Name: From 32 Minutes to 1: How Private School Leaders Are Rethinking Student Safety Systems
Uploaded: 2026-05-13T18:31:44.055Z
Duration: 58 min 8 s
Description: From 32 Minutes to 1: How Private School Leaders Are Rethinking Student Safety Systems

Transcript for "From 32 Minutes to 1: How Private School Leaders Are Rethinking Student Safety Systems": Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for today's session from thirty two minutes to one, how private school leaders are rethinking student safety systems. We are so pleased to bring you today's presentation in partnership with Aura. A few callouts as everyone gets settled. The webinar audio will be broadcast through your computer speakers, so hopefully you can all hear me. As always, you will receive the recording to today's presentation about twenty four hours after the fact. If you need captions, you can hover over the stage and click the cc button on the bottom of the screen to turn your captions on and off. If you encounter any audio or technical issues, such such as your slides freezing, usually a quick refresh of your browser is the best way to get it working again. And worst case scenario, you can leave and log in again. Please click on q and a on the top right to submit any questions that you might have. I do wanna call out that we have a very full agenda. I'm sure you might have questions for our panelists, for the Blackbaud team, or potentially the Aura team, and we encourage you to put those questions in there. Time dependent, we may or may not be able to address them today, but know that we will make sure to pass them along for follow-up. Next to q and a, you'll also see the docs area, and we have a lot of great resources from both the Aura team as well as the Black bond team, and I strongly encourage you to give those a look as well. There are links and resources that you can access both during today's presentation and save for future reference. You can adjust your settings by using the cogwheel at the bottom of the event space. So just a little road map of where we're gonna go today. We're gonna start off with some brief introductions and housekeeping, and then I'll hand it over to Matt, and he will walk us through, the research from the state of the independent school safety. We'll then have a brief panel with two of our school leaders, and then we'll hand it over for a really high level brief solution overview of both Blackbaud, Aura, and how we work together, and then we'll wrap it up with some announcements. I will also be opening a poll periodically if you'd like to raise your hand for our team to follow-up with you in short order. You'll see them in just a bit, but we are so appreciative of Tyler Cabot and Chris Davies from Holderness School and Episcopal High School respectively for joining us for today's panel portion. We are really excited for them to share their thoughts and perspective with you. You'll also hear from Matt Varley, the CEO of Aura, Paul Oregon, cofounder of Aura, and Will Redway, our resident k 12 expert who has over twenty years supporting private and independent schools representing Blackbaud. If you happen to be new to us, I wanted to just give a quick level set. Blackbaud has more than forty years of experience supporting private and independent k through 12 schools. We offer a total solution that connects every facet of your school. We can help you connect enrollment and academics with your business office and development, all with a robust single sign on family portal. This ensures that everyone has the tools and information they need to drive student success. We are an open API first total solution with a broad partner network, as shown by our friends from Aura today for added value. I want to briefly frame what we mean when we talk about Blackbaud's total school solution because it can be misunderstood. We are not about forcing every office onto one system or asking schools to replace everything at once. For us, a total school means connecting the offices that matter most to your school's mission and sustainability using shared data, role based access, and systems built for the specific work that each team does. Some schools start with advancement, some with business office, some move one or more, etcetera. But today, we're really gonna focus on the key relationship between Blackbaud and Aura. One more quick plug before I hand it over to Matt. Wanted to make sure that everyone here knew that we are so excited for the return of our k twelve user conference, affectionately referred to as the UC. Blackbaud's k twelve user conference is our in person event built specifically for private and independent schools. It brings school leaders and practitioners together for practical learning, peer stories, hands on product sessions, and direct access to Blackbaud experts. Please be sure to check out the session catalog on our website for more details, and we hope to see you there. Without further ado, I'm very pleased to welcome Matt Barley to the stage, and Matt's gonna walk us through some of the research. Thanks Thanks so much, Thanks, Elizabeth, and welcome, everyone. Matt. Thanks for for joining us. I'm Matt Volley, CEO at Aura. And just before I move on to the next next slide, looking forward to UC later this year in Boston. Can't wait. So excited today to bring some of the research that we conducted at Oura around the state of independent school safety. And before we jump into the actual data itself, I just wanted to walk through some of the methodology and the process that we went through to arrive at, the research and the reports. So we set out to understand how independent schools are actually managing safety today, not how we think they should and and not what the policy says, but what actually happens in practice. We're looking at three specific gaps. You know, in preparation, are they ready? In communication, do they have the right information to act when ready? And then gaps in accountability, so is anyone actually measuring what safety systems are doing and how they're working? The findings across the report were super interesting, and again, looking forward to sharing those today. Just quickly, the research was conducted in partnership with ATLAS, so the Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools, and we had an external agency called True North, conduct the research, external to us to ensure that there wasn't any any bias, and we got that full, you know, view of the school safety report. We had 85 responses, from US independent schools across safety leaders, operation leaders, and also IT managers, and the coverage is comprehensive, you know, across leadership, governance, decision making, attendance, and daily accountability. So it wasn't a narrow slice in terms of what we covered here and gave us a really great picture, right from the people that are making decisions around safety to what they're seeing on a daily basis. So let's jump in. The first key takeaway that we found was, you know, incidents aren't theoretical, and this is not going to come as any surprise to anyone on this call today. Seventy six percent, so