Ruvna's Marshall Singer and Orah's Matt Varley join the show to discuss the evolving intersection of school safety and technical leadership. The conversation highlights how technology directors are increasingly "quarterbacking" safety through real-time student tracking and Model Context Protocols to bridge data gaps between attendance records and physical locations.

Ruvna Safety Platform

Orah Student Tracking

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Tron (1982)

Matt,

welcome to Talking technology with ATLIS, the show that plugs

you into the important topics and trends for technology

leaders all through a unique Independent School lens. We'll

hear stories from technology directors and other special

guests from the Independent School community, and provide

you with focused learning and deep dive topics. Welcome to

Talking technology with ATLIS. I am Peter Frank, the interim CEO

of the Association of technology leaders in independent schools.

And I am Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey.

And I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of

Information Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher's

school in Richmond, Virginia.

All right, guys, so we are recording this in April

for our constant listeners. You have not heard the last of

Christina. We do plan at least one more recording, if not more

with Christina at our annual conference coming up at the end

of April. But again, that will have passed by the time people

are listening to this, so you will hear Christina again. So I

know Bill and Hiram are pretty bummed, and we understand, but

we've got a great plan for this podcast. Moving forward. We're

excited about what's to come.

I've moved on. I'm past it.

Very good.

Christina, who I'm sorry, who we talking about.

That's she's right out of the gate.

I'm just kidding. It hurts. It hurts deep. This is

how I deal with my pain.

I understand. You can only imagine what joy looks

like.

No, I just Hiram and I are like the brothers that

always got to be poking at the sister. We can't go easy. We got

to go in hard.

That's right, all right. Well, she'll appreciate

that. So just be prepared. Peter, you know, put on the flak

jacket, because everything comes to you now. Now it's brothers,

right? That's a different flavor.

Yeah, exactly. We're coming after you next,

Peter, so get ready for it.

That's fine

live and in public. I didn't

have brothers growing up, so I look forward to

the Brotherhood.

Well you do now, so welcome to it.

Okay. Thank you. So I'm curious for y'all, we're at

the end of spring breaks. The schools have their spring breaks

in different times, but it's typically March, typically

April. So I was thinking to myself, so what is it between

now and we're beginning to wrap up the school year. What's your

focus? Just at a high level, what are you thinking? It's a

sprint.

The great planning is what I would refer to it as,

because this is where everything starts coming out of the

woodwork. You start hearing about all the things that people

are thinking about over the summer that they need to get

done. It's like, the worst of it, I think, is we're going to

be doing this minor construction project where we're going to be

ripping X, Y and Z out, and you now need to figure out what

you're doing. And it was like I would have been helpful to know

a little while ago when I was planning something else, you

know, but

it's just the ebb and flow of it. I tend to be

responsible for a lot of the standardized testing that's

going on. So it's standardized testing season. So it's Erbs,

it's SS, ATS, PSATs, it's AP exams and getting all the spaces

up to par and making sure that your student software are all up

to date, because children do such a good job the following

directions. So it's just one of those things. You just got to

constantly do a lot of that hand holding and make sure that

they've got things ready.

Got you so we are far from Oh, good. The year is

wrapping up.

Nope, nope.

Not even close. We'll have some battle wounds by

the time we're done.

All right. I

have a hard time believing it was spring break,

because I feel like we're in like a second winter here right

now. It's like,

yes, yeah.

Hiram was talking about, like, the great pollening

Last night. It was like, into the 30s here. I was talking to

another school, like, a little further north, that they got

snow. I mean, I'm gonna sweat her again, because my air

conditioning unit in the room is set to go off of heat now and on

the AC. And I'm just, I'm betwixt, in between, and not

happy,

right? Yeah. Up in Northwest Pennsylvania, everyone

was out washing their cars Saturday, and then we had

flurries like Monday morning, and like leaving the window

open. Here is like, Oh, it was 30 last night, even though it

was 70 during the day

three seasons of spring.

Yep.

So let's move on to our guests. We've got another

example here. We've been having ATLIS supporters and vendors

coming in for some really fantastic conversations about

some critical issues. So we are grateful for our guests. Today I

will introduce them both, and then I will call on one of you

to go ahead and introduce yourself, because we do love

learning more about the people. So feel free to include some

backstory. We'd love to hear your journeys we have with us

today. Matt Varley, the CEO of aura, and Marshall singer, the

co founder and CEO of. Of ruvna, so Marshall, I'm going to ask

you to introduce yourself first. Why don't you just tell a little

bit about yourself your organization?

Well, thank you so much, Peter. Really excited

to be back for round two. I had a great conversation with Bill

and Hiram last year. I think my name is Marshall singer. I'm the

one of the co founders and the COO of ruvna. We're a safety

operations platform that is focused on making independent

schools safer, help them communicate with their

communities, and, most importantly, understand

throughout the entire day what's happening on campus. My journey

is a little bit of a funny one, because this is actually the

only real job I've ever had. Me and my co founders started the

roof now in college, originating out of a project from high

school, and it just kind of snowballed from there. We'd all

been involved a lot with education when we were younger,

and then, you know, we were all like, we don't want to get real

jobs. That's kind of scary. But more importantly, we're like,

you know, if we're going to fail or struggle, we want to do it on

our own terms. And so 11 years later, Joey Jack and I are still

waking up every day really excited about what we're

building in ruvna And most importantly, the amazing

community of schools that we're able to support throughout the

country. That's great. Wow. From high school, what was the

project in high school? Yeah, so basically, Joey and Jack are not

one to build like a pizza Tracker app, and they built the

first version of roofna, actually, as a response to the

request from their high school, because they've known each other

since then, basically saying, hey guys like, you know, after

fire drill, the school said, Hey, could you help us here?

