How Bremen High School District 228 Simplified the Family Experience

Challenge

Before Jim Boswell took on the payments problem at Bremen High School District 228, the district had two paths for families paying fees: write a check and walk it into an office, or navigate the state’s e-pay system — a tool the district had no visibility into, no control over, and no way to connect to anything else families were already using.

Neither option reflected how families expected to interact with their kids’ school in 2023.

Jim’s broader role as Director of Technology and Operations had given him a clear-eyed view of what disconnected systems cost: not just in staff time, but in the family experience. He’d watched the district accumulate a different tool for every problem — transportation, registration, lunch, fees — none of them talking to each other.

“It’s 2023. What on earth are we doing,” he said.

The bigger issue wasn’t any single tool. It was the absence of an ecosystem — one coherent place where families could take care of everything related to their student. Jim had a name for that place: the PowerSchool parent portal. And he had a question: why wasn’t paying fees part of it?

Why RevTrak

Jim knew that families are their customers, and customers shouldn't have to go to nine different places to take care of one school.

He didn't find RevTrak through a sales pitch. Another district told him it was working — and for someone who makes every vendor decision based on peer trust, that mattered.

The fit was clear. RevTrak's integration with PowerSchool meant fees assigned by a bookkeeper would show up instantly for a family to pay, without anyone leaving the portal they already used for registration, class selection, and everything else. The vision Jim had for a single, coherent family experience wasn't a future state anymore — it was something another school was already doing.

“Parents want an intuitive process for the biggest things — and registration is the biggest one. Where do I go to pay my fees? It’s in the parent portal.”

Modernizing payments was always part of the goal — but so was making sure families only ever had to be in one place. RevTrak made both possible without asking them to learn something new or go somewhere unfamiliar.

Results

When the district moved registration fees into PowerSchool through RevTrak, families didn't need convincing. The option was already waiting for them inside a portal they already trusted, and that familiarity did the work.

“We just pointed it out — hey, there’s a new way to pay, click here, and it’s going to reflect immediately,” Jim said. Adoption was fast. There was no friction campaign, no training push. The experience was simply easier than anything the district had offered before.

“Our bookkeeper assesses fees for the year, everyone gets a registration fee, and the moment they click that button, a parent can go into PowerSchool, click pay, and all the accounting is done in the background. It’s done.”

Today, every fee assigned in PowerSchool is payable through RevTrak — registration, annual school fees, and more — all in the same place families were already going.

The Bottom Line

What Jim built at Bremen wasn’t a payment upgrade. It was a rethinking of the family experience — a decision to stop asking parents to navigate a different system for every transaction and start meeting them where they already were.

Fees, registration, class selection, grades: they all live in the same portal now. Paying is no longer something families have to figure out. It’s just something they do, in the same place they do everything else. For districts still managing fees through disconnected portals or state e-pay systems, that simplicity is closer than it might seem.

“If you’re a PowerSchool customer, working with RevTrak has worked great for us.”