The SmartTrack Story
The SmartTrack team came together around a simple philosophy: a zip code should not determine the quality of a child’s education. This philosophy took us down an unusual path for fixing a deeply rooted problem in our education sector.
Schools need their resources to provide an excellent education for our children. These resources include textbooks, technology, musical instruments, curriculum materials, and more. Through our own experiences as teachers and educators, we’ve experienced first-hand how difficult it is to keep track of these assets.
Schools across the country are losing millions of dollars worth of resources annually, most of which is lost due to procurement overlap (when administrations make purchases without accurately knowing what they have), and from items being misplaced. We initially sought to tackle this problem in 2015, as a part of the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Policy Challenge. Through this competition we interviewed experts throughout the inventory and education sector and learned of how widespread this problem was, and how little had been done to solve it.
As educators, policy professionals, and technologists, we are deeply aware that any solution has to address the multiple facets of the problem. It needs to be an affordable way to streamline the inventory process for educators, while providing oversight for both administrators and governmental regulatory officials.
We believe that our solution is able to successfully solve these issues. It was developed and refined through countless meetings with educators, administrators, and over multiple rounds of tech competitions. In testing our design, we saw a five times increase in inventory speed using our app versus the traditional pen and paper method.
SmartTrack is currently being used successfully as the inventory system across the Camden, NJ school district. It has also been featured in Governing Magazine, PennCurrent, Fels Institute of Government, Penn's Science and Diplomacy Group, and Technical.ly.
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