What This 2026 Independent School Safety Research Means for Your Business Office

This is the first in a three-part series. The next two cover what this 2026 independent school safety research means for technology leaders and for school leadership.

In early 2026, Orah commissioned the State of Independent School Safety 2026 report to understand how independent schools manage safety in practice, beyond how policy says they should. True North Research conducted an in-depth survey of 85 US independent schools for us, in partnership with ATLIS. One finding stood out to me: 76% experienced a real safety incident in the past 12 months, spanning medical emergencies, severe weather, unauthorized campus access, and genuine lockdowns.

Business officers already weigh safety against every other call on the budget. What this data aims to do is to add a layer of comparison. Where are peer schools putting their money, what are they getting for it, and where are the gaps that are costing staff time and creating unnecessary risk?

Most schools are already growing their safety budgets

Across the sector, schools are investing in safety platforms and initiatives. 47% of independent schools expect their safety budget to grow in the next 12 months, and 80% plan to maintain or increase it. Only 1% expect a decrease. For a business office, that reframes the conversation. The live question is rarely whether to fund safety, but how to allocate what is already being committed.

What the data does not support is a simple “spend more and the problem goes away” story. Among schools spending less than $50k a year, 56% report feeling highly constrained by resources. But even among schools spending more, close to a third still feel significantly constrained. Budget size alone is not what separates the schools that feel in control from the ones that do not.

That sends the allocation question somewhere more useful than the top-line number. The schools that report the most confidence tend to be the ones whose systems are connected— where attendance, location, and emergency response draw on the same record instead of living in separate tools. Connected versus disconnected is the distinction the rest of this data keeps returning to.

A 32-minute answer is a cost, even when nothing goes wrong

The report found that only 56% of schools can consistently confirm that a student with an unexcused absence is safe. When they do, it takes 32 minutes on average. Ninety-five percent still rely on manual steps to start an emergency response.

That is staff time and institutional exposure in equal measure. Every unexplained absence that takes half an hour to resolve is administrator hours on the phone, and a window where the school cannot say with confidence where a student is. 

Curt Schubert, CFO at Marian Catholic High School, described his school’s manual version of accounting for students: teachers work from rosters, confirm to a designated administrator, who relays to the office, who relays to the principal. It works, and it depends entirely on people executing a chain of steps under pressure. The schools narrowing that 32 minutes are the ones replacing the chain with a single connected record. That is the layer we built Orah to provide on top of the SIS.

You do not have to replace what already works

A common business office worry is that better safety means a costly rip-and-replace of systems the school already paid for. The two schools we spoke with on a recent Blackbaud webinar found the opposite. Both run Blackbaud Student Information System, and for good reason: independent schools rely on the SIS as the academic source of truth. At Episcopal High School, the registrar, IT, and business teams keep working in Blackbaud while attendance and location data flows through Orah and syncs back.

“If you’ve tried to do a software switch, they do not want to go away from Blackbaud,” said Chris Davies, Associate Dean of Students at Episcopal. “But they’re able to continue working in Blackbaud.”

The return shows up in places the business office will recognize. At Holderness School, knowing who is leaving campus turned into better resource planning. “I can give our kitchen staff a pretty clear number of who’s gonna be gone any given weekend,” said Dean of Students Tyler Cabot. “We have a much earlier understanding of roughly how many kids are gonna be gone.” That is food service, staffing, and weekend programming planned against real numbers instead of a Saturday-night guess.

The same connected data closes welfare gaps that carry real institutional risk. “We’ve got a better picture of kids who are kind of slipping through the cracks,” Davies said. “It allows you to see a better view of each individual kid.”

The pattern in both schools, and in the customer stories we publish, is the same. Blackbaud stays the academic source of truth. Orah extends it by keeping student location accurate through the day, the system of action for knowing where students are. Neither school replaced what worked. They connected it.

The questions worth bringing to your next board meeting

The report frames safety investment as a governance decision, not a purchasing one. Three questions translate the data into a business office agenda:

• How does our safety spend compare to peer schools of similar size, and are we meeting the standard of care our families expect?
• When a student is unaccounted for, how long does it currently take us to confirm they are safe, and what is that costing us in staff time?
• Are we adding tools on top of what we have, or connecting the systems we already own?

The schools reporting the most confidence are not the ones spending the most for its own sake. They are the ones treating attendance and location as one connected record and framing the investment around risk reduction.

The full data set, including spend benchmarks by school size and a governance question for each finding, is in the report. I would encourage any business officer to read it alongside your own numbers before the next budget cycle.

Download the State of Independent School Safety 2026 report.