Changelog

Demo:

The Snapshot

Need a quick refresher on how to do something in Orah? Now the answer is one click away. A "How to" help button shows up right on the screen you're working on — in select attendance, school settings, and passes pages — with a video, a help article, and a way to reach support, all without leaving the page.

What's New

Look for the blue "How to" link with a question mark icon at the top of the screen. It's contextual, so it always matches what you're doing — on My Schedule, for example, it reads "How to take attendance." Click it and a modal opens with a short video walkthrough, a link to the full help article, and the option to email support or chat with Fin, our support assistant.

You'll find these buttons across attendance settings, reconciliation, insights, records, alerts, roll settings, and school management — with more areas planned.

Why It Matters

When you're mid-task and can't remember how a setting works, you shouldn't have to stop and go searching for it. Now the help you need is right there in the flow — a quick video, an article, or a real person to ask — without losing your place. It's a small thing that adds up during a busy school day, when every minute saved on "how do I..." is a minute back in your day.

Next Steps

1. Look for the blue "How to" link and question mark icon at the top of your screen

2. Click it to open the help modal for whatever you're working on

3. Watch the short video walkthrough, or open the full help article for more detail

4. Ask Fin or email support if you need a hand

5. Click the question mark icon any time you want to bring the modal back
   

   Give it a try next time you're unsure how something works — and if you spot a screen that could use one of these buttons, let your CSM know.

Demo:

Coming Soon

The Snapshot

You can now see at a glance which students have an active prescription. A medication icon appears right next to the watch list icon, on both the Home Board and each student's profile — no need to open the Medications module to check.

What's New

Hover over the icon on desktop, or tap it on mobile, to see the medication name and dosage for every active prescription. On Student Profile, the watch list icon now gets the same hover behaviour as the Home Board. Visibility follows your existing Admin Console permissions — if a role doesn't have Medications access, that icon and its details stay completely hidden for them.

Why It Matters

House parents and medical staff no longer need to dig into the Medications module to check who's on medication before an outing, a meal, or a check-in. It's the same quick-glance pattern staff already trust for the watch list, so there's nothing new to learn — and because it follows the permissions you've already set up, medical details are only visible to staff who are meant to see them.

Next Steps

1. Open the Home Board or a student's profile

2. Look for the medication icon next to the watch list icon — it only appears for students with an active prescription

3. Hover over the icon on desktop, or tap it on mobile, to see the medication name and dosage

4. On mobile, tap the X or tap outside the pop-up to dismiss it
   Questions about medication permissions? Reach out to your CSM.

View the roadmap here: https://orah.featurebase.app/p/medication-manager-icons

Demo:

The Snapshot

You can now set up your school's calendar structure from one place and confirm your school years, then build a teaching-week calendar for the whole school or a separate one for each division.

What's New

Under a new Operational Calendars area, you can review your school years, years pulled in from your student information system (SIS) are read-only here, so what's already synced stays consistent and build calendars underneath them. If every division runs the same schedule, set up a single calendar for the whole school; if divisions run differently, add one calendar per division and assign it to Lower School, Middle School, Upper School, or leave it unassigned. Each calendar lets you toggle which days of the week are school days and set a start and end time for each one, with a month-by-month preview of the year before you save. Assigned a calendar to the wrong division? Use Assign Divisions to move it without rebuilding the schedule.

Why It Matters

Divisions often run on genuinely different clocks Lower School might finish well before Upper School and your calendar setup should reflect that instead of forcing one schedule on everyone. Building it from your synced school years, rather than a separate manual entry, keeps your calendar structure lined up with the years your system already knows about. Operational calendar will have more integration with other features of Orah in the upcoming releases.

Next Steps

1. Open Admin Console and go to Operational Calendars

2. Check the School Years tab → years synced from your SIS appear automatically and can't be edited or deleted here

3. Switch to the Operational Calendars tab and select Add New Calendar

4. Give it a title and, if your school uses divisions, choose which one(s) it applies to

5. Set your weekly schedule → toggle school days on or off and set start and end times

6. Review the calendar-at-a-glance preview, then save

7. Repeat for any other division that needs its own schedule, or use Assign Divisions to reassign an existing calendar
   Questions about setting up your calendar structure? Reach out to your CSM.

What changed

Someone who wears more than one hat (Staff, Parent) at a school can now run all of it from a single email. Think of a teacher who's also a parent, a parent with kids at two Orah schools. Before, every role needed its own email address, so these people kept two logins or just couldn't sign in as the other version of themselves. Now? One email, one sign-in, then the account chooser. A switcher in the top corner changes roles anytime, with no second password to type.

Why it helps

One email, two people. Sometimes three. A teacher who's also a parent stops keeping a separate work login and home login. Parents with kids at two schools no longer sign out of one to peek at the other. Fewer passwords, fewer resets. And Orah remembers where each person left off, so switching roles lands them right where they were instead of a generic landing page.