three in four schools experienced a safety incident in the last twelve months, More than half around a medical emergency, a third dealt with severe weather, and then one in five experiencing an unauthorised campus access or full lockdown at the most severe end. So safety isn't an edge case, it's a normal operating environment for the independent schools that completed this survey, and I sort of find this interesting to frame it in this way because sometimes safety can be an abstract conversation or something that, you know, we will get to that, but it is real. It's something that, you know, schools are dealing with on a daily basis, and the question really leads to will we be ready if and if and when something occurs? One of the key takeaways was the emergency response is generally slow. So only 21% of schools can confirm the safety status of every student in under four minutes during an emergency. So when something occurs, that time from lockdown or emergency commencement to actually confirming where the students are, was long. So 42% take longer than six minutes, and one in four schools either don't measure drill performance or aren't sure whether they actually do. And what we found was the schools that run drills regularly, you know, was high. You know, it was 93%. So the actual running of the drills is very, relevant and runs regularly, but the drills that weren't being measured, timed, improved, you can practice all you want, but if they're not being measured, they're not being improved. And then that time to take to safety from drill performance was measurable when people were actually measuring the drill performance. Only 41% of schools are highly confident they know who is on campus at any given moment, and this is one of the things that we find quite frequently. So, you know, all the different variations of whether they're on campus, off campus, missed class, or, you know, maybe in the bathroom, or sort of somewhere specifically, you know, there was only 41% leaving a huge gap throughout the day of knowing where those students are. So moving down here. So sorry. On the next slide here. So when a student was absent without an explanation, so the the welfare checks were were hit and miss. So when there was an unexcused absent, there was 44% that couldn't rely on confirming that missing student is safe within an hour. So it was taking the office administration team quite a long time to track down that student, their whereabouts. And, you know, looking at the pie chart, only 56% can say that they consistently, can confirm absent students are safe, super important in those times of emergencies where seconds and minutes matter. And this is one of the clearest gaps in the research. The technology obviously exists to automate this, but most schools haven't connected their attendance workflows to a structured welfare check process to ensure that they're accounting for those students in real time. So school safety decisions don't happen in isolation. There's obviously, you know, board and leadership oversight, regulatory compliance requirements, and budget and resource constraints, but probably one of the most interesting takeaways was this balancing safety with school culture, and this is just a very school by school specific topic, is how big brother and how much do they want to track and impose knowing the location of students in real time versus being more free range and how that leads to an end outcome of emergency readiness. One of the key outcomes here, again, was when IT were involved in the process, safety outcomes were improved. You know, so, you know, having the IT team involved, you know, usually bought in, at the end of these processes or they're thrown a tool that they need to implement, but having a seat at the table upfront, really improved the effectiveness of the safety decisions in real time tracking. And then without, you know, the technology involvement, the safety governance is siloed, so, you know, disjointed systems that are not talking together, for instance, between Aura and Blackbaud, that two way sync of writing back things into Blackbaud, which is that source of truth across the school, and making sure that these systems are talking, and not only safety governance but data is not siloed across these platforms. So I know we're short on time, we've got a packed agenda, but, next slide we'll have a download of the school safety report where you can see all of that data, and much more from what we we gathered. You know, we're we're suggesting, like, an order of the safety tech as well. So, you know, having a look across platforms, having a look at the gaps, the report outlines some of those gaps that, can be ordered as well, and then convening a meeting with key stakeholders to assess those blind spots on where in the campus you may have visibility or not, and then how you could actually plug that with either existing or new systems within your stack. That brings me to the final slide. Here's the QR code. I'm sure we'll be circulating a link as well post, this session as well, but if you capture that QR code now, you can download a digital version of the state of independent school safety report from ORAC. That brings me to the end, and I'll be passing back to Elizabeth. Thank you. Thanks, Matt. Just a reminder for our attendees, if there's questions that come to mind, you are, of course, welcome to put them into the q and a for us to keep an eye on. And I did wanna give a call out that there is a link to the report in the docs area, as well. So without further ado, we're gonna stop sharing the slides for just a little bit. And I am going to welcome to the stage our panelists today. I know Matt's gonna plan on staying on with me as well, in case there's some other areas to click into. So I see Tyler, and, we'll have Chris join us. There he is. Perfect. So briefly before we dive into the meat and potatoes, Tyler, why don't we have you just start briefly by introducing yourself, your role, and telling us a little bit about your school? Hello, everybody. My name is Tyler Cabot. I'm the dean of students at the Holderness School in Holderness, New Hampshire. I've been here for thirteen years and worked in the in the Student Life Office for the last nine in addition to coaching and teaching in the History department. Holderness is a is a nine through 12 co ed boarding school, about 300 students with 200 and almost 270 boarders and about thirty to forty day students. And Chris. And I'm Chris Davies. I'm the associate dean of students at Episcopal High School. This is my tenth year here, and I've been working in the dean's office for, I think, six years. And Episcopal, I think, probably the thing to know about us is that we are a 100% boarding, about 460 students, and we are ten minutes from, from Washington, DC. And so we have a lot of kids moving on and off campus all the time, which is sort of how we ended up, with Aura connecting with Blackbaud. Fantastic. And just to level set for everyone, obviously, both of these schools are boarding or boarding and day. Similar to Blackbaud, I know that Aura works with schools of