Starting in March, parents with children attending Immaculata High School will be able to make school payments online by using a service called School Cash Online.
With School Cash Online, parents will be able to pay for things such as yearbooks and school trips without having to double-check that the cash or cheque was safely delivered.
All schools under the Ottawa Catholic School Board, including Immaculata, will be offering School Cash Online by the end of the year. Currently, 21 OCSB schools have been providing the online service since November of last year. Immaculata was one of the 21 schools that were being trained to introduce the service in March.
To use the service, parents will have to go to a website to register an account. Once they have registered, they will be able to select any items from a list that has already been set up depending on which school their children go to. The procedure will be similar to any sort of online shopping and will enable records to be automatically updated.
David Leach, the Catholic board’s superintendent of finance and administration, says there is a lot of handling involved when parents pay with cash and cheques.
“That money, the cash or cheque, would go from home to school with their child, to the teacher in the child’s classroom. It would have to then be taken from the classroom down to the office, all counted and sorted and then it would have to be recorded and deposited at the bank, etcetera,” says Leach. “So it’s very time intensive.”
Compared to the old system, Leach says the new cashless service will greatly enhance security.
“When you are sending cash with your children to school, you know there’s always the possibility that it can be lost or stolen at any point between leaving home and arriving at the school office and ultimately getting to the bank and being deposited,” he says. “Cash is something that is always a temptation and a difficulty.”
While OCSB schools will still accept cash and cheques, Leach says the goal is to reduce the amount of cash and cheques that they receive.
Parents have been asking for an online payment service for some time, Leach says. Gayle Carrozzi, the board’s finance manager, says School Cash Online is a very popular service amongst the schools that have already been using it.
Suzanne Lukowski, whose daughter attends Immaculata, says she does most of her transactions online already and that this new service will be make things easier for her.
“I can do it at my own convenience, whether it’s at work, at a neighbour’s, in my car, at home,” says Lukowski. “I can fill out whatever I need to do online and I don’t have to print it out, write anything, or make any cheques. I can just do it online.”
She says it will also help her stay better organized. With the current cash and cheque system, Lukowski says there is a lot of manual work involved and a lot of paper printing.
According to Leach, the school board is “a little bit more advanced” in terms of implementing an online payment system, but he says it is something that all school boards are looking at using.
Michael Carson, chief financial officer at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, says the board is looking at their needs and requirements before looking for proposals from qualified vendors.
Carson says the board can’t implement an online payment service until they consider its impact on all of the schools. This kind of initiative, he says, will require a “significant financial investment” as well as involvement from school staff and parents.
Lukowski says Immaculata should have set up an online payment system a long time ago. She says it’s “overdue.”
“They should have done it years ago. But again, I guess it’s a big wheel that has to shift gears, right? It’s the institution that has to change. It affects all the schools, so it’s a slow process, perhaps,” says Lukowski. “I find schools are sometimes the last ones to change when it should be some of the first.”