We're really just struggling with what to do. And since they

weren't ones to build just nothing or something for no

purpose, they said, You know what? We'll give that a go. And

then you blink, and it's like 1415, years later, and we're

here. So it's a good ride. And what I wouldn't trade for the

world, that's great. And Matt, we learned when we got on before

we started here. So very late at night from mobile in Australia.

Thank you so much for doing this for us under these

circumstances. Why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit

about yourself. Great to be here, and thanks for having us,

or if I start there, similar to Marshall, was started by Paul

and Kurt

out of University College, and they'd both been

boarders together in boarding school, and had the challenge of

knowing where students are in a boarding school being complex,

either in boarding school off campus and set out to build or

to track students essentially throughout their boarding life

cycle, that's turned further into more of the day school side

of things, where similar challenges and scenarios occur,

both in the day school and the boarding school, and it's gone

from there. I suppose my background has always been in

tech. I'm a software engineer turned CEO and loving life at

this present in the AI era, where AI sort of brought me back

into the fold as a software engineer, where I've been out in

the abyss for the last five to seven years, but really enjoying

building products and bringing solutions to schools. Prior to

aura was in early years technology, so I've almost

followed the trajectory of my daughters, who are 11, eight and

six. They were first in early years care and now heading into

K 12 school education, and just passionate about how we're

looking after these students and how we're taking administration

away from the staff at school.

Great, yeah, and that's why we brought the two of

you together today, because we specifically wanted to talk

about safety in schools and the role now that the technology

director plays, I think about Bill and Hiram, when they

decided to move from educator into technology leader, I'm sure

it occurred to them, Hey, safety is something that I'll have to

deal with to some degree. But I don't know that you guys

anticipated the degree of concern, the degree of safety

and how significant a part of your role it has become. I have

to imagine you didn't think it was going to be this significant

as it is today, and it feels like it gets more and more

significant within your roles. So Matt, I'm curious, just to

get us started here, this kind of scope creep in the technology

director's role and how safety has been getting larger and

larger. Is this a sustainable thing? How sustainable is the

situation with the technology leader role and how safety is

becoming such a bigger factor?

Yeah, yeah. If you go back 1520, years ago, the

idea of safety was very physical and sat within either facilities

or safety officers, and as the world has just got more digital

and the technology has enabled more use cases within the

school, it's naturally moved across into being in that

technology director's role. We recently did a survey with ATLIS

where we polled over 100 IT directors, and what came back

was over 40% of those IT directors are now directly

responsible for safety decisions within their independent

schools, so 100% it's been scope creep in terms of the role, but

I think it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense for the IT

director and technology to be driving a lot. Lot of the what

could be within schools when it comes to school safety, because

the data and the systems and that single point of solution,

be it multiple point solutions, but all talking together is

absolutely critical to then enable that downstream physical

safety, be it sort of door access control or a 911 patch

through to emergency services. So it all kind of starts with

that single pane of glass and having that consolidated data

and technology solution to then drive the action downstream. I

think moving that into a non technology role, you're always

going to be hamstrung by how good your data is and where that

central point is to sort of drive it. So I think naturally

it's ended up there in the same way that beyond schools in

corporations, the role of the technology director has become

bigger than what it was 20 to 30 years ago. We're seeing in a lot

of schools that technology director start to report

directly into the principal, whereas in the past, it's either

been into a business manager or a CFO. I think that's

recognition across the world that this is super important and

is going to drive not only the nuts and bolts of technology,

but the strategy and almost the quarterbacking of how these

schools then drive school safety so really important.

I think it's just a really natural outgrowth

of information security. You know, the technology director

has always been thinking about security. It just previously, in

many ways, was information security, digital security. How

are we going to keep our data protected? How we're going to

keep our students safe online? So I think it's a very, very

natural outpouring of that for directors of technology really

heavily engaged in the safety process at the end of the day. I

think what's also important to recognize here is that while

directors of technology are now much more involved in the

process, I think at its best, they are owning it together with

a Director of Physical security. So I think it's bringing

knowledge, bringing specialty and bringing that ability to

understand from my side of the table, what can we do to support

what you need on your side of the table? Vice versa. And I

think in many ways, the increasing role for directors of

technology is kind of a pushback against the late 90s, early

2000s where, I think in this kind of a bit of a knee jerk

response, a lot of folks just bought stuff and said, implement

it, figure it out, just do it. And pushed and pushed to just

buy a lot of things. And so now you're realizing, we're all

realizing, as our world map, exactly as you said, becomes

more digitally enabled, and every part of it is about

understanding top to bottom data flows, etc, you're seeing a much

more natural balance come into play, which I think is why

you're seeing some really good next steps and really

interesting ideas coming forward about how to make our schools

safer, how to do all this in a way that doesn't throw off but

makes a lot of independent schools

safe.

So what's interesting here at St

Christopher is we had an opportunity to move some offices

around, and our director of security and I share a suite

together, and so as a result, we are in constant communication

about physical security and cyber security, and it is a

great dialog that goes back and forth, because he's thinking of

things that I don't necessarily think of. I'm thinking of things

that he certainly isn't thinking about. And it has been a

wonderful symbiosis of these two departments that you probably

would not have foreseen 15 years ago easily, because it just grew

naturally with the need for access control in terms of the

physical security, and then being able to dovetail that

well, now your IT director has got to be responsible for

putting all that hardware in there and making sure all that

data flows correctly, But we're constant conversation. And I

think what has resulted from that is now the understanding

that when you start looking at different products, how well do

they now integrate with one another? Because you have all

these software applications on the academic side, and people

like Bill and myself are constantly making sure that

things are integrating well and going back to your source of

truth, we're doing the same thing now with a lot of the

security products.