all sorts of different configurations, landscapes, sizes. And later on, when we get to Paul's demo portion and Will's demo portion, we'll be able to speak to, some of the areas beyond, you know, some of the boarding elements that we'll, of course, touch on today. So let's kind of start from the beginning, and, Tyler, I'll have you kick us off. But if you think back a few years, how would you describe the school's approach to student safety and accountability on a typical day, not just during major incidents? Yeah. Definitely. Thank you. I would say Holderness has has been thinking about this in similarly to how Chris mentioned the proximity to DC for Holderness. We're, a largely snow sports school in the wintertime, so we have that's what got us to into Aura, what formerly was Boardingware, actually, nine years ago. So we've been with these guys for a while now, and we needed a a a way to better account who was just simply on campus and off campus as a boarding school. We have dorm check-in every single night, and we wanted to know have a better sense of how to get permissions from parents, students report where they're gonna be, and coaches explain or or teachers what if they take any student off campus. So at night, at at the at the evening check-in, we knew who was going to be sleeping in our dorms because that's our our first and foremost, our most important thing we have as as boarding school teachers is knowing who's on campus and off campus. And so that's how we really kind of got into into ORA and knowing when our kids were on campus, getting away from forms, calling in, to the school office, etcetera, and really finding a way to streamline that. From there, it's evolved into, having a better sense of the day to day through the attendance, attendance feature that Oura now has. That's this is our first year fully using that, and really kind of getting to what Matt mentioned on the welfare check. For us, we've automated a a notification if a student misses two classes in a row in the morning. We get a notification and and somebody from our dean's office, our administrative assistant, or our health center will go and and make sure that student is okay. And that's that from a from a student standpoint and a student safety standpoint has been a a big fundamental change from the day to day. So really, it's it's having a better sense of where our kids are on campus and off campus, but and now we've added a layer of having a better sense of where they are on campus at any given moment. Yeah. And I'll I'll I'll echo that, that I think the the safety piece for us, is and I think this is as Tyler said, I think this is as true for day schools as it is for boarding schools. It's just, you know, different number of hours in the day that you need to know where they are. But I think that in terms of the security piece for us, being able to know where every kid is allows us to do you know, when it comes to things like we're going to do the drill or we have to do a lockdown, knowing where everybody is is incredibly useful. So we're not doing the thing where, you know, you're you're running back into a building to see if maybe that kid is there and to, you know, did did this field trip actually go? And I think that what we what it's what has allowed us to feel comfortable doing is we recently rearranged our schedule, and this is definitely something I think that that day schools would use as well. We rearrange our academic schedule so that we could take advantage of being so close to DC. And so at this point, on any given school day, there's somewhere between three and maybe eight classes leaving in the middle of the day to spend two hours in DC doing something and then come back. And so the ability for a teacher who's on their way to a bus to be able to just glance and look and say, okay. I can do this three tap thing that signs out all of my kids, but also I see that this kid's in the health center, so I'm not waiting for this kid or trying to find this kid because it's so clear that this kid's on a pass. And it just obviously, in the big scary moments, that's super important, and I know that's some of the focus of today. But I also think sort of to what Elizabeth said, like, on the day to day, we have just constant updates of where kids are, which allows us even in that moment of, like, that kid didn't show up for this appointment. Where is he? Let's go, like, let's go get him, knowing that he was in his English class when the per when the teacher took attendance, and that's a bit that's visible to all of us who need to find kids. It's just allowed us to know where people are, to find them more quickly, and to just have a better sense of who's here and who's not at any given moment. Now when we were prepping for this, we also talked, you know, Yes. a lot about student autonomy and just being able to communicate with parents and how that ties into both your mission and your day to day functioning and all of that. So if you want to, Tyler, how about you, tell us a little bit about what's happening at Holderness in that area? Yeah. Sure. There's a there's a number of different functionalities with how you set up your your passes and your leaves in in Aura. But for Holderness, we try to put the onus on the student and so we have we we require our students to to to request the pass and then the parents are simply approving it or or declining it with so it's a a green or a red button via email literally and that's as simple as it gets and then we have the documentation if they're going to a to a friend's house then then the parent, of that friend becomes the host and the students put that in and and they're just that autonomy that it's up to the student and the responsibility of the student to prepare, ahead of time to get their pass in, so that we know who who's leaving on campus and and we don't find I don't in my office or anybody in my office gives the final approval until we have the host and the parent permission. More often than not, it's just simply the parent the parent, approving it. It's not usually because they are usually the host, but it it it nonetheless, it keeps a a good track record, for it as well as getting a sense of if there's a large number of students going to any one spot. We can do a follow-up from the Dean's office with those parents to make sure, make sure everyone is aware that there's a number of students heading to one place. I would also add that, it also gives us a feature to, in the case of an emergency, send a send a one time SMS text message to all parents. That's one of the one of the newer features that Aura came out with, their broadcast feature that we have this year, and we signed up strictly from from a from a state of emergency. We have the ability to text all of our parent body. That was the why we went to it. We use it from a day to day school life perspective, and texting groups of kids for various announcements, just goes to their SMS. But we we signed on for that simply so in the case of a a real emergency, we could easily text all of our parents. Hey. There was a question, in the chat that I'm sure we could have