One platform for your school. The whole family, in one place.
Lantern replaces the patchwork of enrollment portals, billing tools, dismissal spreadsheets, and group chats with a single branded platform — your name, your colors, on web and in real native iOS and Android apps.
Intuitively designed to feel like the consumer apps your families already use — so parents self-onboard in minutes and staff are productive after one walkthrough. Already trusted by schools serving 1,200+ students.
Trusted by schools like
OPPC Quran Academy
Roots AcademySchools shouldn't have to glue their software together
Most schools end up running on five different tools — one for enrollment, one for billing, a spreadsheet for dismissal, group chats for parents, and paper for everything else. Lantern replaces all of it with one platform that knows the whole family.
Data lives in 5 different systems
Enrollment in one tool, billing in another, dismissal in a spreadsheet, messaging on WhatsApp, attendance on paper. Reconciling anything is a manual chore.
One platform owns the family, the student, the program, the invoice, the message, and the audit log. Everything reconciles itself.
Parents juggle a login per child or per app
Each child has their own portal account. Parents forget passwords, miss notifications, and pay siblings on separate invoices.
One family record, with each parent or guardian on their own login. Every child rolls up to it. One calendar, one inbox, one set of notifications — for the whole family.
Communication is scattered and untracked
Newsletters in email, urgent updates over text, classroom chat on a personal app — and no record of who saw what.
Push notifications, in-app chat, and program-scoped announcements — all logged, searchable, and tied to the family record.
Audits and disputes turn into archeology
Did a parent sign that consent? Did the payment go through? Was the child released to the right adult? Hope someone kept a screenshot.
FERPA-compliant audit trail. Every consent, payment, dismissal, message, and edit is timestamped, immutable, and retained for 7 years. Pull the record in seconds.
Designed to be used, not trained on
Most school software was built for the back office. Lantern was built for the people who actually use it every day — parents picking up at dismissal, teachers marking attendance, staff running enrollment night. The result is a platform that feels like the apps your families already trust, not enterprise software with a 200-page manual.
Familiar by design
Looks and feels like the consumer apps your families already use — clean layouts, instant feedback, no enterprise-software clutter.
Tasks in 1–2 taps
Marking attendance, messaging a parent, releasing a child at dismissal, paying tuition — all reachable from anywhere in the app, in one or two taps.
Parents self-onboard
Most families finish enrollment from their phone in under 10 minutes. No office calls, no printed PDFs, no “where do I click?”
One-session staff training
A single 30-minute walkthrough is typically enough for your team to run independently. New hires onboard themselves the same way.
Everything a school needs to operate
From the first enrollment application to the last dismissal of the day — Lantern handles it all, in one place, on every device.
Enrollment & Applications
Full application lifecycle — submissions, waitlists, time-limited offers, registration fees, and legally-binding digital consent capture with immutable snapshots stored for audit.
Real-time Dismissal
Live dismissal board with instant updates. Staff coordinate releases from web or mobile. Parents tap a button on arrival; staff see them queued instantly. Zero radios, zero phone trees.
Tuition Billing & Autopay
Tuition and registration fees by card, ACH, or cash. Optional autopay clears card and ACH tuition each cycle. Cash families pay at the office; admins mark the invoice complete — same family record, same audit trail. Parents see payment history and upcoming charges from their phone. Every transfer to your school's connected account is primed with invoice number, student, family, program, category, and location metadata, so your bookkeeper reconciles straight from the dashboard or a QuickBooks/Xero export — no cross-referencing back to Lantern.
Messaging & Announcements
In-app chat with text, images, and file attachments. Program-scoped announcements ensure parents only see what's relevant to their children's classes.
Masked Staff Calling
Teachers and staff can call parents directly from the app — and the school's published number shows on caller ID. Personal cell numbers stay private.
Calendar & Events
School-wide and program-scoped calendars for assemblies, holidays, parent meetings, and field trips. Parents see exactly what applies to their family.
Attendance & Reporting
Daily attendance tracking with analytics dashboards, financial reports, and full activity logs for compliance and auditing.
Incident Reporting
Staff can log incidents with a written description, the action taken, and any other students involved. Admins control which incidents get shared with parents — the rest stays internal. Every entry is timestamped, attributed to the staff member who logged it, and tied to the student record.
Digital Consent Capture
Medical, photo/video, emergency, registration, and tuition consents — all signed digitally during enrollment and stored as tamper-evident records.
Automation that runs the school day for you
Lantern's job isn't just to store information — it's to do the work you're tired of doing manually. Tuition charges run on schedule. Waitlist offers send and expire on their own. Branded emails go out for every meaningful event. The office stops chasing.
Billing automation
Tuition collection runs itself. Lantern generates the charges, runs them on schedule, retries failures, chases overdue accounts, and warns before cards expire.
