those other kinds of ways you might think about calculating attendance.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, absolutely. And we'll get deeper into how Orah helps specifically around those attendance workflows as well. We integrate with most of the main student information systems, and we have different levels of integration depending on demand from our customer base. At the moment, Veracross, Blackboard, and TAS have quite deep integrations, and we're looking at building out ISAMS and Synergetic next.
But we're always open to feedback on which integrations we should work with. One thing to note is that Orah is not here to replace your SIS by any means. We're here to sit on top of it, complement it, and work with your existing system seamlessly.
Okay, so onto the topic for today—we're going to be focusing on attendance. At a high level, I want to talk through how you can use Orah to fix some of the biggest attendance pains that we see with the base starter version of Orah's attendance product.
Okay, so the most common attendance problems we come across are manual data entry leading to inaccurate or lagging data. This includes parents emailing and leaving voice messages, and someone in the attendance office having to trawl through all that information and manually add it into the system. Usually, it takes a few hours—assuming the parents have provided the information on time—for the attendance manager to input it into the system. So there's already a lag.
Not a lot of real-time information is available. Because class has already started, students are being marked absent, even though there’s a legitimate reason for them not being there—it just hasn’t been entered into the system on time. Also, with manual data entry, there’s always room for error, and things can fall through the cracks. So that's one of the common problems.
There’s also not much visibility into attendance patterns and insights. So there’s a lot of data being collected, but there aren’t very intuitive and user-friendly ways to digest that data so you can really see the patterns and take action from those. So not much visibility—it’s hard to get a sense of what’s going on.
And also, as a combination of those two things, there’s poor follow-up and interventions around attendance. It’s usually after the fact that you find out there’s been some sort of behavioral issue, and you haven’t been able to take corrective action as soon as you would have liked. Say if a student is showing tardiness or absence behavior, you’re behind the ball, and you can’t follow up and intervene to make a difference. And so ultimately, this leads to higher levels of tardiness, absences, and safety concerns when you don’t truly know where your students are.
So those are the three big problems that we typically see. And with our starter package of Orah, you’ll be able to solve these problems in three steps. The first step is improving the timeliness of attendance records, the second step is visualizing your attendance data so that you can see those patterns, and the third step is to automate your follow-ups whenever certain criteria or thresholds have been met. So we’re going to focus on each of these and talk through the tools that we have available.
So the first one—improve the timeliness of attendance records with Orah’s parent excuse form. The way this works is that you provide your parents with a public URL. You could send that to them via email, or you could put it on your website. A parent would go to that link, submit an excuse, and that will be instantly added to either your SIS or to excuse a student from class. So that whole lag period between the parent sending the information and it getting input into the system gets completely automated. So I’ll show you what that looks like in practice.
So first, I’ll go to the request page.
And from here, we provide the public URL, which will be unique to your school. So you’ll simply copy that, put it on your website, share it with parents—however you’d like. Some schools embed it into their school app. That’s it. And when parents click on that link, they’ll be directed to a page like this.
And they don’t need to have an account. All you need is their email address in the system, which we will sync over via the integration. So the parent doesn’t need to create any username or password. They just click on the link, put in their email address, and we’ll send them a one-time password. So I’ll just put mine in now.
And that’s it. I’m connected to my child within the school, and I’m showing the excuse options that I have available. These are fairly customizable, and the common ones that we typically see schools creating are early dismissal—so if a student is leaving school early—a full-day absence if they’re not going to be at school for that whole day, a late arrival, and a multi-day absence, which may require school approval before actually being written into the system.
A few automations that we can set up are that, for things like early dismissal, we can actually fix the end time to the end of the school day. So all the parent has to input is the start time—when they’re actually picking up their child—and we’ll automatically set the end time. Any classes within those two time periods will be excused.
So if I say I’m going to pick up my son at 2 PM and take him home at 3 PM, then he’s going to be automatically excused from class between those two times. As I mentioned before, you can set up an approval step. So if you want some oversight on a particular type of excuse, then that can come to the attendance manager, who can review it and approve it. Once they approve it, it will excuse the student.
So that’s a really quick way to solve that problem of parents emailing, calling, and someone having to manually enter that into the system. You just provide the parents the link, set up the passes, and everything goes in automatically.
Here, we can see what it looks like when a student is excused. As soon as that form is submitted, the attendance record would excuse the student from that class without any lag. Great, so that’s the first tool to improve the timeliness of attendance records.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. Sorry, just a good point to call out: if you do have any questions about that, pop them in the chat because it is quite different from maybe your contact forms that send through an email that you might have on your websites at the moment or in the app where it goes to your email, or it goes into— I know some of you use, like, maybe Office or Google Docs, and it goes in there, and then you copy and paste it into your system and things like that. This is much more streamlined, straight through. So it’s going right into the attendance system directly from what the parent is putting in. That might spark some questions, so jump in and ask if you’ve got any.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, exactly. And I would also say it’s more secure as well. If you’ve just got a public Google form, you don’t really know if it’s the parent putting that in. Whereas we have that extra layer of security where the parent’s email address is used to verify that it’s actually them before they submit that excuse. So there’s a bit more assurance that it’s the right person doing it.