an entirely separate webinar on this, but Ethan was wondering if you're allowing students to access their phones during the day to update their passes. So we are, we are in the process of, changing our cell phone policy, which I think I don't know if we're I don't know if we're late, but, but it feels like everybody is making some adjustments. Thank you, Jonathan Haight. And so, basically, we are moving to a place where the kids won't have their phones, with them during the day next year. And that has caused no shortage of of conversations about how much we've come to depend on student cell phones. And I think one of the things that has come up for us is that, we really the kids are able to do this really quickly, and they can do it whenever they want. It's not a situation where you have to say, like, you need to get your leaves in between ten and twelve because that's when the dean is at the desk who's able to do that. They're able to put those leaves in whenever. So they can do it in the evening. They can do it they can also do it from a laptop as well as their phone. And so, basically, the way it works is the kids do it when they can. And then once we hit the deadline, we go through and sort of approve those leads. So, you know, every day, and then throughout the week, we have those pieces. The and then the other thing I would say too is, like Tyler, we're really pushing the kids to be able to handle this stuff themselves. And so we sometimes get requests from parents because Aura has functionality where parents can make requests. And, again, at a at a boarding school and we're a 100% boarding, so everybody's here. It's it's a lot easier for us to work with them than it is to work with their parents. I I don't know if there are parents on this call as well as school people, so maybe I should we should, be careful what I say. But I will say that we have found it much more successful to be able to say, just come to the office. This leave is a mess. You put it in six different ways wrong somehow again. Come back and talk to us. And so we don't have parents do that. So the kids do the whole thing, and they know the rules and how many people can go to a particular kid's house. And it also I think that's the other piece is we have been using Aura for for almost fifteen years, I think. And at this point, our kids are so, Oura fluent that they're able to do all of this stuff, and they figure it out quickly because, as you know, there is motivation for, kids to get off campus. So they wanna figure it out. They wanna be able to do it. And Aura is one of the only systems that we have that all anytime parents can't get into something. They've forgotten their password. They don't know what the login is. For some reason, that always comes to the dean of students office, so I have a good sense of what people struggle with. And I can tell you that, like, when we're trying to get people to sign up for parent teacher, conferences for family weekend, The number of people who can't get into the system is huge. But to Tyler's point, with the email part, our parents are able to just our parents are so it's so easy for them to do what they wanna do and to know where their kids are. And I guess that's the the one other piece I would say. Tyler mentioned the host. And if you haven't seen the the way Aura works on these leaves, for an overnight leave, obviously, this is boarding, but we also sometimes do it for a day, is the kids have to put in the host, like, who's with them. If you're going with your parents, you you can just pick your parents from the drop down. But if you're going with a family friend off campus to do something, they have to put in the the information about that friend about that family friend, and the thing kicks out and they get they get to see, yes, the parent approved it, and now I'm gonna approve it at the host, and then we can approve it. And I actually feel like that fits into our culture a little bit because as our parents are kinda spread out, they're not seeing each other every day at at pickup or whatever. And so they actually get that information, and they can reach out to that person and say, like, hey. I see my kid was gonna spend the night at your house. Why don't you tell me a little bit about what weekends look like at your house? And it sort of allows that communication, So we really appreciate that as well. Fantastic. I'm doing double duty because we are answering some questions, along the side. Melissa Paul will, speak to some of the elementary school functionality, including dismissals and other areas there. So rest assured that we are going to talk about the entire, landscape. Art was wondering for both Tyler and Chris if you switched from a different emergency system over to Oura just to provide some context there. We excuse me. We we were a a a pretty much a a Google form meets clipboards of names of each dorm in a bag in the head of school's administrative assistant's office. So we were we were pretty much analog to aura and that's that was there was nothing really in between. We do use another emergency alert system that connects with local law enforcement at Holderness, that's separate, from a from an from called InformaCast for a for a, for some of our emergency systems but in terms of the of the tracking of students we were clipboards with sheets of of of with each dorm's lists and now we're that plus aura just in case you never know what the case of the emergency might be. So we do still have sheets of paper with every dorm, on every dorm in the roster, but then we also use aura now. And I would say that we also have multiple sort of security solutions. One of them in preparation for the fact that, one in for the getting rid of kids' cell phones during the day. And so we have, like, loud speakers now that we can, like, use just since we can't count unnecessarily texting them. But we're asking them to carry their phones in their backpacks so that they can access that information, or we could do an emergency roll or something like that if necessary. But we didn't I don't I wouldn't say we switched from something to Aura other other than what Tyler said on paper. But when we switched, we really just used it for the boarding school side of things. We just used it for leaves on the weekend. But as the platform has sort of grown and matured, we also, as Tyler did, we recently switched to, Aura for classroom attendance. And as we've started using it and our community has gotten more familiar with it, we're using it for more and more things. And the more you use it, the more data you get, and we are just starting to tap into how easy it is to look at a kid on Aura and see, you know, disciplinary infractions, classroom attendance, how many leaves they're taking on the weekends, how often. And And that all gets pulled together in dashboards that you can look at. And so I think that's another advantage in terms of school safety is I think we've got a better picture of kids who are kinda slipping through the cracks, but it's just a little bit here and a little bit there, so it may not all get put together. This kind of allows