To get started with Orah’s attendance tracking for Blackbaud and Veracross, you can sign up for a trial account on the Orah website. From there, simply connect your school’s data via API keys, and the system will walk you through the setup. Once connected, Orah pulls in attendance data automatically, and you’ll be able to explore insights and set up alerts within minutes. If needed, Orah’s team is available to assist with any setup questions.
Note: This transcript was automatically generated and manually reviewed, but may still contain errors.
Tiago Penteado: Hello everyone, welcome to this webinar with, Philips Exeter Academy and the University School of Nashville.today we're going to be putting a bunch of questions to them, about their processes to keep track of students in their schools. but first, before we get into any of that, I'm just going to do a short round of introductions.
so I'm Tiago, the marketing manager here at Orah. Um, and I'm currently in DC for, um, the TABS conference,and Kurt, I'll let you go next.
Kurt Meyer: Hi everyone, thanks for joining in. I run the product team here at Orah. So anything feature related or, um, new build, I generally work with our team to get that done. so yeah, looking forward to hearing more about Rochelle and Nicole's journey with Orah and any questions that you have.
Tiago Penteado: Very cool. And then, maybe Rochelle, if you'd tell us a little bit about yourself and then, your role at Phillips Exeter as well.
Rochelle Karakey: Yes, hi, my name is Rochelle Karakey. I've been with Phillips Exeter Academy for four years, next week actually, and, I was hired to help, identify the various different student information systems out in the world, and to implement and configure, and as part of that whole process, we chose Blackbaud, of which we've just gone live with in the last few months, but then also we chose Orah.
And we, to do, our out of, our what we call out of towns, but our passes. And, we went live with Orah in September of last year, a little over a year ago.
Nicole Jules: Hello, everyone. My name is Nicole Jules, and I'm at University School of Nashville. I'm the Assistant Head of High School for Student Affairs, and as part of my duties, that includes attendance and, keeping track of attendance during the day when kids are not here. And we actually signed on to do Orah in August of 2024.
And we really put rolled it out, the second week of school. So we are really new. and our biggest thing was finding ways to, one thing we really love about Orah is having the insights page because it allows us to see where the hotspots are. And then also just to take attendance a little bit more effectively.
we have been using Blackbaud for years now and through all their changes, the attendance page has changed quite a bit. And Orah has allowed for us to have access to information in a way that we did not before.
Tiago Penteado: That's awesome. Thank you so much for that. I'll just put out to everyone as well that there's a Q& A box down at the bottom of the page.
so if you put any questions that you have for, Rochelle or Nicole throughout the session, just put them in there and then at the end of the session, we'll, put those to them as well.Okay, cool. I've got a line of questions to go through, um, so I'll kick that off and whoever wants to answer can, can, um, can go for it.
so the first question is, what challenges did you face in student tracking before using Orah, and then how has that,changed since?
Rochelle Karakey: Okay, I can start. so Phillips Exeter, is a large campus, over 600 acres, and the kids were having to do a whole lot of walking in the past, because it was a physical form that we had, and they would pick it up from wherever, then they would have to get their advisor to sign it, maybe their dorm supervisor to sign it, and if they were missing classes, they would have to get, their teachers to sign it, then they'd walk back to the Dean of Students and drop it off, and get it, wait for it to get approved, and and that approval could be waiting for a host to send in an email or send over a fax, waiting for a parent to, a parent had to go into the parent portal and fill out the exact same information that was on the physical form and then give approval for it.
And then if they were missing classes, they had to fill out yet another form. through form site where the deans would give approval. and so all of that. And then they would eventually go back to dean of students, pick up the physical form. It was a duplicate and take one of the copies and post it up on their bulletin board in their house, in their dorm room, dorm building.
and so that was, A challenge to just do all that and keep track of it and it was very tedious and took a lot of full time attendance specialist plus additional time from like two or three other people, um, based on the time, like Fridays, for example, whenever it was trying to go out of town, we have about 1100 students and 800.
boarding students of the 1100. So there's thousands of passes that we process. Well, I think we've processed probably five or six thousand just since September. So it's a lot of, a lot of effort. So that was our challenge.
Nicole Jules: Well, we don't have that many kids, but we were facing some similar things. Um, I kind of transitioned us from a physical form a few years ago to just like a Google form.
and so that. Changed the amount of it got our kids actually filling out the form in the right way. Just not having to do that, those extra steps. But I think for us, and I think a lot of places, we're a day school. And so coming out of COVID, it was, they had gotten used to for that. It's funny how patterns change so quickly, but, just a little bit more flexibility and kind of attendance during that time.