How it works

For the person signing in, it's short. They type their email, sign in once with a password or their school's SSO, and if that email opens more than one account, a "Choose an account" screen appears. Pick one, you're in. The menu in the top corner switches roles later.

For the admin, this is where the real change lives. Three cases:

• Someone already in Orah picks up a second role. If the email is already a staff member, you can add a parent role to it. It works the other way too: an existing parent can be given staff access. The extra role attaches to the same login, so they sign in once and flip between the staff view and the parent view. This is the teacher-who's-also-a-parent case.

• A parent who already belongs to another Orah school joins yours. Their email already runs one parent account. When your school adds them, Orah ties your students to that same account instead of opening a new one. All their children, whatever school they attend, land in one family dashboard.

• Some things stay separate on purpose. A student account never merges with a staff or parent account, either direction. And inviting the same staff member to the same school a second time won't create a duplicate.
  Whichever case it is, there's no duplicate account and no second password. If the person hasn't signed in yet, they see a short welcome that says they're being added as a given role at your school, and that they can switch once they sign in.

Key points

• Roles and schools stay hidden until after sign-in. Typing an email at the login page gives away nothing about who owns it. That privacy is on purpose.

• Parents stay a single account across schools. Staff get one account per school, because two schools really is two jobs.

• Multiple single sign-ons work too. A person can use School A's SSO for work and School B's SSO as a parent, and keep both.

• Locked out of SSO after a child graduates? A quiet "Can't log in?" link lets them prove they own the email and set a password to get back in.

Common questions

• "I added a parent but no new account appeared." Expected, when the email already exists. The parent is attached to their current account and can switch to your school once they sign in.

• "Our parents come in through SSO. Do I still send an invite?" No separate email invite. When your school provisions parents through SSO, they're linked on sign-in. A parent who's a contact on several of your students gets invited once and linked to all of their children, so the old "JIT user already exists" error is gone.

• "A parent has children at two of our schools." One parent account covers all of them. Every child sits in the same family dashboard, tagged with the school they attend.

• "Can a student share an email with a parent or staff?" No. Student accounts stay walled off from staff and parent accounts, both directions.
  Questions? Reach out to your CSM.

Demo:

The Snapshot

You can now decide exactly how Orah turns class rolls into a daily attendance status. Choose whether the day is judged on every class or just the first one, set the thresholds that make a day Absent, Late, or an Early Departure, and apply each policy school-wide, by division, or year level by year level.

What's New

Under Daily Status in Attendance Settings you pick one of two ways to calculate the day: All Classes throughout the day, which aggregates attendance across every class and marks the day absent once a student misses more than your threshold, or First scheduled class only, which mirrors the day from the first class — and you can narrow that to a particular class type if you'd rather anchor the day to, say, the first academic class. There's a new Early Departure for Day status alongside Absent, Late, and Present, and a priority table on the page showing exactly which status wins when a student meets more than one. The daily reason and its excusal now come from the class rolls themselves: if every class shares a reason, that becomes the daily reason, and if reasons vary, the first one chronologically is used — then pushed through to your student information system with the finished record. Turn on Pass Thresholds and approved passes that overlap the school day set the picture instead: a pass that runs into the morning records a Late Arrival time, one that runs to the end of the day records an Early Departure time, and overlapping passes are merged and read as a single block. Set one year level up the way you want it and copy that policy straight across to the others.

Why It Matters

Every school draws the line differently on what counts as a day away. Now that line is yours to set — a student who misses two of six classes can count as present at one school and absent at another, and Orah will report it your way, right down to the percentage. Approved late arrivals and early departures land as Late for Day and Early Departure for Day with the real arrival and departure times attached, rather than being lumped in with a full-day absence. And because the daily reason and its excusal are read from the rolls your teachers already mark, the record that reaches your student information system matches what actually happened in the classroom — no separate step to keep the two in step.

Next Steps

1. Open Attendance Settings and go to Daily Status

2. Choose who the policy applies to — school-wide, by division, or by year level

3. Pick how the day is calculated: all classes across the day, or the first scheduled class

4. Set your absence threshold — how much of the day a student has to miss before the day counts as absent

5. Turn on Pass Thresholds if you want approved passes to set Late and Early Departure times, then set those cut-off times

6. Check the priority table so you know which status takes precedence when a student meets more than one

7. Save, then use Copy this policy to other year levels wherever the same rules apply
   Worth a look before your next reporting cycle. Questions about which settings suit your policy? Reach out to your CSM.

Start an emergency roll today and every student and staff member appears on it. The eight visitors signed in at reception do not. From this release, anyone checked in through Visitor Aware lands on the roll with everyone else, across every campus you run, and gets marked safe from the same screen your team already uses.

What you get, step by step:

1. Link your campuses once

Open Visitor Aware in the App Directory, paste the API key from your Visitor Aware account, and choose the sites you want Orah to watch. Link one. Or link Main, Westside and Northgate together, each with its own connection and its own live visitor count, so a roll you start covers exactly the campuses you picked and nothing more.