A lot of this goes back to me, or to my department,

I should say, because the joke I always have is, if it plugs in,

we're responsible for it. So I think about the way in which

that relationship with your physical plant, your security

office has evolved over time, and what those needs have been

and to the point that Hiram has made about the integration

piece, and it's really one of the questions that I want to

pose to you, is how you look at working with the various vendors

in the space, But in particular as a setup for that, the idea

that when we have an incident and we're dealing with an event,

and we have to look at the accountability pieces of that,

where this really came into focus for me within that

relationship was we would have a lockdown drill or some sort of

event. On campus where everyone was staying put, and we needed

to say that, you know, everyone needed to stay in place until we

were all clear. Well, the all clear was supposedly an email

address that all the teachers were using to send their

attendance to so that we could see that all the kids were

accounted for, but there was no cross check. A lot of those

emails came in after we said the event was clear, and there was

no ability to cross check that against the actual attendance as

far as what was going on. So when we took that step to bring

in, in this case, we brought in ruvna to work with on this. This

was the second problem that they had solved for us, but that real

time tracking and that integration between the platform

and our SIS gave us real time data as far as knowing who was

in the space. So how do you look at and work with your vendor

partners to make sure that we're using your system and the other

system or systems that we may be using to make sure that we are

really delivering on this promise, that we are keeping our

students and our employees safe and secure during an event.

That's a great question, because I think a lot

of schools sometimes don't realize we also have vendor

partners. There are other people on the other side of the table

that we rely on as well. A really good example is a partner

we have called Moonlight. We work with them to help with the

PSAP and 911 automation component for schools that use

what we call our 911 connect product. So awesome. Just great

question for that in mind. I think what's important to think

about here is flexibility in that. I think when we look at

legacy systems, Legacy ways people looked at it was always

about getting schools locked in with hardware, getting them

locked into a specific set of door panels or alarms or

something that made it really hard to not only switch, but

also to get it to work with other systems. So I think what

you should be looking for is interoperability, but also

flexibility. A good example of how we try to lean into that and

design with that philosophy is in our web hook connections. So

instead of building an integration for one platform, we

sat back and said, Well, what does this need to do? And what

it needs to do in this case is allow systems external to rubna

to be able to provide notification, communication,

things like that during an emergency or during an important

event. And so instead of saying hey, we'll build that for one

thing, let's just build an open ended system that can be used to

integrate ad hoc as the school needs. So to your specific point

bill, I think it comes to flexibility, and I think it also

comes to understanding what schools are doing, and we really

are able to do that in partnership with our schools, by

understanding their end result, which is having a single pane of

glass that is able to integrate with whatever pieces and things

they're swapping in and out, so as to not lock them into

something that they look back 10 years later and say, Hey, why do

we still have this? This isn't working for us, enabling them to

more easily iterate. As technology becomes more flexible

and becomes more easy to integrate,

I think the days of hardware vendors and even

software vendors trying to lock the school or the customer into

their proprietary solution are well and done and very over. If

you need to lock something down, it is the school's data, it is

the school's workflows, and we are there to enable that. We

aren't to get in the way. I think there was this period of

time where SAS vendors really that moved from on prem into

SaaS tried to then take almost the school's data hostage and

hold them over a barrel for what they're doing. And I think those

days are over. We're seeing it with AI, and how easy it is to

be able to plug in external systems, to run workflows off

the back of things like Claude or anthropic and you know, the

more open the system is, to Marshall's point, the more value

the school can get out of that. So I think it's philosophical

being open from the start, be it sort of web hooks or MCPS with

AI APIs, if that's what it's needing to do. But we have

integrations with a lot of the school information systems, like

the Veracross and blackburns of the world, you know, and then

downstream with platforms like single wire, where they can

trigger alert systems or nine on one calls, similar to what

Marshall was saying. And doing that integration on behalf of

the school, I think is super important from a vendor's

perspective, because you can get more nuanced and control and

ensure that it's actually reliable at the point of either

emergency or drill, whatever they're needing to do. I think a

challenge that IT directors face at the moment is having to

maintain all of these integrations and having to

stitch it together themselves means that they become that

single point of reliability within the school. If they're

away on leave or they leave the school, a lot of that

intellectual property then sits in that person that wrote the

integration. So the ones that we can take away and make that

seamless for the school, I think the better, and then sort of

remain. Open as well, that if there's custom implementations

that need to be done, that it can still be actioned. So as

long as it integrates and it works and it saves minutes

seconds in the event of an emergency, it's absolutely

critical.

Yeah, and actually building on what you

said, Matt, that made me kind of think of so when we first

founded roof note, we were in the middle of the EE seven

revolution, as I'll call it, you know, Blackbaud and Baldwin

Hill, they were pushing people, rightfully so, to the new online

SAS and Veracross was just about to come around the corner. And I

think exactly what you were talking about of those days

ending. I think you could see it back then, because you can look

at the legacy folks that really existed before then, not, I

won't name names, but, you know, and then you can look at the

after days, right? And how much market share Blackburn and

Veracross have taken in the past 10 years because of that open

API layer that it allows schools to flexibly access their own

data, as opposed to, you know, some of the legacy folks, which

will then charge per integration. You can't do your

own, you know, integrations on your end, you have to go to

their corporate where then you're waiting on their

engineers, which is Matt, I love the way you said that they're

essentially holding their own data and their functionality

hostage. So I completely agree that we're moving towards a

world where you're looking for a kind of a hub and spoke where

every point of that is going to integrate, and it needs to be

able to flexibly integrate with the next series of hubs and

spokes. So, yeah, absolutely.