And so, um, yeah. Actually, I had a student ask me this morning, why did, why did we, it seemed like we made some big changes and it was like, well, it really wasn't that we made changes, we just made you all aware of what the policy was and then actually held you to it. And so just doing that in one year's time, we went from.
Probably in a semester, 226 of our 400 kids would've been in process to that dropping to less than a hundred. And so that was huge for us, in comparing two springs. and then this year it was like, okay, how can we cut that even more and just be. A little bit more, timely in our responses. it's just me and one other person, our admin assistant, she does the day to day and I do kind of over time.
And so it was literally adding 10 to 15 extra hours a week, just trying to run reports in Blackbaud. Anybody who has Blackbaud knows that you have to run five reports to get the one thing that you need. And it, that changed, that's changed drastically because I can literally, I have the app on my phone.
As soon as I get an email, I can put something in and it just makes it a lot easier.
Tiago Penteado: That's awesome. Do you maybe, maybe talk a little bit to the, how the process of tracking students changed since, bringing on, Orah, with Blackbaud.
Nicole Jules: sure. Um, anyone who works at a school knows that kids come in, our school day just ended, and I have some phones that have to be picked up, so, um, I think for us, it was making sure that, our faculty, one, were taking attendance.
Appropriately, and so the big push for that was adding the Google Chrome extension changed everything. They didn't have to log into Orah at the beginning, I mean, into Blackbaud at the beginning of every class period, which was always the rub. and it being able to send alerts. To the teachers within 10 minutes of the start of class.
So that helped tremendously. And then also us adding the kiosks. we added iPads to our high school office, middle school office and our health room, and just being able to have kids sign in with, for us, we use their lunch code as their pin, just made it a lot easier. We weren't having to keep track of.
Clipboards and making sure kids actually fill them out and following behind them. it just made it a lot easier. And so it also gives us numbers when teachers are like, Oh, so many kids are missing class. And we can go back and say, well, actually, no, that's not the case. to have the easy access to that information has helped a lot.
Tiago Penteado: yeah, and Rochelle, is there anything maybe from your end, I know you got only recently brought on Blackbaud.
Rochelle Karakey: What was the question again? Sorry.
Tiago Penteado: So is there anything about the way that you, I guess the process for tracking students has evolved since, bringing on, integrating Orah with Blackbaud?
Rochelle Karakey: Yeah, so the, so we use Blackbaud now for attendance, because we just went live with it, but what we do from the integration point of view is that we have passes set up That, that impacts the attendance in Blackbaud. So if a student is in the health center, and they're unwell, and they're not going to make it in time for the dorm check in at night, then the health center will create a pass, and that pass will then, excuse them from any classes that they're in during the time from that to the next morning, and also will indicate to the dorm supervisor that they're not expected to be in check in.
so that. They know where they are. So we use that pass. Then we have a couple other passes where the dean of students, if they approve that pass, then that indicates that the student has been given permission to miss classes. Maybe they're going to college visit or they're, at some other, Thing that's not health related, but the dean of students has approved through a petition, then we will ask the student to do that particular pass.
And if they do, then Orah is, coded to be able to, to send over an excused absence.
So that's been super helpful to make sure that our, because it does it ahead of time. So then, because we approve the passes ahead of time. So then when the class starts and the teacher opens up Blackbaud, they see immediately that they have an approved Dean of Students pass or an approved health center pass.
And so they don't mark them absent. and then cause problems down the line. So that's how we're using. Orah and Blackbaud together for the attendance part of it.
Tiago Penteado: That's awesome. It's very interesting always to hear the different ways that schools use it, which is the reason for this kind of forum as well.
Rochelle Karakey: Yeah.
Tiago Penteado: That's really cool. I guess to jump, jump questions a little bit. So next question is that what insights from Orah have been the most valuable in your day to day operations, um, open floor?
Nicole Jules: I'll say for us, it's definitely cut down on the number of, classes that didn't have attendance taken because we could see, like, faculty know now that we can see a lot easier, what attendance hasn't been taken.
So that's one. and then also, It just, it got us away from the anecdotal, like, this kid has missed a lot of class to, maybe they just haven't talked a whole lot in class lately because they're, you've marked them present. So, are we marking them present and they're not there? Or are they there and they're just not as active in class?