you to see a better view of each individual kid. So if the concern for safety is not something external, if the con concern for safety is mental health, that I also think is has been useful for us. I would add another another un unclear at the beginning, but now beneficial piece that we use every week is it I can give our kitchen staff a pretty clear number of who's gonna be gone any given weekend, and they're very appreciative of that. It was something that we would never have a a super accurate number of until really Saturday night, and now we have a much earlier understanding of roughly how many kids are gonna be gone. That's really helpful to our kitchen staff from a planning for Saturday night dinner and Sunday brunch. And and weekend activities too. Like, what do we wanna do this weekend? Well, we can tell at a glance that there's gonna be a 100 kids gone this weekend. It's a big weekend. So, like, let's make sure we have stuff for the kids who are still here, but let's not plan one of the things that, like, everybody's gonna be heartbroken if they miss. Derek is wondering how the integration between Aura and Blackbaud is helping you the most. Well, the I mean, it it the Blackbaud the from Blackbaud to Aura is all of the data. Right? All of the basic demographic data of every student, but, really, it's the it's the it's the Aura to Blackbaud is our attendance. We we we we do all of our attendance every single day through Aura. And the the class list, the locations, the student information, all of that comes from Blackbaud as our SIS, but then our, our attendance from our teachers goes through Aura, and our leaves go through Aura. Yeah. And the I would say that the the syncing is super helpful because, a lot of what a lot of the information that we want in Aura already lives in Blackbaud for some you know, for our registrar and for our for our, admissions team and all that other stuff, fundraising. So that stuff's already all in there. So being able to pull it into Aura, like, the beginning of year setup for us is so much easier to just be able to make sure that it's right here. And we have some stuff that, you know, syncs from Blackbaud to Aura. You can go both ways. And so what what's really helpful for us is that, essentially, to some extent, a lot of our, behind the scenes colleagues, so the people who are working in IT, who are working in the registrar's office, who are not faculty, who interact primarily with kids, the people who who work with the information and our our other adult colleagues sorry. Our other colleagues, they are really comfortable with Blackbaud. And and as anybody knows, if you've tried to, like, do a software switch, like, they do not wanna go away from Blackbaud, but they're able to continue working in Blackbaud. And while from the dean's office perspective, every class list is in there, You can go through and check on individual classes. It's all synced. I also they have, Aura's, phone app is really, really good. And so a lot of times, I find myself getting information that I know is in Blackbaud, and I actually just grab the Aura app because I know that has the kids, like, sport in there because we've tagged them that way. And so I just think it gives multiple multiple entries, multiple paths, I would say, to the information. And in my experience, because our faculty is already using Aura for so much stuff, you know, we're doing checks every single day. Now we're doing attendance. They're really sort of fluid with it. And so I think the sync allows you to sort of give give people what they want while still having all your data, you know, backed up and secure and everything like that. Alright. I've been keeping an eye on the time, and I know that there's a there are a lot of questions naturally around how the solutions work together and and and, but I do wanna close this out with, a last question, and I'm gonna pose it to, Tyler, Chris, and Matt for thirty seconds or less. If you think about someone who's reevaluating their safety systems today, what is one piece of advice that you would share for them based on your experience? I don't know who wants to go first. I'll go first. I'll go first, and I'll say that what I would say the first thing to do is is to make sure that you've got a high quality digital attendance solution. And for us, that's been Aura. We've been happy with it. But I, like, I I really think that once you start using it, you're gonna find that you didn't have as good an idea of where kids were as you think you do. Like, you'll figure out that you were overestimating. We've had to make a change on our attendance policies because we realized that with Aura, we're getting so much more attendance done that we're actually finding out that more kids were missing stuff than we realized before because somebody forgot to send an email. And I think once you for us at least, once we started using it, it was like, oh, wait. And we can do this and we can do that. And so as we've built more, I feel like knowing really knowing how much you know where your kids are is really important. Expanding on that, I would say no matter how much it or when you when you hear these about these platforms and whatnot, it seems like everything can be automated and everything can be can be, kind of spit out to you, but when it still is a human inputs driven system, and your your to Chris's point, your your faculty need to take attendance, your students need to put in passes. We're not microchipping these kids, so we don't know exactly where they are. Right? It all is it's it's as as slick as it all is, we still need to make sure our inputs are that are human driven are happening, and if those inputs happen, it gives you a more efficient way of handling all of it. But if your culture of your school is are, like, struggling with the input to start with, you have to think about that first because this is only an add on. It's not gonna solve that. It will make it easier, but it's not gonna solve it. And last but not least, Matt, before I hand it over to Will and Paul, any, parting words of wisdom for us? Yeah. I'll be I'll be quick. But, yeah, I I think traditionally, you know, when I've spoken with schools, they see attendance as this thing that's done retroactively and as something that's stored away for the purposes of academic reporting. I think bringing that period attendance up as a signal to a student's location, then enabling not only safety, but also duty of care and spotting things that you would have normally, maybe glossed over is just really critical. So that linkage between attendance and location and it being one off signal that can drive that operational layer within a school. Awesome. Well, I know we could all sit here, and I'm sure our audience members would love to continue to hear from y'all. There is a poll open if you'd like to raise your hand to learn a little bit more from the team at Aura about their services and solutions and how they can work with you. Please feel free to answer that. Tyler, Chris, Matt, thank you so much. And without further ado, I'm gonna welcome, Will Redway, up to the stage so that