What do you guys need from the vendors that

you're working with? And what's asked of you to make that as

easy as possible? I mean, if we were to get up and advocate and

say, you know, listen, this is a huge issue, and because we often

sit at the crossroads of the SIS vendor and vendors like

yourself, what can we do to help? What do you need? What are

the things that we should be focused on most?

For us, it's the most access to every bit of data

that's possible. Is the ask, right? There's still some slits

of information that either aren't accessible via an API.

And I think as we move more and more to introducing AI

functionality within our platform. The ways of accessing

data is super important as well, so moving from that API only

into more of an MCP layer is super important so we can

leverage in application access to that data. So let's say

you're running an emergency drill within aura, and there's

information that sits within the SIS that could be relevant in

the event of that emergency drill that say we don't have in

aura, the ability to be able to query in MCP with the CIS and

bring that back into the interface would be really

critical. I think that layer of intelligence and ease of

querying via MCP without having to write that specific route to

an API is super critical, and I think just the use cases that

could come from having access to that is immense. The ease of

writing to MCPS now be able to bring back really useful

information is just so much easier than the traditional way

with APIs. So Bill to sort of answer your question more

succinctly, it's getting access to that data through various

different means, rather than more APIs,

I'm

going to ask you to define it for the audience,

because I don't want to make it seem like I don't know what I'm

talking about. What is an MCP,

because it sounds like it interfaces with AI in

the way that you're discussing

it?

Yeah. So MCP model, context protocol, it was a

protocol. I'm pretty sure the anthropic guys actually came up

with the protocol, and it's a way of trying to standardize the

ability to access data from another system that is more AI

native. So typically, if you're sitting on top of data, as we

all are, you create an MCP server, and that kind of

protocol which governs what access and what data can be

exposed through that data store out to an external party. And

then, as people come and query that MCP server, they can throw

a natural language type query at that MCP server, rather than

having to write to a specific get this specific API, send

these parameters, I'm going to pull that information back and

then do something with it. It can be get me all the medical

records for this student, because I need to display it in

this interface. And it can be that kind of natural language,

to a point where then a combination of the MCP protocol

coupled with AI sitting behind the scenes can go and get that

relevant information. So the main use cases right now is

being more flexible in terms of the data that you can call.

Ultimately, it's still the same thing. You're asking for data.

It's going and doing something, bringing the data back, and then

displaying it wherever you need. But it's a more flexible natural

language powered by a AI kind of way, rather than an API being

quite structured.

I heard someone describe an MCP once like a USB

port, and I found that to be just a fascinatingly

straightforward way of explaining it that think of a

USB. Like the era before USB, that every different keyboard

needed a different cable, and the computer needed to

understand how that specific keyboard worked, or anything

like that. And then after USB, it doesn't need to know

specifically how that mouse or keyboard works. It's just that

it connects through USB. So think of it like a Universal

Plug standard that lets any AI model connect to any other

external system, and just without having to wire them up

together individually each time it's super duper powerful. And

Matt, I love that you said that, because that was certainly where

I was going to go a little bit as well, both in terms of, I

think, better embrace of the powers that the layer of AI can

build, not like building it directly in at every part,

because I think sometimes that's a trap, but I think the

analytical abilities and additional context that using AI

can provide schools. I love your in emergency example. I think

that's such a good one. Of providing additional data access

through natural language processing and natural language

queries is super powerful. That's a higher I'm going to go

to a lower level one, which is my forever one, which is just

better documentation, please. I think that the SIS vendors are

amazing, and I think sometimes they don't know all of the

capacities of their own product sometimes. And I think

additional documentation for what's possible would be

wonderful, because at the end of the day, a, it's your data and

B, we want to help you leverage it to do cool things. So when

there are updates made. You know, both Veracross and

Blackburn are larger organizations, and so I think

just continuing to focus on how they can ensure their vendor

partners, you know, like aura and ruvna always have access to

the most up to date information on capacities and how to unlock

those for our mutual clients. And I understand when we're

moving fast and trying to do a lot, that's tough, but I think

that, for me, always rings true of, you know, making it so we

don't have to then get on exactly as you said, Bill, get

on a, you know, you serving as the middle person between us and

an S is, if you and I can sit down and figure it out, that's a

much better outcome for everybody involved. Chief of all

the SIS. So I think that would be my simple what I would say is

the number one ask, as I always

have, I'm curious. So we've quickly reach the AI

point of the conversation, as we knew we would, as these systems

get built, and you're talking about bringing more in that

either the software is just doing it for you, or you're just

doing it for you. I'm curious, culturally with the technology

directors and then all the people that the technology

directors serve, what are you finding are the biggest

pushbacks, or where is the most resistance? Because when you

were talking about AI, and you're talking about safety, one

of the greatest concerns with AI is, like, we're giving all our

data away.