And so that's helped us navigate some conversations with teachers, to be thinking in other ways other than they're just not. In attendance. so that's where we are. We're still really early on, in this, what, maybe, month three. so we're still figuring those things out. I think I'll probably have a better idea of what insights we get by the time second semester starts just to kind of get through this one.
But our faculty feel the kids have now started getting those alerts. That's a big one. The alerts are huge. that I don't have to send out myself for every time a kid hits a threshold. And so having the alerts, has been huge because that gets them having conversations with their faculty, their teachers, and I hear that's the part.
Oh, Susie came and talked to me about missing three classes. and it was a good conversation. And so the fact that it's. Encouraging those conversations is huge for us because that's just the type of school that we are.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, that's awesome.
Rochelle Karakey: Um, I think for us, several things. The, one simple thing is that when you drill into a student's profile, you have the records tab that shows everything that's ever happened.
And so, like, if, a student is not, not, uh, Present during the check in. A dean, whoever the dean on duty is, can go and look to see what's happening with that student. Are they on the pass? Did the pass finish? What were, and the new feature that just got added, the actual start and end times, is super helpful as well.
so they, the deans very much like that. Campus safety and others like to be able to go to the student's schedule and anticipate how many people are gonna be off campus either tomorrow or for the whole weekend. like we had a family weekend recently and everybody was gone. But campus safety loved being able to tell day by day how many students they anticipated being on campus.
I would imagine the dining hall might appreciate that as well, and, and then, And then just the dashboards. We use the dashboards to understand, just looking backwards, how many passes, what kind of passes, are there some passes, because we have probably more passes than we need, but, what passes maybe aren't being used that we need to re evaluate.
We tried to make it really easy on the students, and so we'll have the exact same pass replicated, but one is with a host, and one is without a host. Because we didn't want them, we didn't want to make it optional and they really should have put in a host, but they didn't. And then we're chasing them down, trying to make them put the host in.
So that's an example of having a lot of passes cause we do with host and without host, but, so that's all I have regarding that.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah. Interesting. Maybe, maybe to follow up on that and this may or may not be relevant, but how do you
keep track of students like when they go off campus? and, or like across different campuses, do you have like different passes for those campuses? Yeah,
Rochelle Karakey: we just have the one campus, but we have a variety of passes.
So if, they're allowed to, because it's a boarding school, they're allowed to, go within about a two plus mile radius without necessarily telling everybody, anybody. They don't need approvals. But then this year we thought it sure would be nice to. If we just knew that they were, a mile away or biking to the ocean or whatever.
So we created a pass that gets automatically scheduled. so nobody has to, approve it. And then they activate it when they walk off campus. It's just to let us know that they're not on campus, that they're in the larger, allowed radius. So we have that. And then, if they're just taking a day trip,then they don't need a host, right?
So we'll have a day trip pass because maybe they're just going to Boston for the day and they're walking to the train station, getting on the train and going into Boston, and they don't have to have a host. So then we don't require a host on that one. And then the health center has a whole sorts, a lot of passes that they use.
and then we have these missing required appointments or missing classes, ones where petitions are required. So when they fill out that pass, then the attendance or the person that manages Orah, knows to go look for a petition and make sure to see whether or not it's been approved before they continue in the process.
and then just like we have the Dean's pass. I'm sorry, we have the day pass. We also have the pass for off campus when they're literally going away and they need to have a host for whatever reason, or maybe they don't. So we have those differentiation. And then the other two that are very. unique to us maybe, or maybe not, is that we, if someone's on a leave, let's, they're on a medical leave, or a personal leave, and they're just not, at school for the whole semester, we don't take them out of Blackbaud, we don't take them out of Orah, but we want them to, we want the world to know that they're on leave, so not to look for them.
So we'll put them on a leave pass, or if there's another Situation where we don't want to say exactly why they're not around, but because it was a Dean situation, we have another pass for that. Just to let people know in general, not to look for them, but they're off campus and we know they're off campus and that's okay.
Nicole Jules: Yeah, I think.similarly, we have a bunch of paces too, because our middle school also uses it. So there's some ways that we want to be able to filter, certain passes based off of who they are. So, um, some of them are the same no matter what, but then we also have, We, our high school kids can go off campus, like in the city.