2. Visitors appear on the roll

Open a roll and there is a Visitors tab sitting beside Students (1,844) and Staff (12). Marcus Bell in the Gymnasium. Amelia Foster in the Main Office. Every person who signed in at a front desk, listed with the destination they were heading to and the time they arrived, pulled from Visitor Aware the moment the roll starts.

3. Choose who gets the alert

Turn on "Include visitors in this roll" and pick your audience before anyone is contacted. All visitors across the locations you selected, or only the people heading to certain destinations, with every destination tagged by campus so Gymnasium (Main) never gets mixed up with Auditorium (Westside). A running count sits under the picker: 12 visitors selected, 9 reachable by email or phone. Orah names the other three and shows their photos, because a volunteer who left the phone field blank still has to be found in person

4. Mark safe from your phone

Tap a visitor safe and the row turns green. Flag one who needs help and it turns amber. Several staff can work the same roll at once from iOS, Android or the web, and the unaccounted count drops live as they go. Nobody has to be at a desk.

Instructions:

If you run more than one campus, go to App Directory, open Visitor Aware, and add each site with its own API key. Single-campus schools keep their existing connection and have nothing to reconfigure. Check the all-clear wording so it matches how your school talks to guests. Then run a drill with visitors on site.

Demo:

Coming soon

The Snapshot

When you create a pass for a student who already has one at that time, Orah now flags it right in the form — showing both passes on a timeline with the overlap highlighted. Nothing gets blocked. You decide whether to go ahead, adjust the existing pass, or leave that student out.

What's New

A time conflict alert appears as soon as the times clash, telling you exactly when the overlap falls — say 11:00am to 11:30am — and what will happen if you save, whether one pass ends the other or the two simply sit side by side. From the alert you can open the existing pass, cancel it if it hasn't started yet, end it if it's already running, or edit its time to clear the overlap. If a student has several clashing passes, each one is listed with its own actions and the timeline stacks them all together so you can see the full picture at a glance. Creating a pass for a group works the same way: Orah tells you how many students have conflicts and lets you untick anyone you'd rather leave out.

Why It Matters

Two passes for the same student at the same hour is how an activity pass quietly ends a sick leave, or a trip pass lands on a student whose parent already booked them out. Now you can see that before you save, on one screen, without opening another pass to check. And because Orah warns rather than blocks, you stay in charge — sometimes overlapping passes are exactly what you want, and you can still create them in one go. Your pass records, and the attendance that follows from them, end up matching what's actually happening.

Next Steps

1. Create a pass as you normally would and set your times

2. Watch for the time conflict alert — tap See details to open it

3. Check the timeline to see exactly where the two passes overlap

4. Open the existing pass to review it, cancel it if it's scheduled, end it if it's active, or edit its time

5. Creating for a group? Untick any student you'd rather leave out of the new pass

6. Save when you're happy — you can save with a conflict still showing if that's what you intended
   Give it a look next time you're setting up a pass. Questions? Reach out to your CSM.

View the roadmap here: https://orah.featurebase.app/p/warn-about-pass-conflicts-new-pass-during-an-existing-passes

What's New

Schools can now send the Secure Parent Link one-time code by text message.

Plenty of families share one email account between a parent and their child, which means the sign-in code arrives somewhere the student can read it and use to request their own pass. Sending it to the parent's mobile fixes that. The delivery method is a per-school setting, and it sits in the Secure Parent Link modal next to the link and copy button you already use. Every school stays on Email until an admin changes it.

Key Benefits

Closes the shared-inbox gap: The code lands on the parent's phone. A student reading the family inbox never sees it.

No one gets locked out: If an approved parent has no mobile number on file, their code is emailed instead.

You can check your data first: The modal counts the approved parents you cannot reach and lets you open that list, export it, or notify your admins.

Access rules are untouched: Only approved contacts can sign in. Where the code goes has no bearing on who is allowed in.

One setting, both modules: Your Passes and Dismissals links follow the same choice.

How It Works

The parent opens your Secure Parent Link and types their email, exactly as before. Email stays the identifier. Orah matches that address to an approved contact before any code is generated.

On Text message, the code goes to the mobile number held against that contact, and the parent sees only the last two digits, for example "ending ••73". Phone numbers are masked everywhere in the product and full numbers are never returned by any endpoint.

If that contact has no valid mobile number, the code is emailed and the parent is told why.

Getting Started

1. Open Passes or Dismissals and click Secure Parent Link

2. Under How should parents receive their code?, pick Email or Text message

3. Read the readiness warning, and use View list if approved parents are missing numbers

4. Save
   
   Text message verification requires SMS to be enabled for your school, and an active SMS package for codes to actually send. Until both are in place, this option stays disabled. Only staff with pass settings access can change the verification method -everyone else can still copy and share the link.

   Questions? Reach out to your CSM.