It's all going on to servers. What's anyone

really doing with it? Is it protected? Is it safe? Just when

we're using AI to figure out, like I just saw, can you upload

my kid's basketball schedule into my calendar, like things

like that, like the privacy factor for ourselves as

consumers with AI in schools, it seems like it's so much more

significant as we're talking about the safety of miners and

the privacy of miners. So are there pushbacks already as you

start talking about AI and how AI is working within your own

systems, and what are your answers? Yeah, so we have been

very careful whenever we look forward to how we would

implement solutions like that and tools like that. We're

really excited about its possibilities, but as of today,

we haven't implemented any of that into our live product for a

lot of the reasons you've just said, I think we're still in a

little bit of the wild wild west of AI in ed tech. And for us,

being a mission critical product of when you use roof net, it

just needs to work, no ifs ands or buts, full stop. And so I

think for us, that means we have to be very careful when

embracing new technologies and how we can use it, but

internally as a tool as a we like to call it a force

multiplier. Roof now has been all in it allows us as

employees, as team members, to get so much more out of our

individual skills and knowledge, to provide a lot more value and

benefit to our schools. Looking forward to how I think education

in particular will be embracing it. It's to allow better use of

people's functions. I don't think we want personally AI

making decisions. We want AI providing us with additional

context, additional information and additional views of a scope

to help us make the right decision. So at its best, it

should be enabling human ingenuity, not replacing it. And

I think in a rush, some folks have just thrown it in

everywhere, willy nilly, and I've typically found the best

technology leaders and the best schools are the ones that don't

get caught up in a rush to say a buzz word or come out swinging

against or for something. It's taking

a moment to realize, how can I best leverage

this to benefit my community? Great, Matt, how about you

balancing? We want to take full advantage of AI and all that

offers, and we're dealing with all of this sensitive data and

privacy,

similar to Marshall, where we're all in

internally. I think you know, in terms of what it can do for how

we operate internally, to deliver more value to schools,

it's amazing, but it's not quite ready yet. It still

hallucinates. It still gets things wrong, and AI in school

safety is only as. Good as the data that sits underneath it, a

lot of schools are still struggling with fundamental type

issues. Of this student is on a pass. They've gone to the

bathroom, or there's still an email sitting in an inbox that

the student is going to be absent, and that hasn't made its

way through to either the SAS or the aura platform and running

fancy AI workflows off the back of data that still isn't right

is fraught with danger, because it'll then sort of send it down

a path similar to Marshall. We haven't publicly launched

anything in the AI space, but obviously play around with it

internally with what we're doing. And one of the

interesting things that we did the other day was de identify

all of the PII data before we push it off into the model. So

we're looking at attendance patterns the other day, and

instead of sending student name or even the student ID with some

of the attendance data into the model, which was hosted in AWS

bedrock, so it's not going off outside of our cloud

infrastructure, we created a dummy ID which then mapped back

internally to the student ID and pushed that dummy ID off with

the attendance data. So there was no student name, no PII.

Wasn't even the student ID. So I think this de identification of

information before it's pushed off into the model is super

critical, as one layer doesn't protect everything, but thinking

about how we've got that gate before data gets pushed off into

these AI models, keeping that ring fenced is super important,

playing within the playground right now, keeping everything

internal. But I think to Marshall's point, the use cases

are not replacing jobs. It's how do you get AI and agents to do

things like follow up, which are routine behavior? You know, some

of the AI voice technology is getting fantastic right now,

where students missing hasn't turned up to class, and an

attendance administrator will then call through to the room,

or they'll call a parent in the future, all that stuff surely

can be automated so that attendance officer or the

teacher can get back to actually doing what their core job is.

Yeah, that's something that's not necessarily pushing

sensitive data off into the model. It's just automating

workflows in the same way that software has done in the last 20

to 30 years. It's just taking that next level, and I think AI

has just got that little bit more context where, again, like

the MCP conversation, not having to articulate every specific

step, you're just sending it off in a natural language way. And

it's learning over time and getting better again, all with

the intent of, how do we get these people back, actually

doing what they intended to do when they started their jobs and

not buried in spreadsheets and paper and having to make 20

calls of a morning.

I'd like to just express my gratitude to hear

that you all are very cautious in how you're handling the

information that schools are providing your respective

companies, because both of you are spot on. You still need that

human in the middle component that is absolutely necessary. I

just happened to hear an article today on the radio and NPR about

judges calling out attorneys who are providing briefs where

they're citing information that's completely incorrect or

cases that haven't even happened. So I can't imagine

having to face up with a judge and say, you know, sorry, I used

AI and it just made this up, and I didn't really proof read it or

examine it. When you start talking about people's children,

the landscape changes immensely. And I think what companies

today, and I'm talking about more of some of the older

companies as well, is that trust needs to be maintained and it

needs to be reviewed and steps need to be taken to ensure that

from our seats, we're constantly having to review and vet

applications. That's one of the challenging aspects of our jobs,

and knowing that you all are very cognizant of that is

soothing to my ears.

Yeah, and I think that comes from a respect

for our communities and a trust built over time of understanding

what folks I think need, and understanding the gravity and

the importance of what we do. The other thing I think is

really important that I think sometimes gets lost in a

Zeitgeist for a new technology, not that it was real, but the

metaverse, you know, that was never going anywhere. But, you

know, people were like, Oh, it'll all be there. But look

where we are now. Is that? What's the point? What are we

trying to achieve here? What is the actual end goal we're trying

to have? What's the outcome? And AI, is one tool in our belt, but

it's not the only one, and it's one that has been added to our

roster of ways. When we understand our clients, our

schools are going, Hey, we're really struggling with x, we're

really struggling with y. When we look at it from a holistic

level, it's just another avenue, another step along the journey

of solving a problem for them, it's never it shouldn't be a

zero sum, and at the end of the day, it's just a way we can help

schools get back to just teaching. Working and helping

them spend as little time as possible on things that just

need to be done that aren't that human. Element of educating the

child. In our run a show, we were talking about, one

of the things we had listed is like the real time student

accountability, knowing where people are, Matt, when you were

talking about aura, and the fact that, you know, starting in

boarding schools. And I've never worked at a boarding school.

