“There are some office facing solutions that are lights out that I love. The first group that I would talk about is ClassWallet. ClassWallet is a great business office solution and you say, “Wow that is so simple!” ClassWallet talks about student funds and accounts, field trips, things like that, and you go, ‘Oh my God that’s such a low hanging fruit.’ But everyone of us brings that brown envelope down to the office. It’s a nightmare. But ClassWallet digitizes it.”

Dr. Adam Fried, Harrington Park School District Superintendent

Christpher Nesi, educator and supervisor in the state of New Jersey, a man on the cutting edge of technology trends and host of the House of #EdTech Podcast, sat down with Dr. Adam Fried, superintendent of the Harrington Park School District and an innovative education leader at New York EdTech Week to discuss technology that is changing classrooms in a meaningful way.

The Problem

Three years ago, Dr. Adam Fried, a man who says he is up a lot at 2:00 AM thinking about how to solve problems and lives by the motto “If we are not evolving, we’re dying,” saw a need in the education space for change.  He needed to challenge legacy education providers that were trying to create good education tech and falling short.

What Dr. Fried did was create a model inside his district to allow young startup companies to come in and pitch their product.  The model then matches them with school staff and the relationship gets built from a bottom-up perspective.

Over the last three years, Dr. Fried says he has been blessed to speak on panels about that process and where he thinks his team is being successful in changing the space.  He mentions how his team is even changing things such as the procurement process, including how school supplies are bought and how are school expenses are reviewed.

The Solution

At New York EdTech Week, Nesi asked Dr. Fried: Over the last three years of being involved in this type of forward thinking, which company has he seen grow the most.  The first company that Dr. Fried mentions is ClassWallet.

Dr. Fried tells Nesi, “I always say there are different facing groups right there, some office facing solutions, that are lights out that I love, like ClassWallet.  ClassWallet is a great business office solution, you go, “Wow that is so simple”. ClassWallet talks about student funds and accounts, field trips, things like that, and you go oh my god that is such a low hanging fruit but everyone of us brings down that brown envelope down to the office because it has to be by code twenty-four hours.  It looks like a bag of nickels you know what I mean, and it’s a nightmare.”

Dr. Fried continues, “For us [Harrington School District] what we’ve done is use ClassWallet to digitizes it [the process].  ClassWallet creates a wallet for each staff member.  It’s not just field trips but even [classroom] money that we allocate to [the teacher].  We zero base budget my staff so [teachers] build [their] own budget.  I want [teachers] to have empowerment to that.  If I give [teachers] five hundred dollars they are going to spend five hundred dollars. So with ClassWallet we fund your wallet and then you go spend. We aren’t checking you.  That’s not what professional educators do: We empower you to do things.”  

At ClassWallet, we believe there is a better way to allocate funds and school payments and we have helped over 1,000 schools track school-based purchasing.

Sign up here for a free demo to learn how ClassWallet can help your school.