So like, well, within a two, three block radius of our school, and we're all in one big building. So, um, we don't really need ones for different buildings, but if they want to go off campus to Panera or one of the other restaurants in town, we right now ask them to sign out in the office and it's typically during their free period.
So we have a free period pass. And then of course, excused absences versus non excused absences, the same thing with tardies and that sort of thing. we have those that are core for us because we're a day school, so usually when they leave us, they're going home or with the parents somewhere, so we don't have to keep track of everything.
but we do for the day to day stuff we do.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, that's awesome. And maybe for everyone here as well, could you maybe walk through what, like checking, do you guys use kiosks or the tap in the NFC tiles or is it roll checks completely? Like, how, what's your setup?
Nicole Jules: we do. Kiosks in our high school, middle school offices and in the health room, as far as when they go off campus, when they use the kiosk, so they sign out the kiosk and then they go and then they sign back in when they come back.
Same thing if they have an appointment during the day, I think. we, this will be the first year that they will all have to wear, name tags. They actually will get them next week. And so there, there is a conversation of whether we can, the next iteration of that is to get some sort of tap. Pass kind of thing.
So
Rochelle Karakey: yeah, because we're a campus, large campus, lots of buildings, we don't really use Orah at this point to track location. It would be really tricky. So we mostly use it just to do the passes for leaving campus. And, then also like I talked about the health center passes for indicating that someone's in the health center, they're in the hospital, or maybe they're a day student and they've stayed home, and so that pass them will impact the, attendance of Blackbaud.
So we're currently not using it for, Locations, but maybe the hope would be someday in the future, it would be ideal, but I still, it's a big project to think about doing that.
Kurt Meyer: one thing I wanted to mention that we're working on to make passes a little bit more flexible is being able to have multiple active passes at a time, because at the moment, as you will all know, one of the,limitations is that a student can only have one active pass. So they would have to end that to start a new one. and that creates conflicts, especially for the health center situation. they might. be a boarding student and have a pass for the boarding side, but they're still coming to the day school and they end up in the health center and then that pass overrides the other one.
And that's been a bit of a issue that we're trying to, that we're working on at the moment. So students can have multiple passes and the other one is not requiring a location. So like you mentioned, Rochelle, if you're only using passes and you're not using Orah for locations yet, then you could use passes more flexibly without having to import a location.
It's another thing that we're working on.
And it's happening.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, awesome.that's great. I'll probably, I'll skip ahead, maybe to, a question, maybe a bit more around communication. So maybe for you guys, how has, since you brought on Orah, how has Orah improved communication, between staff, students, and parents at your school? Has it improved or?
Is it not? yeah, maybe talk to that a little bit.
Rochelle Karakey: Yeah, we used to have to produce a lot of reports and send them out, so that people would know who, um, like, so the health center people would know what the, the advisor information is or the contact information is for students, but those nurses can just log into, Orah and see all the information right now.
So that's helpful. The same thing with, the, The campus safety because sometimes they needed to know contact information or advisor information. They just go on to Orah to find it now, so that's helpful. we have 26 dorms and there was 26 different ways to do nightly check in. And so now it's consistent.
and everybody's doing it the same way. So the dean who's on duty each every night, there's a specific person who's a dean on duty. They can go into Orah and to see across the board in the aggregate What's happening with across the versus 26 different google sheets or something like that or some of them were on paper and even so that's been super helpful for everybody to have a just like a bird's eye view of what's going on.
Um,what else i'm looking at my notes. You Yeah. Oh, and the fact that the students and the parents can go onto their app and find out what the status is of a pass, and not have to contact the Dean of Students and ask them, what's going on? What's, they can look on at any time and realize, oh, it's the hostess, the person who's the holdup, because they haven't given the approval.
Or the student can look on and say, oh, my mom or my dad hasn't endorsed the pass yet. That's the status. And then they don't have to bug the Dean of Students office with that. So that's been helpful.
Nicole Jules: I would say ours has been mainly internal. Just, getting the reminders and that sort of thing to make sure they go talk to teachers instead of them coming to me. What am I supposed to do every single time? I think our next phase of rolling out will be looking at the passes. if they're, like, looking at, Can we change our planned absence process?
Because right now we've just adapted Orah to what we were already doing. where it's me or our admin assistant putting in the planned absences. like the next shift I think will be for students and parents to do some of that work. And I'm excited about that. I'm also, I'm a little less excited about the rollout to parents and, students because I'm nervous that my smoothest part of this was to faculty.
but just thinking about as. I am not the IT person at my school. I'm like I said, the assistant head, which for us is one of the assistant principals in the high school and, in our middle school, we are the two, we have the middle school version of me and we're the two people that are the Orah people in the building.
