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SchoolReach Reduces Negative Lunch Balances
Snapshot Overview
McLean County School District, located near Bloomington-Normal, IL, enrolls over 12,500 students and supports 21 facilities. Every month, the district found itself burdened with hundreds of students carrying negative lunch balances. An innovative solution was required to address the situation, so McLean County School District turned to SchoolReach®.
Contact Strategy
McLean County deployed SchoolReach's EZ Lunch Balance, enabling administrators to deliver a pre-recorded message to parents regarding their student's lunch account balance. As with all SchoolReach services, EZ Lunch Balance is a 'hosted' solution, which allowed McLean County to initiate the service without installing or managing costly hardware, software, or additional phone lines.
"We started using SchoolReach to cancel school for snow days," said Michele Lemek, Assistant to the Superintendent of McLean County Schools. "We loved the system so much that we began to use it to help with administrative duties because it was so easy to use and worked so seamlessly with our student database system."
Successful Results
Before McLean County started using EZ Lunch Balance, hundreds of students carried negative lunch balances. Many parents had no idea that their children were purchasing additional à la carte items that were not covered in their lunch budgets. Even though mailed and emailed notices were being sent, parents were slow to respond. Now that parents are immediately reminded when lunch balances get extremely low or fall below zero, less than 20 students per month in the entire district, on average, have negative lunch account balances.
"Not only have we virtually eliminated our negative lunch balance problem, but we've also saved more time and money by eliminating all the notices that we were mailing and sending home. We use SchoolReach for pretty much everything now," said Lemek. "Each school has an account and even organizations like the softball team and the chess club uses it to relay information. We have received such a positive response from our parents that we know we will continue using SchoolReach."