Case Study
How Lake Central Built a Cashless Campus One Payment at a Time
Now the culture is here at Lake Central — it's just a given. That's where you go to pay. Nobody has to think twice about it.
Challenge
Lake Central School Corporation had been using RevTrak for years — but barely scratching the surface. The platform was mostly handling food service payments, and the person previously responsible for it wasn’t inclined to explore further. If it worked, that was enough.
Meanwhile, families were still paying for activities in cash and checks. Events like prom meant hundreds of students standing in line to buy tickets. Fees were tracked inconsistently. And the district had no centralized way to move payments online, even as parents increasingly expected that option.
What the district needed wasn’t a new tool. It needed someone willing to use the one it already had.
The Shift
When Theresa Scherzinger moved into the SIS administrator role, she inherited RevTrak along with everything else — and immediately saw what it could do.
Rather than waiting for vendor guidance or top-down directives, she started building stores herself. A prom ticketing page. A donation form. A fundraiser. Each one took minutes to set up, and each one quietly expanded what the district thought was possible with RevTrak.
“I just started doing it. It’s very easy — you upload a logo, it’s cute, it’s easy. Prom, a donation, a fundraiser — we set something up last week called Hunger Heroes to take donations for kids with food service deficits.”
Her admin team quickly took notice. Requests started coming in: Can we do this? Can we do that? The answer was almost always yes. And with each new use case, the district’s dependence on cash and manual processes shrank a little more.
How They Built the Culture
Going cashless isn’t a flip of a switch — it’s a series of deliberate choices that, over time, shift what families expect. At Lake Central, those choices came in a few forms.
First, they made cash impossible in certain contexts. Food service payments moved entirely online. Families can bring a check, but not cash. No exceptions. That single policy removed the path of least resistance and accelerated the shift in behavior.
Second, they made online payment the default for assigned fees. When a student damages a book, the fee goes directly into Skyward and families are directed to the school store to pay it. It’s not a suggestion — it’s just how it works.
Third, they lowered the barrier to entry for families who were hesitant. Early on, there was pushback: Why do I have to create an account? Theresa’s team addressed it head-on.
“Once we communicated to families that you don’t have to store a credit card, you don’t have to store an e-check — you can enter it every time, it’s only for your convenience — the resistance went away.”
Finally, they made the school store easy to find — from every direction. There’s a link on the district website. Fees assigned in Skyward link directly to the store. For events like prom or the Hunger Heroes donation drive, QR codes route families straight to the right page. No one asks where the school store is anymore.
Results
The impact shows up in ways both big and small. Lake Central’s high school serves nearly 3,000 students. Prom, homecoming, and formal used to mean hundreds of kids waiting in line to buy tickets. That’s gone.
“We don’t have 2,000 kids waiting in line to buy tickets anymore. That’s huge.”
The district also uses RevTrak’s import list functionality to enforce eligibility rules automatically — blocking underclassmen from purchasing prom tickets, or keeping students with attendance or discipline issues off the purchase list. There’s no workaround, no awkward conversation at the door.
Behind the scenes, the finance team has felt the difference too. Bookkeepers get clean, reconcilable records instead of cash envelopes and handwritten tallies. The district’s business manager can see what’s selling across schools, in real time, from anywhere.
And when a new need arises — like a donation campaign for students with food service balances — Theresa can have a store page live within the week.
The Bottom Line
Lake Central didn’t transform overnight. The shift happened store by store, policy by policy, QR code by QR code — driven by one administrator who understood what the platform could do and kept raising the bar for what the district expected of itself.
Today, paying online isn't something families think twice about. It didn't happen all at once — nobody declared a cashless campus. They just kept building until one day, that's what they had.
“Anybody considering RevTrak — my answer is always yes.”