And so I know with additional access becomes, um, more, accounts. Issues. And so thinking about how we can do that in the right way is,top of mind for me.
Tiago Penteado: That's awesome. That's, that's something as well. Like we, we may be able to pair you up with someone, some other customer who's done the rollout for,their experience of how it went as well and what to look out for.
yeah, that's really cool. I'll just make a quick call out for anyone who's watching as well, just to, if you've got any questions, just put them in the Q& A. I'll get to the one question that is there at the end of this section, which is not far away. So just for the last question to you guys from me is, if you could maybe share one piece of advice for schools that are currently struggling to keep track of the students.
from your perspective, what would you, what would it be?
Nicole Jules: I would say probably know, have a process in place before and kind of make students aware of it before the rollout. I think that's, probably what helped us is that we were already having conversations about hey, you need to communicate this way. And so this was just another tool added to that.
that, that would be one. And then the other one do not start it as school is starting. We did. That was probably, not the best timing. It ended up working out, but,ease your way in into it because we were learning a lot of things on the fly. and fortunately they, it worked out, but, like thinking about how you're going to tell faculty, I used a ton of the videos that Orah puts up on their website.
I was just, I just kept sending out videos of like how, this is how this works, and this is how this works, and I think that helped a ton.
Rochelle Karakey: I've mostly been talking about our regular session, which is the September through May, but we also run a summer school for five weeks in July that has like 800 students to it, so they definitely use Orah on a regular basis. And The thing that helped the most was when we were, talking about how they do things, their current state, and what Orah could do for them, is that they had a willingness to change their policy.
And I think that's helpful because, the way they were doing it, It was very time consuming on their part. It was needed at the time based on the current scenario, but, they were having to, because the kids were younger, there's middle school kids that come from all over that stay there for five weeks.
So there's a lot more responsibilities that the admin have over the younger children. And, so when a host, they were, they were having to make sure the host was. Um, you know, going to actually pick them up, they need to check on their age, if they were going to get into an Uber or a taxi, if they were going to get onto an Amtrak, they were doing a lot of, transportation checking and stuff.
And when we realized that we could put the onus on the parent by saying, you know, by having the student, um, Um, That's the other thing. We don't let parents issue passes. We make, at least in our regular session, we make the students do it because otherwise sometimes the parents would do it and the student was like, yeah, I'm not going to do that.
And then it was a lot of effort, for no reason. So that was one thing we learned really quickly. But, back to summer school, they would,by having the student, Request the pass and then having the host approve it and then the and the parent to prove it in that order Then that just released the summer school admin people from all of that responsibility And it was huge, huge amount of savings of time.
They weren't chasing people You know it they didn't even pay attention. Neither school pays attention to the pass Until all the endorsements have happened, and then they look at it and decide what to do with it. And so before that, they were putting a lot of energy and time into helping the process go through, and now they don't.
being willing to understand how the software is designed, and then being willing to change your processes and your thinking in order to use the software to its best, was huge for everybody.
Tiago Penteado: That's incredible. no, thank you both for answering all those questions. We really appreciate your time today. I'm going to go through a few questions from the Q& A, in the Q& A at the moment. so also if you're watching again, reminder that's down the bottom there, if you have any questions for Rochelle or Nicole.
the first question here is from Kurt Robinson. I think this is probably more directed to you, Kurt Meyer. It's, is it possible to use an ID card to check in and out in a VS? How does that work, or what equipment is needed? this might be interesting to you too, Nicole, as you mentioned. Yeah, I could speak to that.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, currently it's not possible. Unfortunately, it's something that a few schools have asked for.we've experimented with ID cards, but it's really something that you need to be, really focused on and have the right resourcing to ensure that it works properly. so we haven't undergone that development work yet, and we're mainly just focused on the underlying data around attendance and making sure that we can reconcile them and ensure the records properly before moving on to any hardware components. Yeah, so that's where we're at the moment, but we'd love to touch base when we are ready to work on ID cards.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, that's awesome. And I think that's one of the good thing is also to keep those, if you have those processes in school that you're looking to implement, keep them, keep us aware of them as well, because the more people that come forward and say that's something they want help can help us prioritize as well.
and then I got a question here from Art Bryman as well. He says, And I think this may be more for Rochelle and Nicole,what is the parent communication process like, and how is it going for you guys? So I guess, how do you, how have you communicated Orah to your, parents? And I know it might be a bit different, I think, and I'm interpreting the question right.
yeah, so anyway, talk us through your parent communication processes.