I've worked with boarding schools on a number of different

things, and I think about how they need to know where students

are and how difficult of a process that actually is. And

you may have a few day students, but you've got attendance. Who's

here? Who should I expect in my class? But on all of that free

time. How are they accounted for when there is no structure

around where they have to be, but we need to know where they

actually are. And I think about a use case that I was actually,

literally on the phone yesterday with Rachel at ruvda, talking

about, you know, an issue that we have with students who when

they come in in the morning, we have the attendance, but then if

they have, like senior privileges, they then check out

and then go out of the building. So they're present with us in

terms of, we know where they are, but their actual location

is something that's a little bit different, because they're in

different spots, and yesterday, for me, exemplified a great

opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with a vendor about

a particular problem that we're trying to solve. But I want to

turn this slightly to both of you and say you're trying to

solve this problem for schools, what does it mean to know where

somebody is in a given moment, and whether that's integrating

or having your own attendance systems, having your own check

in, having kiosks that you can go in and out of. Part of it

comes down to where are the gaps, and where can you tighten

up those gaps? And if that requires the students to be part

of that process. What does that mean? If that requires the

teachers to be more involved, what does that mean? So if

you're looking at those gaps, where do you see those gaps

existing right now so that we can actually fully deliver on

what we mean when we say real time student accountability?

Yeah, there's a lot on that. Being in boarding

schools, the orientation of Aura has been built. From that

complex perspective in boarding schools is very much leave or

passes of border is going away for the weekend. They're going

to their friend's house, or they're going home, or they're

on a bus to a movie, cinema excursion, whatever it may be,

an unstructured schedule of having a pass to fill in where

they are at that present moment. And you know, at the boarding

house, it was signing in with the student on an NFC tile and

then signing out. The extension into day schools has got its own

series of complexities, and I think there's lots of gaps, to

be brutally honest. And we got into the mode, and we've

actually built an attendance solution separate to the SIS,

that's bi directional and allows the teachers to take attendance

in aura, and then that pushes back for academic records into

the CIS and other processes that need to run off attendance. But

one of the key learnings in the last six to 12 months has been

attendance and location, whilst interrelated, are two very

different things, and we see attendance as almost like a

financial ledger. Where it's taken it's set in stone. It

doesn't need to change. The student is either present or

not. There's context about their location that's important when

taking attendance, the other students on a pass, they're

currently in the health center, or they're down at a music

lesson or sports class at this present point, that provides

that context to the teacher when taking attendance. But

ultimately, it's a binary, they're here or they're not, and

that's locked away and it's filed away. So that nuance

between location and attendance has been a key learning when it

comes to location, some of these school campuses are massive, and

depending on the philosophy of the school, they're allowed off

campus for lunch, or they're not, or there's after school

activities, there's dismissals, predominantly usually in the

Lower School of student Arriving, student leaving, and

that could be parent pickup. It could be them walking home. So I

think the gaps are beyond class attendance, and it's like what's

happening in all of those we found 84 scenarios when we dug

deep into this nurse's office after school events, dismissals.