he can go over, his overview, and then we'll hand the baton over to, Paul from Aura to talk about how all these pieces go together. So, Will, I'll hand it over to you. Thanks, Elizabeth. And so many thanks to Tyler and Chris and Matt. I'm Will Redway. I've spent half my, career working at schools, last one being at a boarding school, in Massachusetts where so many of these types of conversations were discussed, all the time. The second half of my career was spent talking to leadership teams about how to solve these problems. And, before I begin, I know Elizabeth already went over this slide. I think ultimately when we're trying to, satisfy the many, groups that are interested in what private schools do, the parents that go there, the teachers who work there, who also wear five different hats. I think as Tyler was going on there, I was thinking of my St. Mark's days as a development director, a tennis coach, a dorm head, you know, all of these different things. Ultimately you need a core system that everyone's logging into where they know this is the common place to find this, this information. And as Elizabeth was pointing to, we have all of these different systems, but just as importantly, we have a connection to our partners, that gives them the ability to come in and add that extra, pieces, you know, those pieces of information, you know, as we as people need them. So what I was going to do in an incredibly brief amount of time is sort of give you that foundational piece and divide it into a couple of thought processes here. First, I just want to sort of give you the sense of that when we built this, there was a couple of key views that we were thinking of. One is that I'm a parent, I'm a family member who might have multiple kids, one in the lower school, middle school, upper school, who might also be a board member, who might also be helping with something else. But the key is that when I log into the system for the very first time, much as Tyler, and Chris were speaking to, it's one database. It's got all the pieces that are in there. So when I log in the very first time, it knows who my kids are. It knows what teams they're on. It knows what dorms they're in. It knows what after school activities they've got, and everything that they've got is presented to them. And that when someone launches a system like this, and as Chris said, it never, no one ever really wants to change. But when you're now the modern launching of a system, isn't let me teach you how to use this. It's you as an institution saying, these are the important things we're going to share that the three, four, five, six awesome adults that are gonna be in your kid's life are gonna be there, and the promise is that you're going to keep them safe. And so part of that safety is regularly communicating with those people, coming to one place and seeing what the doormat has to say, seeing what the coach has to say, and being able to say to your families, I'm gonna be able to come to one spot and get all of, you know, that type of information. And then if you want to dive deeper, if I wanna be able to come in and see and and I for those who are I know that we have a lot of people on here. If the hairs in the back of your neck are going up, going, oh my god. We would never share this much information with our families. That's totally up to you. You would decide what information's there. But for that transparency piece, the modern part of having a private school is you saying this is the information I'm gonna share with you. I can come to one place to see that performance, their their progress reports, their conduct saying that they were throwing spitballs today or that they just can't seem to show up for geometry because that just isn't the thing for them or that they're supposed to be doing workouts for their varsity swimming thing. I can come to that one spot and be able to see that based on the expectations that you're putting out to families of the information that you're going to share. In addition, you wanna go even deeper. You wanna get into their schedule. You wanna get into, their actual assignments for the evening. You wanna make sure that they know that that your their kid has a bee allergy or any of those things. All of that information based on one system because the enrollment management system is attached to the student information system is attached to the rest. You need to have all those things together to be able to present it back to either a family, you know, that's in here. And then the other as important parts of the shameless former development director who sat next to the business manager is that when I log in here, you want parents to be able to do the things you need them to do, like pay you, or to be able to see every single notice that you need them to sign or fill out. So if you need to fill out the pizza fund piece, if you need to fill figure out your financial aid, if you want if you need to pay tuition, if you need to, you know, give the the seventh grade permission slip to the zoo, that yellow bar is going to show up and be able to give you, you know, all that information as a family member in one place. Again, just like modern good systems. When when I go to Delta Airlines, you don't have to teach me how to use the system. It's going information is going to be in the place that it should be so the right information gets underneath the right person's nose. And most importantly is when people do have to fill out that information and and get it, all that information is really filled out. Now we're coming in here looking for your signature, making sure that that you're agreeing with the information that's here, and we're organizing it all for you in one place. So now when we go ahead and we're acting, like, as a as a family, I literally can go to one calendar. It knows all my kids. It knows whether it's pizza Sunday and that there's gluten in the pizza and that I've got, you know, three kids that are struggling in geometry or I've got, you know, one that's got after school activities. I can come to one calendar and put it all in here, or I can dump it all into my iPhone and all those things. Just it works like modern systems work, where, you know, this isn't drastically new, but it's taking that that ability to, you know, basically say, I'm not gonna teach you how to use this. I'm just gonna come in and I'm gonna be able to use it, straight away. Now when I come in, the only way that that can work, that a family can come into one place and be able to see all that, is that you have to have an interface where your teachers, who are also advisors, who are also coaches, who are also dorm heads, can also come into one place and it's going to present them, in similar to parents, all the information they need. But now it's about doing, where I'm gonna come into one place and it's gonna know what I coach, what dorm I've got, you know, all those pieces. I'm gonna come to one thing. I'm gonna see my schedule with all of those things, you know, together in one place. And I'm gonna be able to do all those things that I need to do, whether it's grading or grade