For more specific instructions on how to use our signout app, Orah,
click on "Students" or "Families" at the top of this page to find your relevant instructions.
Orah provides several benefits to students, families, and staff members:
Students can easily sign out for off-campus trips via the "Orah Student" app or app.orah.com. Most of these trips will be "Day/Local" trips, like grabbing coffee or lunch down the street. For those signouts, students do not have to interact with or get approval from a staff member; they just sign out with Orah. For any trips that will have a student off-campus overnight, cause them to miss curfew check, or travel more than 30 miles away from campus, students have to put in a pass request and sign out with the on-duty staff.
Students can also submit a "pass" to leave campus overnight, to miss curfew, or to travel more than 30 miles in advance. Their guardian(s) will get an email notifying them that the pass has been created, giving them all of the travel details and asking them to endorse or to decline the request. (Students will do this pass even when it's a guardian picking them up. You won't need to endorse those passes as the on-duty staff will check your ID against your student's guardian contact info. Students should not wait until they are at the CC office to create their passes for overnight, missing curfew, or 30+ miles travel passes.
Students will still need to check out at the CC office when they are traveling more than 30 miles, missing curfew, and staying off-campus overnight, and the on-duty staff will activate the pass that the student submitted to sign them out.
Families can easily endorse their students' pass requests via the Orah for Families app or app.orah.com. They can also put in pass requests on behalf of their student if they know when they are being picked up to leave campus overnight, to miss curew, or to travel more than 30 miles. We hope students do this proactively but it can also be helpful for guardians to do this so they don't hit any hiccups at the signout process. Families have much more easily accessible information about their students' signouts than before we started using Orah.
Employees will have a more accurate roster of which students have signed out to miss curfew or to be gone overnight, helping curfew check run more smoothly. Orah will also save administrative time as we cut out the phone call to guardians to confirm the students' travel plans.
For everyone, in emergency situations, like a lockdown or fire drill, we could use Orah to start a safety check. This would alert every student on campus or in a particular building/hall and ask them to confirm their safety and/or location, greatly speeding up our incident management/response.
We are only using Orah for its passes (sign-in/sign-out) and roll call (curfew check) features. We are not currently looking at any additional features, like wellbeing notes, surveys, attendance, or mood checks; we do those tasks through other platforms.
There is a location feature in Orah that some campuses use that asks students to sign in to each building or space as they move about campus, by swiping their phone across NFC tiles that have been installed, to get a more accurate accounting of which students are where at any given time or to see how often spaces/services are being used. It does not track students via their phones' location with geofencing or anything like that. There is a location tracking update coming to Orah, but we may not use that feature when it becomes available.