Nicole Jules: Say for us, right now, because they're not really having to do a lot with passes that it was really something that we just put in the newsletter that we have a weekly newsletter that goes out and just said, Hey, that we're using this. and then there are opportunities later to get more parents involved in the process, but that's the extent of it.
because there's really nothing for them to do. It's just an additional tool for us internally right now. I think listening to Rochelle talk about giving the students the onus on creating the passes that's similar to what we're talking about with our planned absence form. Rochelle, I might be reaching out to you a little bit more as we're thinking about that with kids, like, how to roll that piece out because even now, we still require a parent email.
As part of the other process of looking at how that works.
You're muted. Oops. I'm,
Rochelle Karakey: I'm muted because I have a cat that's bothering me. Um, um, so parent communication, what we do is we have, in BlackBaud on the parent resource board, we, have a link and then they click onto it and explains all of our rules and procedures and policies to the parents for, For Orah, and it even gives them the QR codes that they can use to be able to download the app.
And they're only, the only thing they really have to do is two things. One, create an account in Orah, and then pay attention to their emails and either approve or deny the pass, the pass request. So there's not a whole lot that we do with Orah and parents other than those two things. And it's key, the key is that, and we've told these, is that the parents, at least one parent has to be connected to Orah before the pass request is made.
Otherwise, if the pass request is made and no parent, then it's just dead and you have to start all over again.
Tiago Penteado: That's a good call out. I'd say as well, parent communication, even just general school communication piece has been something that over the last few years we've noticed. It's been, it's obviously a thing that schools deal with a lot. So maybe for Kurt, do you want to give a brief overview of what we, what Orah can do for parent communication?
Maybe to try and answer Art's question from all angles.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah.so for classes, there's two options for parents. They could have the, the family app, like what Rochelle was describing, but there's also A public form that the parent can use where they don't need a username and password. we'll send them a one time password to their email, and then they'll put in that code and then they'll give them access to their own students to submit a pass.
and it really depends, which makes more sense because the family app gives the parent, the records that they can look back and they can check status quite easily. And once they have the app, it's pretty easy. Definitely an easy option. But if you're still getting parents onboarded and you just want like a smooth transition or kind of a safety net, then the parent, public form is a good option as well.
just to give them something easy. if you can use a Google form, then you'd be able to use that to submit a pass and there's a bit more security as well. So yeah, those are two options for parents.
Tiago Penteado: Very cool. I've got a few more questions here. So I've got one from Jamaica. so how do you help, sorry, how do you help keeping students from just ignoring submitting a pass and just departing campus?
And then additionally in their return, are there any suggestions or tips on swiping back in on the NFC checkpoint to clear the pass when they return to campus?so maybe Rochelle, this might be a question for you.
Rochelle Karakey: Yeah, we haven't implemented NFC tiles yet. Like I said before, just because the campus is, that's a lot of entry points.
so we just. We've had a difficulty over the last year or so to get students to, activate their passes and end passes. And it's just been a matter of training, just constantly emailing them. And I think the light of the latest thing is if they don't Activate or end their pass on time three times, then they get a point, an absence point, and our absence points, add up to what we call restrictions, which means they have to be in the dorm by 8 PM at night and they can't go away for the weekend.
So there's ramifications. So they've started to implement that recently. but there's a big, huge improvement over this time versus this time last year, as far as. doing the activation and ending of passes, as far as leaving school without a pass, I'm not in that loop, I'm in the IT department, so I don't know if that's happened but I know that would be a disciplinary action.
That would be a big deal. So they're allowed to go within that two, three mile radius without a problem. If they forget to do that pass that lets us know they're doing that's not a big deal. But if they get on a train and go to Boston without doing a pass, that's a whole different game. So,anyway.
Tiago Penteado: That's cool. I think, thanks for that. Is it, did anyone else have anything to add to that?
Nicole Jules: for us, it would be, it would go under kind of our disciplinary thing too, is like you're supposed to sign out, and then sign back in. And so if you don't, then that goes into usually the first time's a warning.
