As the Catholic Bookstore”s direct-to-School ordering pilot moves forward, the founder returns to the community that formed her — sitting down with the Principals of the St. Joseph Roman Catholic Cluster.

For the founder of MyCashlessClass, the road to St. Joseph is also the road home.

Dawn Nelson is a St. Joseph”s Convent girl. The Catholic schools of this community are the ones that formed her — and this week she sat down with the Principals of the St. Joseph Roman Catholic Cluster, not to pitch a platform, but to continue a conversation that has been underway for some time. The schools of St. Joseph are moving, school by school, toward a single, all-in-one way of managing their transactions, and the people in that room are the ones making it happen.

The visit comes as the Catholic Bookstore”s direct-to-School ordering pilot continues to take shape in the same community. As the Bookstore brings direct-to-School ordering to the schools it serves, the Cluster”s own Digital School Offices are coming together alongside it — bringing cafeteria operations, the school store, and the records and reconciliation of the front office into one place, built around the way Caribbean schools already work.

What stood out in the room was not the technology. It was the recognition — from people who run schools every day — that this is addition, not subtraction. Nothing they do well is being taken away. What is being added is convenience: for the office, for the teachers, and for the parents who no longer have to send a child to school carrying cash.

There is a particular weight to building something for the community that raised you. To take what she learned modernising payment systems at the national level, and bring it home to the Catholic foundation that created her, is — by the founder”s own account — a deep source of personal pride. She does not take it for granted.

St. Joseph is not the whole story. But it is the right place to begin telling it.