So we're just scratching the surface here, but I think

thinking through the lens of attendance and location and

location becomes really important in the event of

emergency, because even though they marked present in class 30

minutes ago, if their location is now the nurse's office,

that's super important in the event of emergency, because. If

they're not physically in that class location, they're at the

nurse's office. One's real time, another one's kind of more

ledger point in time, record keeping

very well, said Matt and we came to a very

similar conclusion. After the pandemic, when a lot of our

schools started using the QR codes we had issued people to

say, hey, they successfully filed a health questionnaire

they can arrive. Here's how they tell you they arrive. And we

summed it up as the SIS is really good at answering the

question of, did they learn it's not built to answer the question

of, where the heck are they and what does that mean,

functionally throughout the day, right? They're just very

different things. And moreover than that, a lot of schools take

class attendance because they have to, not because it's

fundamentally useful for a lot of their community. So there's

just a lot of gaps, as you said, that exist both because of

deficiencies in technology, but also because, I think schools

are starting to rethink whether they do things because they

should or because they have to. And I think looking through that

lens is pushed a lot of folks to change. And to your point

exactly, Bill, I think that's for us why we've been really

working to help understand more holistically with things like

roof and attendance and shameless shout out, we just

released dismissal literally today. So that's exciting for

me, through understanding where that location is throughout the

day, and not just physically where they are, but critically,

what does that mean? What does that mean for their attendance

the rest of the day? What does that mean in terms of the

communications that have to go with parents? What does that

mean in the case of an emergency? So better

understanding all of that, I think, is going to be critical,

because, Matt, I couldn't agree with you more, there are a ton

of gaps throughout the day, but I think most importantly for us,

I think specifically to each school, they're going to look

really different. And the correct solution for those gaps

are going to look really different, because one school

might really be interested in having, let's say, an external

system taking attendance in the class. Another one might say,

look, we've already got that all in Blackbaud. We don't want

folks opening up a separate system or things for the nurse

and things in that capacity for after school. So I think more

holistically, being flexible to understand what is the school

trying to achieve. You know, they want to know whether

they're in the nurses office, what time they went there, and

the specifics of capturing that and getting that could look

different for schools. Might be NFC, might be RFID, might be

GPS, might be something we haven't even thought of. But I

think providing the flexibility to solve for that within the

confines of what they have and what they might want to be

doing, both like technologically and operationally, is how we

come to some really exciting outcomes and how you come up

with solutions. Henry Ford, there's a quote attributed to

him, which is, like, you know, if I gave people what they

wanted, we would have a faster horse. So I think that's how you

kind of end up with those types of interesting and novel

solutions. Is when we think about what we're trying to

achieve, not just how we can solve it, how we might think it

should be solved. At the end of the day, flexibility and working

with schools to solve a problem within their community the way

it needs to be solved, not just the way we immediately think is

how we're going to come to

the correct

answer. It's interesting that you both

settled on like that location piece and that being like the

crux of that issue. Because the reason this came up in the

conversations that I had was because we were dealing it with

fire drills, and we were trying to see if we've got everyone

accounted for. You know, I have instructions on here's what you

do when you log in to check for the accountability piece on your

phones to make sure you've got everyone but then right next to

it, I've got a published query out of Veracross that's got the

check in, check out log. So if you don't see the person, you've

got a cross reference to that check in, check out log. So

having that conversation with our grade level deans, which is

what I was just in at our high school, was an idea of trying to

explain the difference between what you're looking at in one

place is attendance, which is one thing, what we're looking at

in another is the idea of is a location mechanism, a protocol

for gathering, whether somebody is on or off campus, from that

location. And they're two separate things, and that mental

hurdle to get over that was something that was really hard

to explain, but they're checking it like, why isn't that showing

it's because they're not absent, like we would have to understand

and how we are impacting the way, and we're looking at that

data, and depending on you mentioned teachers taking

attendance, and not really necessarily, For what reason are

they doing it in individual classes? Well, we don't know

where that reporting needs to go, you know. We can't have

statuses flipping back and forth, you know. So there's

interesting problems to solve there. And it got to the point

in the conversation I was having, is there anything we

need to ask of students to do, and to that level, from like, a

privacy standpoint, Marshall, you mentioned GPS or, like,

tracking them, like whatever it may be. And then I think about

that privacy piece of it, and what do we need to ask of

students? Do we need to allow them to check themselves in, or

do whatever they need to do in those events? It's. What more

can we ask, and what should we ask? And what really can we ask

in order to overcome some of those gaps when we need more

inputs from other people, particularly the students,

Bill, what's fascinating about your

statements is that if we listen to what Matt said earlier, he

talked about attendance being transactional, it's very much a

singleton event for a teacher or even for the administrative

team. Were they here? Were they not here? And then that location

piece, and we've been having these conversations as well. And

I think what's been really helpful is both sis providers

are looking at a 360 view of students, where attendance is a

piece of it. It's a data point that is really, really important

about the well being of your student community, along with

conduct. And How is that connected to attendance, and how

is that then connected to academic performance, and how is

that connected to how they're doing in practice, for whether

it's the arts or in athletics, so we're really starting to pull

the veneer off of that single transaction that Matt mentioned

earlier, and really diving deep into what it's like to be a

student within one of our schools.

And I think if you think about that AI piece that

you were talking about and being able to ask a question in a

natural language, like, where is Sean Stites? If we were to ask

that question, it would be able to look at the attendance log.

It would be able to look in the check in, check out log, and it

would be able to look at those multitude of things, or be able

to look at the sporting events and understand all of those

things. I think that if we go back to the AI piece, if we

think about where that can really help the work that we're

asking all of you to help solve for us as schools, that's a

layer right there that I would be like, Okay, let's go in on

that. Because to me, that's just the thing that we don't have to

worry about, is this endpoint available on the API? How does

it impact this? How does it do this? It's that natural language

question that can look at multiple sources and give us

what we need in those actual moments that if we can build

towards, we're going to have a much better chance of actually

knowing where people are in the moment that we ask that

question.

I think Bill just to cover that point, one thing

that we haven't spoken about in understanding the location of

the student is, where are they expected to be the schedule, and

the schedule is sitting across multiple different systems, if

you think about not only class attendance, but also then

extracurricular after school activities, excursions, and then

knowing, then the location of the student and it not being

where they're expected to be creates a discrepancy, which

then needs some form of interrogation, depending on how

severe it is. I think, to your point about AI in the future, if

it could do some of the groundwork and be integrating

with some of these other systems and saying, Well, there's a past

there, and they're not expected to be there because Mum or Dad

called in earlier today and said that they're going to be off for

the afternoon. It's that level of nuance that takes a lot of

time. So it's, where are they expected to be? Where are they

now, real time, location. And then there's the attendance,

file away, lock away, academic transcripts, funding, depending

on the school. So I just wanted to quickly talk about the

student agency of check in. I mean, the technology is there,

right? Facial recognition, biometric types of ways of

scanning faces, you know, fingerprints as they walk into a

classroom. The technology has been there for years, but it's

more of that privacy. You know, in some states it's just

completely outright banned, not allowed in minors. But there's a

spectrum of teacher taking all the agency, marking the role,

marking location, borders, inherently, have always had a

lot more agency because they're away from home and they're

checking themselves in and accountable for themselves. I

think if we could bring it more into the day school where it's

more student led attendance in a way that still respects privacy,

would be a great outcome for schools, because not only does

it make the real time location record more accurate, it's also

putting the agency ownership back on the student and taking

less time from the teacher in order to update it, because I

think that's what we see, is this doesn't need to be more

work on a teacher's plate. I think there was a discussion

about change management. If updating location and updating

tenants takes more time for a teacher, then naturally, there's

not going to be as much adoption within a school of doing this.