The second time is our disciplinary board. And it's what I tell kids is about safety. We are required to know where you are. We're responsible for you from eight to three. So in that time, you have to, this is part of it. So if you don't want to lose your off campus privileges, if you don't want to lose other things, then the least you can do is sign in and sign out.
Tiago Penteado: That's cool.
Kurt Meyer: just add to that, that second part of the question, tips on swiping back in on the NFC checkpoint to clear the pass.so you could, you can set up reminders on the pass, within the pass settings as well. So if the pass becomes late, then you can notify the student that it's overdue and that can be a little prompt as well to remind them to activate their pass.
Rochelle Karakey: We definitely have reminders set up. To the point of being obnoxious, as many reminders as we sent out.
Tiago Penteado: cool, I got a question here from Rachel as well. do your, either of your schools have international students? And if so, how do you, how do your international parents approve day off passes considering time zones?
Rochelle Karakey: Day of passes.
Tiago Penteado: So I assume that means, so that if a student, if an international parent is in a different time zone, but it's a day of pass. So within the next 24 hours, do you have any?
Rochelle Karakey: We have a significant international population. I don't have the policies memorized in my head, but I don't think we allow day of passes.
so I think, I think they have to be in by, noon for the next day. Okay. That kind of thing that there's a, there may be an emergency thing, but in general, they can't show up at nine in the morning and say, I want to leave at 10.if they do, and everybody approves it, and it's an emergency or something that will, but I think for the most part, our policies prevent that.
Nicole Jules: Yeah, and we're a day school, so if they're out, if it's a day of, typically it's going to be an email or a note from a parent. for our international students, they have a host family, so it's the same deal as the host family would notify us.
Tiago Penteado: Makes sense. great. And then I've got a question from Art.
He says, for Rochelle, how was, or accepted by the students, was there any pushback? And if so, how do you overcome the pushback? our students felt that their privacy was being jeopardized.
Rochelle Karakey: by and large, it was very much, accepted and appreciated and thanked for because of the fact that it was so easy and they weren't having to walk all over campus.
There was, a misconception at one point in time that we were tracking their, location from where they're going, place to place, but we just cleared that up and explained that we weren't, and then we haven't heard anything since then. So just, education, as to what it is and what it isn't.
Tiago Penteado: Actually, on that too, I think Nicole, you mentioned something about, I was talking to you the other day and you mentioned something about a student coming back to you in regards to the attendance alerts and coming up to you with the, you want to talk to that a little bit?
Nicole Jules: yeah. our kids were like, initially when the first alert, cause we'd, I didn't.
Intentionally didn't say anything when we first set up the alerts because I wanted to see how well they were paying attention. and so then when after about a week, a couple of kids were like, so we got this email and we don't. And I was like, did you read the entire thing? Because there's another box.
That is in the alert and they're like, no. And so I sat here and watched them read it. And then they were like, oh, so, I mean, they're teenagers. So they did something new and they want you to tell them what it is before actually reading. but for us, once we said that, and then I went into one of our assemblies right after that, and just to explain what it was and they were fine.
our school is pretty open. And If we're putting something in, they trust us enough to be like, okay, you're not trying to really crack down on where we go and when we go. It's just, you want to know where we are. And they've been pretty trusting about that. And then explaining what it means when it says location.
off ground means you're off campus.just telling them what those mean. And once they knew what that meant, they were fine.
Tiago Penteado: That's awesome. Um, so communication and time seems like the theme.that's really cool. That's all the questions I've got in the Q& A and all the questions I have. was there anything anyone wanted to say to kind of sign off?
Nicole Jules: No. One thing for us that was helpful in the summer is thatyou all at Orah allowed us to play around with it with some data from last year's, we use last year's seniors as our test group and that was helpful for us to see what that layout would look like. And that was a big, deciding factor for us being able to use information that wasn't with our current students.
because there was some concern about the syncing and all the information. And being able to use students that were leaving, just to see what the layout looked like was really, was really good.
Tiago Penteado: Awesome.I thank, thank you both very much for joining us today. really appreciate your time and thank you to everyone who joined the webinar as well to listen in.
I'll, send out the recording after this. so you guys watch it back if you'd like to as well.
Rochelle Karakey: thanks.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. And, I'll leave you back to your Wednesday.
Rochelle Karakey: All right. Thank you very much, everyone.
Tiago Penteado: Thanks so much, Rochelle. Thanks Nicole. Good
Rochelle Karakey: to see you. Bye.
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