Convenience To Go: How Eaton Academy Offers Restaurant Food using K12 Lunch Payments

INTRODUCTION

Background

Eaton Academy is a private  school in Roswell, Georgia with an intentionally small population of students and an approximately 5 :1 student to teacher ratio. Within these parameters, Eaton Academy has the opportunity to innovate their educational offerings and provide individualized learning opportunities for every student. 

Serving students from  kindergarten through young adulthood, Eaton Academy offers programs for students in a variety of unique situations. Some of their students are competitive athletes who travel and complete their assignments remotely. Dawn Fix, Director of Postgraduate Studies at Eaton Academy, explains: “We have a really flexible schedule for them, so they can take the materials with them and do it on the road. We've got a racecar driver, a tennis player, and we've got somebody who's on Broadway,” she adds.

Other Eaton Academy students attend school in-person but require unique programs for their special needs, such as Attention Deficit Disorder or Down Syndrome. They offer a program for young adults with Autism where they can learn the life skills they need beyond the classroom. “We help them get jobs and learn to cook and clean. We have a mock apartment and we mess it up and they have to go in and make the bed and vacuum do the dishes. Then we have our apartment complex just down the road where some of our kids are living, and we will check in on them there,” Fix says.

They even have a program where students can practice attending college classes while they still have the supervision and support of their high school teachers. “We do two college courses for a whole  semester and give the students feedback on what they're working on and what they need to improve,” Fix explains.

A New Way to Do K12 Lunch Payment Options

Across all of these programs, Eaton Academy offers their students a dining experience that is both unique and fun. Their lunch program includes the option to purchase a lunch menu item from a local restaurant every school day. And they use their school store, powered by OSP by Edlio, to run the program.

Here’s how it works:

• School administrators create the lunch listings in the Eaton Academy OSP store. Each day of the week is a different restaurant option for students to experience.
• Within each daily listing, the students can use the drop-down menu to select their menu choice (for example: a gyro or spaghetti from the Greek restaurant on Thursdays; pepperoni or cheese from the pizza place on Fridays), and a second drop-down menu allows them to choose their beverage.
• Families can purchase as many menu listings as they want within their transaction, and then check out at one time to pay for everything through the OSP store and app.
• On the back end of the reporting, Eaton staff members? can pull the report for the daily lunch selections and use that to call the restaurant with their order.
• The Eaton Academy staff then picks up the meals and delivers them to the students.

“When I first started here, they would complete this process on paper, and you'd send a piece of paper home to families and get a piece of paper back in,” Fix explains. That system was both time-consuming and overly complicated, turning a nice perk for students and families into an overwhelming workload for Eaton Academy staff. “So we tried Excel, and then we switched to Google; but Google doesn’t add it up or collect the money, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s see what we can do,’” Fix adds. 

Since Fix’s own son attends a nearby public school using OSP for their online school payments, Fix knew there was a better option. She partnered with OSP by Edlio and in that process, has been able to streamline the process of collecting funds for the lunch program to keep it running smoothly for students, families, and staff members.