If the real time location is not up to date, then the emergency

functionality is not as rich. So how do we come back to that core

of making it simple to capture this location data without

impeding on a student's privacy so that the end goal of keeping

students safe is achieved? So yeah, just my kind of thoughts

on the complexity.

Piece of this, but it's an exciting area to

solve. I really like the way you said that, Matt, because I think

it's almost looking for that really nice middle ground

between, how do we empower students, but not entirely rely

on them, while also removing as much as we can from teachers

plate without fully removing because I think you will need

both parties in this process, no matter what the question is, how

can we leverage both of what their capacities and

responsibilities are to get the best outcome? And I think that's

really to your point. What I'm super excited to think about,

because one of the things for rubna We've been building

towards for years is that understanding of throughout the

day, from before the first bell to after the last class ends,

where are you and what does that mean? And I think now, as we

look intra day, whether that's going on a pass, whether that's

going to a field trip, whether that's during an emergency, how

we can leverage capacities to make this process a lot easier,

and also, just to kind of come back to my shtick of like

relative to what schools are open to doing, because I think

you could sit down with two schools and both of them could

give you incredibly passionate and incredibly correct answers.

One on the side of my students are not going to be taking their

own attendance, and the other, on the side of I'm totally okay

with students taking their own attendance. And I think both of

those folks are completely correct, given the gamut of

independent school culture and beliefs and the ways in which

they function. And so the question is not just, how do we

collect that information, it's, how do we provide ways that work

within both contexts, and then on top of that, have the context

from something like AI, from analytics and things like that

on top to provide additional value. So I think it's a really

fascinatingly amazing time to be an ed tech entrepreneur, because

of just the capacity increases and the conversations that are

happening within schools and within the community of ATLIS

and all these other wonderful associations,

nice. Yeah, we appreciate all that enthusiasm.

It is an exciting time, for sure. And as usual, on this

podcast, we run out of time, like we get going with these

conversations, and we wish we had more time. And that's

totally normal here. Before we let you guys go, though, I

wanted to give a chance to anyone who's listening right

now, or maybe they've been thinking, Yeah, we do a good job

with safety. Perhaps we could be doing more, or maybe we know we

want to be doing more. And maybe they're considering their tech

stack, and they're looking at different platforms, etc. I know

sometimes they're like hidden taxes in systems, sometimes

they're things that they're not pitfalls, but it's just

questions that weren't asked when they were considering

platforms. What's the one thing that you know from all of your

experiences, people need to ask this question more as they're

considering platforms like these, because it's very

enlightening. The way the vendors get to answer this

question, it's enlightening. You can learn a lot. What's

something that like people often don't ask that you feel like,

yeah, people should

ask this more. Am I allowed to give three?

Because I have the same three I get every time I'm asked this

question, go for it. Number one, can I talk to an engineer? I

always tell folks, get someone technical from your vendors

before you put your name on a contract, because if they are

not willing to provide you someone that is involved with

the process of creating that product, I would be wary,

because it means they might be outsourcing it, or it means they

don't really want to go that deep with you, but as a director

of technology, you're forming a partnership, and they should be

willing and excited to engage with you. I love having those

conversations. Two it's ask your own network about who's using

what product. When I say like, if you ask a vendor for a

reference, they're going to give you the person that's had the S

Plus amazing experience with them. Ask around, talk to the

people you know, talking with them. Of course, the reference

is amazing, because I'm sure they're using the product a lot,

but the people you know are really important as well. And

number three, and very specifically, ask, what does the

process look like between going from

where I am today to successfully using your product,

and what does it look like specifically, and what do I need

to know ahead of time on where I should be focusing on making

sure there are no pitfalls. You know, give me a real firm walk

through on understanding how people see success for your

solution. The one that I'd add there is, it's the conversation

that we had around attendance, location and schedule, in terms

of bringing in not just a narrow set of stakeholders, but

everyone, ultimately, is responsible for student safety.

The point is about broading out the stakeholders, because in a

location tracking platform, it's not just about having the IT

director and the attendance manager on the call. It's about

that head of safety. It's about the deans of students that are

responsible for the location of those students to ensure that

all of their pain points are captured when a process looks

quite narrowly at attendance, I think it misses a lot of those

gaps that we spoke about before, and understanding how those gaps

are being addressed. Right? Now and ensuring that the system can

address all those different scenarios is super important.

Excellent. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank

you both so much for being willing to come on and share

your insights. I know our listeners really appreciate it.

We've got Matt Varley from aura, Marshall singer from ruvna. We

look forward to seeing you guys at the Atlas conference coming

up soon, which will have passed when this airs. So we had a

great time. We had a great time in Columbus. We could say, I'm

sure we will. I

want to point out one thing, because,

oh, shocking. Bill wants to point out something.

The reason I thought I knew what the MCP was

is because I'm an 80s nerd, and the MCP was the master control

program in the Tron movie, right? So that's why I was,

like, I've heard MCP before. Where is this? And that's why I

was scared of it, because MCP was the villain in the Tron

movie, and this is not the villain, all right? And with

that, I think we've reached end of line.

You're welcome.

Yes. Thank you. There you go, Peter. Thank you.

Thank you so much, everybody. We will put Sean

Stites location in the show notes. This has been talking

technology with ATLIS, produced by the Association of technology

leaders in independent schools. For more information about Atlas

and Atlas membership. Please visit the atlas.org if you

enjoyed this discussion, please subscribe, leave a review and

share this podcast with your colleagues in the independent

school community. Thank you for listening. You.