Awesome. Alright, so the next piece is visualizing your attendance data. We provide an out-of-the-box Attendance Insights dashboard that plugs directly into your SIS. This can be set up in minutes. All you have to do is enable the integration, and we’ll pull in all of your attendance data to provide this dashboard that allows you to really drill down into those attendance insights and patterns.
I’ll show you what that dashboard looks like.
This is our demo account.
So at a high level, we give you an overview of your attendance rates over different time frames so you can see how that rate fluctuates over time. You can set different time periods and filter by different student groups. You could have a dashboard set up for different grade levels or different school levels.
You can have those pinned so that you can easily open those up at any time. We give you some insight into attendance hotspots on a per-class level or on a per-grade/year level, and these are color-coded as well. So if you have any time periods with poor attendance rates, they’ll be highlighted in red or orange, and you’ll be able to see if there are any hotspots of concern that you should focus on, whether on a class level or a grade level.
We also have some widgets to show your frequent flyers in terms of the most unexcused absences. This will give you a list of the top ten within that given time frame, and you can open up these records to see exactly which classes that student was absent from.
Also, for the most tardy students, you’ll be able to get a list of your top ten, as well as for the most excused absences. If you click on any of these quick links—so if you wanted to view more than just the top ten—by clicking on that link, it would automatically filter the student table at the bottom of the dashboard. So we can see all the students who have at least one unexcused absence. And you can sort these tables by different columns. We can sort it by unexcused absences, and that’ll give you a descending list.
You can also open up that modal to see the specific records as well. All of this data is exportable, so it’s easy to put into a spreadsheet or any other systems you might need this information for. You can also search on a per-student basis. Straight away, that gives you some high-level insight into how attendance is tracking, where the hotspots of concern are, who your frequent flyers are, and which students might need a bit of attention around attendance. This gives you a really good starting point to drill a bit deeper into how you can improve your posture around attendance.
The other thing with the dashboard that I would mention is that this dashboard plugs directly into your SIS. So currently, this demo is plugged into our Blackboard account, so all of the data is pulling over from Blackboard. We also support Veracross, and we’re working through a couple of other integrations at the moment. But if you are using Orah for full attendance tracking, you can easily switch the dashboard over to Orah as the main source of data. So it’s easy to switch between data sources, but just to emphasize that this dashboard I’ve shown you is completely generated from your existing SIS data, so you can get up and running and start using it straight away.
Anything you’d add to that, Ronan?
Ronan Quirke: Just one thing that I was thinking of as we were going through that is who and when would be using the attendance dashboard. Personally—and don’t take this as gospel advice because I’m not an educational professional, though I’m trying to be—I feel like the Attendance Insights dashboard is really useful for the attendance manager and school management. Maybe for the attendance manager on a daily basis, but for school management on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. This way, you can see those patterns you talked about.
This is really good at looking at patterns, also discussing the sorts of alerts that you have set up. So the alerts are your interventions, your ways of actually saying, “Okay, somebody is developing a pattern, and before they get too far gone, we can take some steps to intervene.” But yeah, that’s how I think about the Attendance Insights dashboard. It’s probably not something I would personally be trying to refresh on an hourly basis to see live things. I think it’s very much more of a tool to say, “This is where we are. These are some things we’re not happy about. These are the people who probably won’t be too much of a surprise to you.” And then, looking at what sort of alerts we could configure as a result of that to try and disrupt behaviors that we don’t want to see.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, exactly. So just to emphasize that, these dashboards are really like we see them being used by a lot of deans or people who have responsibility over a certain cohort or group of students. They could create their own dashboard, and when they look into that dashboard, they know those are their students and those are the ones they need to have conversations with and follow up on.
But we are working on making these dashboards more granular so that even teachers would have a similar dashboard where they could see, “Okay, just for the classes that I’m responsible for, how is attendance tracking?” So it’s really about giving the school faculty and leadership the information they need to hold students accountable and follow up on students, and then giving that tool to everybody so that you can all work as a whole to improve attendance.
So Ronan mentioned the alerts. That’s the third...
Ronan Quirke: I know, I’m sorry, Kurt.
Kurt Meyer: No, it’s a good segue. So that’s the third solution that we have to automate your follow-up processes. The alerts are completely automated and are built on top of the Insights dashboard. So they can work with your SIS-based data as well. If I go back to the dashboard, you’ll see that we have this alerts tab here. This gives you a history of all the alerts that have been generated so that you have that record. Each record shows you the criteria that triggered the alert, who was notified, as well as which records met that criteria. And, of course, which students it relates to.
I’ll show you what it looks like to actually create an alert. If we go into the dashboard settings, this is where you would manage all of your alerts. If I go and create a new one, let’s say we want an alert for students who have been tardy, unexcused, or absent for any course three times in total within one week. You can see how customizable this is, so you can really refine the sorts of thresholds that you want to set up to trigger these alerts. Then you can also define who should receive the alert. You can send the alert to staff members, contacts, and students.