- Auto-generated tuition invoices on a schedule you set
- Scheduled autopay charges by card or ACH
- Smart retry on failed charges, with parent notified
- Escalating overdue-invoice reminders (dunning)
- Card-expiry alerts before charges start failing
- ACH settlement monitoring and reconciliation
- Automatic refund and dispute handling
- Cash-payment opt-in per family — same invoice, same audit trail
- Every transfer primed with invoice, student, program, category, and location for accounting
Enrollment automation
Applications, waitlists, and offers move through the pipeline without staff intervention. Parents get reminders. Seats free up when offers expire.
- Waitlist offer reminders as the deadline approaches
- Time-limited offers that auto-expire and free the seat
- Application status emails (enrolled, rejected, changes requested)
- Digital consent capture during application
- Unverified-registration cleanup
Communication automation
Parents and staff stay informed without anyone hitting send. Branded emails go out for every meaningful event. Push notifications fire in real-time.
- Branded transactional emails — your colors, your logo
- Real-time push notifications across iOS and Android
- Welcome and invitation flows for parents, spouses, and staff
- Scheduled school-wide and program-scoped announcements
- Dismissal-confirmation emails the moment a child is released
- Password reset and account-verification flows
Powered by best-in-class infrastructure
Battle-testedStripe Connect
Card & ACH payments with dedicated accounts per school location — funds settle directly to the school's bank.
Twilio
Masked staff calling — your school's number shows on caller ID, not personal cells
Firebase
Real-time push notifications across iOS and Android
Patchwork stack vs. Lantern
The same job, the same school day — done in two very different ways.
Up and running in three steps
We handle the heavy lifting so your team can focus on students.
We set it up for you
Tell us about your school. We configure your branded platform with your logo, colors, programs, and staff accounts.
Your team gets trained
We walk your administrators and teachers through every feature. Parents get a simple onboarding flow in the app.
You're running
Enrollment opens, dismissals go live, payments flow in. We handle ongoing support so you can focus on your students.
See it in action
Real screenshots from schools already using Lantern — each with their own logo, colors, and configuration.
Native iOS & Android Apps
Real native appsEvery role, every device
Administrators, teachers, staff, and parents all get dedicated native iOS and Android apps alongside the full web dashboard — not a mobile website, but real apps with push notifications and App Store / Google Play distribution.
For Administrators
Full control on web and mobile
- End-to-end enrollment pipeline management
- Granular staff permissions and role-based access
- Multi-location support — separate payment accounts and reporting per location
- Financial reports and analytics dashboards
- Accountant-ready transfers — every payout primed with invoice, student, program, category, and location
- Activity logs and compliance auditing
- Productive after a single 30-minute walkthrough
For Teachers & Staff
Classroom tools on any device
- Student rosters and classroom management
- Daily attendance with one-tap marking
- Real-time dismissal coordination
- Direct parent messaging and masked voice calls
- Program-scoped announcements
- Common tasks reachable in 1–2 taps from anywhere
For Parents
Everything from their phone
- One family record — every child rolls up; each parent has their own login
- Self-serve enrollment in under 10 minutes from their phone
- Real-time pickup coordination with push alerts
- Tuition payments by card, ACH, or cash — optional autopay for card and ACH
- School calendar and event notifications
- Branded native app on the App Store and Google Play
FERPA-compliant. Built that way from day one.
Lantern is built to meet the standards schools are held to — not bolted on afterwards. Education records are protected by role-based access, every meaningful action is captured in an immutable audit log, and every subprocessor is independently certified and bound to school-official-style data-protection terms.
FERPA-compliant
Education records, role-based access, parent inspection rights, and an audit trail of disclosures — built in from the database up. Subprocessors act as 'school officials' under FERPA and are contractually prohibited from using student data for their own purposes.
Student-data discipline
No student-facing accounts. All student data is created and managed by authorized adults. Zero advertising, zero behavioral profiling, zero data resale — your families' children are not the product.
Encryption everywhere
Industry-standard encryption in transit and at rest. Token-based authentication with automatic expiration. Continuous error and uptime monitoring with platform alerts on critical operational events.
Role-based access
Granular permissions for admins, staff, and parents. Every staff member sees only what their role grants — and every meaningful edit is captured in the audit log with who, what, when, and from where.
7-year audit retention
Every consent signed, payment processed, dismissal released, attendance marked, and staff edit — timestamped, immutable, queryable, and retained for 7 years to satisfy education-records inspection requirements.
Vetted subprocessors
Stripe (PCI-DSS Level 1), Google Cloud (SOC 2 Type II, FERPA-aligned) — every subprocessor is independently certified and bound to a school-official-style data-protection agreement. Our hosting provider is SOC 2 Type II certified.
Full details in our privacy policy and terms of service.
Ready to retire the patchwork?
Replace your enrollment portal, billing tool, dismissal sheet, and parent group chats with one platform that's branded for your school. We'll have you running in weeks, not months.
Get Lantern for Your School