<body><div><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=3bury8_1GqFwaL100" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=3bury8_1GqFwaL100" width="2001" height="1501" >In October, tap to pay was introduced to the cafeteria. Students can now use their personal credit or debit card to pay for their lunch instead of using MySchoolBucks, the old system built into Infinite Campus.With MySchoolBucks, parents added money to their children’s accounts to use as a form of credit to buy meals from the cafeteria, and the cafeteria only. Students can only use this credit by way of their student IDs. Under that system, no matter how much money the student had on their credit or debit card, they were left to go the day without a school lunch if they didn’t have sufficient cash on them or money in their account.Even when students did have the means to buy their lunch, the encouragement of cash as a payment method also made it so they could end up missing their lunch period anyway. Standing in the lunch line waiting for cafeteria workers to finish ringing people up could take a lot of time. Senior Robin Tobin buys from the cafeteria every day and has found himself spending much more time there than he would prefer, with waiting in the lunch line taking up to 15 minutes out of the 40 minute lunch period.“It’s a lot of waiting, and I know we’re all trying to get somewhere, so I’m excited [for the tap to pay],” Tobin said.According to a June study by The Robin Report, a consulting platform focused on the retail industry, 57% of teenagers prefer to use some form of digital or card payment as opposed to cash. The MySchoolBucks system may have kept many from expressing this preference even though cash is less efficient than digital or card payments, leading the cafeteria lunch line to become crowded fairly quickly.“No hate to anyone who pays with cash, but it does take a while to get through everyone because of the counting,” Tobin said. “It just gets really packed to the point where it’s hard for people to even get into a line to get food because you don’t know where lines start and where they end.”With a mission to shorten the line and the waiting time, “a lot of students” went to food committees in Fall 2025 to advocate for tap to pay, according to Claire Wilson, a Quest food management worker who oversees all seven District 214 (D214) school food programs.Wilson heard them, and she decided to advocate for the cause. In December 2025, Wilson went to the district to talk to them about implementing tap to pay throughout D214. Rolling Meadows got it in March.“A lot of students were asking ‘Why [can’t we use] credit cards? We don’t carry cash. We don’t always have money in our MySchoolBucks account, and then we have no other way to buy lunch,’” Wilson said.Wilson worked with the district and Stephen Borchers, the food service manager at Prospect, to bring this system to Prospect as well.Heartland, the tech company that creates and runs all of the technology at the points of sale in the cafeteria, implemented all of the tap-to-pay devices. In late August to early September, all of the equipment was delivered to Prospect. Wilson and Borchers wanted the system up and running earlier than mid-October, but some components took longer than expected.They had to work with IT to get the system out to the network, and then they had to wait for Heartland to configure it on their end.Despite the unexpected delay, both Wilson and Borchers believe tap to pay is worth the wait.“It’s just more so giving access to our students,” Borchers said. “If they forget money, they don’t have cash, they don’t have money on their ID or anything like that, they [still] have a credit card. It’s just easier, and it kind of opens up more opportunities for more students to be able to eat inside the cafeteria.”Never miss important news: every Monday, get a preview of what’s going on this week at Prospect, and what went down last week. To sign up for the Knight Notes newsletter, click here.</div></body>

Block Source: prospectornow.com

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In October, tap to pay was introduced to the cafeteria. Students can now use their personal credit or debit card to pay for their lunch instead of using MySchoolBucks, the old system built into Infinite Campus. With MySchoolBucks, parents added money to their children’s accounts to use as a form...

Tap to pay eases lunch transactions

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In October, tap to pay was introduced to the cafeteria. Students can now use their personal credit or debit card to pay for their lunch instead of using My

Tap to pay eases lunch transactions

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