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There are few things more chaotic in the life of a school administrator than tracking who paid for the field trip. Cash in envelopes, multiple payment portals, different logins for every system — and somewhere in the middle of it all, a kid who shouldn’t be left behind because her family doesn’t have a bank account.
ClassDojo is betting it can fix all of that. ClassDojo Payments is promising to enable schools to collect field trip fees, manage fundraisers, process technology fees, and accept payments from every family, all on the platform that tens of millions of school leaders, teachers, and parents already use already. Powered by Pay Theory’s payment facilitation infrastructure, the technology aims to eliminate the friction of offline payment collections and disconnected third-party portals while ensuring every family can participate—including through cash-to-digital acceptance at thousands of retail locations nationwide.
It’s a big leap, but Chad Stevens, Head of Growth & Partnerships at ClassDojo for Districts, sounds confident. I had the pleasure of chatting with him about their progress.
The vision, according to Chad, is simple: a teacher sends a field trip message through ClassDojo, there’s a payment button right in the post, a parent taps it, uses Apple Pay or face ID, and it’s done. No envelope, no separate portal, no morning scramble to figure out who still owes money.
But the feature Chad is most excited about is less flashy and arguably more important. An estimated one in six U.S. households are unbanked — families that operate entirely in cash and can’t use digital payment systems. Through the PayTheory partnership, ClassDojo plans to let those families pay for school activities by scanning a barcode at CVS, Walgreens, 7-Eleven, or Family Dollar, with the payment routing digitally back to the school district.
“Just because a kid doesn’t have a bank doesn’t mean they struggle to get to go on a field trip,” Chad says. “To me as a former teacher, that was just one of the really exciting things about what we plan to build.”
A full launch is targeted for late 2026, with the company signaling it wants to get the back-end accounting and compliance architecture right before flipping the switch.