books, or, you know, writing notes off to, you know, internally, that parent student teacher sort of triangle of communication. You can go in whichever directions that you need to, but I'm still logging into one place where I can, you know, get in and and get to these pieces. And if you do that well, you're gonna have the tools, like, built into and this is up to schools as to whether they wanna share even more information, said the again, the shameless former development director. I want my families to be able to log in and see what's going in in the classroom, see what's going on in the dorms this weekend. And now if I've got the the tools with me in one place, I can now communicate with them. If I'm in charge of the dorm this weekend, I can see certain things about the students that are there. If I'm a, if I'm in my classroom, I can now send out, you know, notes and and messages that I need to each one. And, of course, I can see the information about every single person that's in my group in one place. And the nice part about all of this is if you're doing this well, the parents are logging in and seeing it. The teachers who are coaches are doing all of their parts, meaning they're they're putting information into the system so that they can do their jobs. It means that, that families are gonna be able to log into one place and be able to see the that information right in front of them in a meaningful way. And if that happens, this is the the sort of the nice part here is that, the people who are running the school are now going to be able to see this data as we got into it. And I think, it was Matt who was talking about if you're not being measured, you aren't improving. And this is the part where you need the data coming from multiple different systems to be able to come into one place, whether it's a little bit of us, a little bit of aura, a little bit of NACE, a little bit of this. You wanna be able to pull this information in and be able to see what is important to you? So if your particular pedagogy says, this is what at risk means, you can start beginning to put reports together that have these pieces that are going to like, what does that mean for us? Does it mean that their grade point average dropped five points in the course of two weeks? Does it mean that they you know, their attendance was off? So now as an end user, I can come in and click on one of those bubbles and see exactly what's going on with one of my kids. This is the conversation many companies like Blackbaud used to have, with, you know, ourselves within our own systems. Now we look at this as information that is also great with our partners who are are taking that information, from different spots. So without any further ado, what I'd like to do is sort of now show you that when you're using Aura, I'm gonna hand it over to Paul to sort of, like, take this and show you how these systems can can work nicely together. So, Paul, I'll hand it over to you. Great. Well, yeah. Like Will said, Blackbaud's still that hub for making sure that anything about a student, specifically academic, sorry, attendance records and things are back in the student profile. So So the screen, just quickly here, is the integration of using Aura alongside your Blackbaud LMS. So your teachers, from an interface standpoint, it feels like the same experience. Just taking what Matt was talking about from our safety report, from the from the research, I just wanted to zoom in on a couple of things. So he mentioned, you know, 56% of schools confirm the safety of absent and unexcused students. So 44% often don't or don't. And then thirty two minutes, on average, it takes for independent schools to find a student of an unexcused absence is logged. And then there's there's some other here that adds to the same picture, but, essentially, if students aren't where they're supposed to be, every SIS isn't set up really to do that, and so that's where we come in. There's there's many moments outside of the classroom, that your SIS or Blackbaud in particular wasn't set up, to do. And that's where we've kind of provided the tools and the workflows, to capture all that data, whether it's boarding, after school management, you know, after care and activities, absences, late arrivals, early dismissals, hall passes, dismissals themselves for the lower schools. And then, obviously, now we have attendance built into the same picture because that adds to that live view for student location. Ultimately, it's all still feeding back into Blackbaud. So that to to back up Will here, you still got that attendance data in your student profile, you're doing reports, you're doing transcripts, things like that. And so there were some questions asked around, you know, emergency systems. I think I saw Art thank you thank you for the question, Art. Talking about emergency roles. Now an emergency platform is great. There's lots of great products out there. Where we're different is because we provide all those different, tools to capture that data as to your student's location, including class or period by period attendance. If, and we will hope it doesn't, but if an emergency is triggered, then you've got a live view of the student location. It's not kind of taking a poll from the last thirty minutes or being sent or or capturing it from all these different places. It's all in the same place. So you know, that your response is gonna be cut from what we're seeing is an average of ten minutes down to under ninety seconds. So how specifically do we help, supercharged Blackboard schools? So we have granular attendance automations. So reconciling, like I said, if a student doesn't show up to class, where are they and where should they be? So we can help streamline that whole process and automate all the workflows around that process. Two is that we can capture student movements outside the classroom, which I touched on. And this is where we've kind of branched out from just focusing on boarding because as, you know, Tyler and Chris know, like, they're they've got a twenty four seven job to know where kids are. It's the same not twenty four seven now for day schools, but all throughout the school day. If they're not in the classroom, we can provide you all those different capture points. Mobile attendance tracking, you know, if your coaches are taking the kids off campus, it's very easy for them to take through that, take the attendance through the, through the mobile app, and same for teachers that are maybe taking the role on your fields or your courts or things like that. We've got attendance compliance, so automated attendance, which I'll touch base touch on. So allowing students to check themselves into different into classrooms, to mark themselves as attended without using their phones. We can cover that. And then, obviously, live location awareness, which ultimately leads to faster emergency response. So first up is just our attendance follow ups and alerts. So we can be we can give you kind of dashboards. We we see this, you know, a custom one made for lower school, middle school, upper school. We can switch between day and period