Emergency Rolls are an Orah feature to be used in the event of an emergency situation. These rolls function similarly to a daily roll check, but with the added ability to send notices to staff, students & parents at the start and end of the roll. School administrators will often set up an emergency roll template for any possible situation that could occur, so they may craft the appropriate messaging to fit with the scenario.

Emergency rolls also have an added functionality that allows students to mark themselves as safe or in danger and update their location, which is especially useful during lockdowns or other situations where students and staff will not necessarily be gathered together.

To initiate an Emergency Roll simply click 'Roll Check' from your home board and select 'Start Emergency Roll' from the drop-down menu.

Select the roll type:

Note: Dependent upon the settings created by your school's Orah administrators, you may not have the permissions to start an Emergency Roll.

Confirm your emergency settings on the roll check settings page, and then select 'Start'.

Once you press start, the alerts set in the roll template will be pushed out to all parties. Staff will now be able to mark students as present/missing as in a normal roll check and will also be able to view updates made by other staff members or by students participating in the roll check themselves.
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Marking Students During an Emergency Roll

When an Emergency Roll check has been initiated by a staff member you will receive a push notification (iOS) and see an in-app banner appear within your Orah account to inform you of the matter at hand.

Once you have received this notification, please join the roll.

Work through the roll check to mark students as safe. As this is a live roll check, you will be collaborating with other faculty members to complete this roll check. You will see students marked as safe and by which faculty member on your roll call.

Once all your students are accounted for, a staff member will complete the roll check and push out a notification via email or push to update the different parties on this matter.

When a staff member has activated a roll check, students will receive a push notification to advise them of the situation.

Students have the ability to mark themselves as safe from their Orah Student App. All they need to do is open the app, select the emergency notification, and select the applicable response. Their response will reflect on your roll check.

Two separate settings are required before a staff member can mark themselves safe. Enabling only one of them is the most common cause of staff being unable to respond during a drill.

⚠️ Warning: staff who are not collaborators will receive the emergency alert but will have no button to act on it. They will appear on the roll as unaccounted for until a collaborator marks them. If you want every staff member to be able to respond for themselves, every staff member must be included as a collaborator on that roll type.

Please note: a collaborator can mark every student and staff member on the roll — there is no self-only option. Marking is not restricted to the person's own record.

If staff cannot see the mark-safe option, ask your Orah administrator to check both settings on the roll type: that staff are accounted for in the roll, and that those staff are included as collaborators. See Configuring Emergency Rolls for where these settings live.

Once your Emergency Roll has been initiated, you will have the ability to contact your students to ensure they are accounted for. Simply select the 'Contact' button under their profile card to reveal their contact information.

Note: Emails, calls, and texts made to the students will come from the staff member's phone and not from the Orah platform.

Staff received the alert but have no way to respond

This is expected behaviour when those staff are not collaborators on the roll. See the warning above — "Account staff in this roll" sends the alert, collaborator permission grants the mark-safe action.

"Error: Creating emergency roll"

The cause of this error is not yet documented. If you see it, note the exact time you attempted to start the roll and which roll template you were using, then contact Orah support with those details so the attempt can be traced. If the emergency is live, start a different emergency roll template in the meantime rather than retrying the same one.

A roll is stuck under "Rolls in progress"

A roll that cannot be completed from the app has to be closed from the backend by Orah support. Contact Orah support with the roll name and the date it was started and they will complete it for you. Leaving it open does not prevent you from starting another emergency roll.

Marking a student absent does not create a pass

Marking a student as absent on an emergency roll does not create a pass or a leave record for them. If a student's location is set to home, they will not appear in a coloured tile unless they are on a pass. This is expected — the emergency roll records accountability, it does not change where a student is signed to.

Schools can trigger an Emergency Roll in Orah automatically from an external system — no staff member needs to open the app during an emergency. This is especially valuable when every second counts: the roll can start the moment a physical alarm is triggered.

Orah's Open API trigger allows external systems — such as fire panels, mass notification platforms (Singlewire, AlertMedia), building automation systems, or custom scripts — to send a single authenticated API call to Orah. The result is identical to a staff member starting the roll manually: the same notifications go out, the same staff workflow is activated, and all roll records and reporting function as normal.

Setup overview:

For full setup details, see Triggering Emergency Rolls from External Systems (Open API).

Have more questions? Click the chat icon at the bottom of this page to reach the Orah support team.

Further Reading:

Tags:
Emergency Roll, Emergency, Roll Check, Safety, Lockdown, Fire Drill, Open API, External System, API Trigger, Collaborator, Mark Safe, Rolls in Progress