For staff members, you can send it to specific staff—so if it’s just, say, the attendance manager or a dean of students who should get that alert, say, if it’s a higher threshold—then you can specify staff for that. Assigned staff would be basically any staff member who’s connected to that student through their class, dorms, or houses. So they have some sort of association with that student. And the third way is by user role. You can set up all of these user roles within the admin settings. Let’s say advisor—that’s one of the roles that we’ve created. So in this case, anytime this alert is triggered, we’re going to notify the advisor of that student. You can put in a custom message as well that would go to the advisor, with follow-up steps and what the next steps should be.
For parents and contacts, you can send alerts via email and SMS. You can filter by relationship, so if it’s just a certain level of contact—say the legal guardian or something like that—these relationships are all pulled over from the SIS as well. You can apply those filters. Again, you can customize the message that the contacts will receive. We’ve had some really good feedback and use cases—real-life stories of how these kinds of alerts have actually helped identify students who would have effectively been missing throughout the day because the parents thought they had dropped them off at school, but they ended up leaving school. The parents were notified, and then they found out the student wasn’t actually at school. We’ve been seeing these alerts actually make an impact in some pretty important real-life scenarios.
And, of course, you can send alerts to students as well, just to alert them that they’ve met a certain criterion.
Ronan Quirke: Thanks for that question here. Can we use alerts to put someone on detention if they’ve been late five times in a term? So we can certainly track the lates and the number of lates within a time period. You would set that for the current term in terms of the time period, and in that case, you’d probably want to—ideally, you’d have an alert that would go to the student and the student’s parents, maybe after three lates, and another one after four, so they get their warnings, and then maybe generate an email to some staff to say, “Hey, okay, they’ve now hit five lates, so now we need to book them in on detention.”
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, absolutely. And so when the staff member receives that alert, they’ll be able to click on it in the email, and that’s going to bring up all the details in terms of which classes the student actually missed or was tardy for in order to meet that criterion. So when they’re putting a student on detention, they can say, “Look, I can see that you missed history and choir on these days.” They’ve got the data they need to talk to the student about it, and then, if they need to put them on detention, they can.
Awesome, awesome. Yeah, thanks for that question. That is alerts. So just a quick recap on what we’ve covered: the three main pain points being lagging data, lack of insights, and lack of follow-up. Our solutions to those are the parent excuse form, which writes to your SIS or Orah immediately if a student’s not going to be at school for any reason; the Attendance Insights Dashboard, which plugs into your SIS if you haven’t started using Orah for full attendance tracking; and then the automated alerts for those automated follow-ups. Everything we’ve covered today is in our starter package of Orah.
There’s a lot more capability that Orah covers in terms of activities, emergencies, and location check-ins. Those are in higher packages, but what we’ve covered today is all within our starter package. It’s designed as a way for schools to just easily get started and address some of those pressing pain points really quickly. You can get started for free by going to our website, orah.com, where we have a free signup flow in the top right-hand corner. If you have Blackboard, then you should be able to set it up yourself. If you have a different SIS, one of our reps will need to help you get the integration enabled, but that’s usually a fairly straightforward process. And so, yeah, you can get started with everything we’ve shown very quickly.
If you have more questions or if there are other scenarios you’re curious about and how we might be able to help with those, we can set up a demo and a consultation. You can email me directly at kurt@orah.com, and I’d love to set up a time to learn more about your needs and how Orah might be able to help. Or we’ll send a follow-up email with a recording of this webinar later on, which you can also reply to if you want to get in touch to learn more.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, not a lot of questions today, but thank you, everybody. As Kurt said, though, just hit reply to any of the emails you’ve gotten about these webinars or the recording that we’ll share. If you do have any questions, we’ll be happy to go through them. I know there’s a lot to take in sometimes. But, yeah, as Kurt said, everything that we showed today doesn’t require the whole school to change their systems and processes. It does require you to sign up and adopt what we have here, but it really does work with your existing SIS. So it’s a good initial step.
If you’re already a customer—and I know some of you on this webinar are and have tried it in the past—then it’s probably worthwhile reaching out to us again because a lot of the improvements that we’ve shown have just come in the last couple of months, thanks to some of your feedback as well. So it might be a good opportunity to relook at the attendance insights again if you’re already a customer and using that.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, absolutely. We can turn it on straight away for anyone who’s already set up with Orah, and if you already have an integration, it’s just a flip of a switch, and you’ll be able to get access to all the capability that we’ve shown. So yeah, do let us know if you’re interested. We’d love to help you get set up with that.
Great. Okay, I think we can wrap it up there. Thanks so much, everyone, for joining in, and I look forward to hearing from anyone in terms of learning more.
Ronan Quirke: Thanks, everybody.
Kurt Meyer: Cool. Thanks, Ronan. Thanks, team.
Ronan Quirke: Bye.
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