by period. But essentially, you can start to see things in real time around attendance rate, students that are frequently missing class, students that are frequently late. Those are all surfaced and made visually appealing for you all. And then the next piece is alerts. So the moment a student hits maybe five missed English classes, you can have an alert go out to the head of department, go out to the parents if they hit ten. You can change all the alerts to be customised and very, very granular, which we haven't seen across other systems. So that that's kind of our first step into helping you kind of isolate and follow-up on where students should be or why they missed class so that you've got that ultimately a tighter picture for student location. Moments outside the classroom, funnily enough, I've started with the one that is in the classroom, but, yeah, the Chrome extension or the mobile app is where you'd capture student location or attendance in the in the classroom. Once attendance is taken in the classroom, it's gonna update the student's location on the aura system, but it's still gonna send the data back to Blackbaud. You've got your self-service iPads, which our boarding schools are familiar with, but now day schools are using it for late arrivals, early dismissals. Their parents might do it for if they're a lower school student. And the health centre is a common place too. So if they wanna check-in there, again, that's all updating the the location and aura. It's also updating the classroom attendance so that your teachers know, hey. You know, Matt's not expected because he's now on the nurse he's at the nurse. Mobile apps are used for in the classroom, but also outside the classroom during, like I said, field trips or excursions, all those kinds of things. And then we have our new new functionality around QR codes. So, yeah, students can either mark themselves as present in class again or writing back to, Blackboard for your attendance records. And and there's various ways that there are various times I use that as well, like study hall or free periods, things like that. So just quickly to zoom in a little bit, we recently rolled out, automated attendance at Donna Klein in Miami. How's it Miami? Yeah. Or Florida for sure. And, basically, their students now come in. They use their ID cards, so they don't require a phone. It reads either Matt, do you remember if it's a QR code or a or a bar code? One of the two. The student ID, they they put in front of the the camera on the iPad, and then that checks them into class. We recently released, dismissals. So, that last leg of the day, especially for lower schools, is the kind of the last moment that you guys will be, kinda handing over that supervision to, you know, a guardian or a parent. So we'll have a dashboard. Your teachers can see it. Whoever's running their dismissals can see it. And then when a parent arrives, you can scan the QR code to update the system that they're they've arrived in, what zone they're in, and then it'll notify the student to come out, or the teacher to tell the student to come out and and, be picked up. And then you'll see here just recently too, we added the ability to do signatures in a lot of the states around North America. That's a requirement under state law. If they're I think it's under four years old. They need to have a signature to show that the parent came to pick them up. So I guess to summarise, there are we have counted there's about 83 scenarios, throughout the school day that impacts a student's location. And, like I mentioned, the SIS is set up primarily around the classroom so they can capture that. I'm not saying you have to use Aura for all 83 of those scenarios. I mean, that might be too much for some of you. I assume for a lot of you, it would be, but we do have the tools to pretty much capture all of those. So, yeah, last piece is just that we are now using over 500 schools around the world. I know that, Tyler and Chris are some of our very first boarding school clients, but we have over a 100 day schools now over a 100 blackboard schools now using Oura. And this this will be shared in the follow-up deck. But John Spear here was, a recent case study where they were being audited by or getting accreditation from the New York State of Independent Schools. They ran an emergency roll or a drill, and the accreditation committee pulled, I think it was four students out of the drill. And they were able to, within ninety seconds, account for the students and identify quickly which students were missing. Yeah, all done within ninety seconds because of our implementation there. That's me. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Paul, and thank you to the entire team at large. We had a very aggressive agenda, and the former teacher in me is just tickled that everyone did their best to stay within the allotments. Also an additional thank you to Tyler and Chris and the team behind the scenes who have been helping to field the questions along the way. We are running, short on time, but I did wanna make sure that everyone on here is aware that we recently held our product update briefings. These are now available on demand, and they're your opportunity to see how our product teams are innovating across our solutions, give you insight into new features, and a clear path to greater impact. I have the pleasure of, hearing from our k twelve executive advisory board, and they were just cheering for, everything that they learned along the way. So I encourage everyone to take a look at the product update briefings. One more kinda quick plug in terms of the k twelve user conference. We are really excited to welcome Priya Lakhani, as one of our keynotes. She will be, as everyone knows, focusing on AI for impact, and really leading us through a conversation around transforming k 12 education responsibly. We will also welcome to our stage Peter Baron. If you are a long time Whipple Hill Blackbaud, customer, Peter is a very familiar, face and name, and he will be talking to us, about how schools can design an unreasonably good, experience for all of their key stakeholders. I would be remiss to not continue the thread. It seems like you can't go anywhere, webinar, cocktail party, school pickup line, etcetera. And, of course, we're all talking about AI. So just wanted to make sure that everyone knows, that we do have some really great resources available. I've linked to our AI page on the hub. And just wanna let you know that across all of our solutions, Blackbaud is committed to an AI strategy that is based on the pillars of convenience, powerful, in terms of the data and expertise that we're building on and, of course, building our AI in a very responsible, manner, which includes fairness and inclusivity, security and trust, and is really aligned with international frameworks. So without further ado, I know we are at the top of the hour. Again, I have the pleasure of saying a sincere thank you to everyone from the team at Blackbaud and at Aura. You will receive the recording to this, and we hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks.