Questions from food service teams, principals, and IT.

MorningCount is a web-based morning lunch-count board for K-12 schools where students take the count themselves: each student picks their meal on the classroom screen, and the cafeteria sees live totals. The analytics add-on turns the history into trends and a daily forecast. It’s a Moxie Digital product; there’s more on the About page.

No. MorningCount is a production-planning count: it tells the kitchen what to cook. The point-of-service count your program uses to claim federal reimbursement happens at the register, with your POS or your existing claiming process, and MorningCount doesn’t touch it.

Because every old way of taking it, the show of hands, the spreadsheet, the form, has the teacher doing the counting while the class waits. When students tap their own name and their own choice, the count is faster, it’s more accurate because nobody answers for them, the teacher gets the morning back, and the youngest kids start the day with a small act of independence.

No. There are no student logins. The classroom screen is unlocked once with a district code, and students just tap their name.

Yes. A student taps their name (with a little help the first few days), then sees big pictures of the meal choices. Tap one, tap Yes, get confetti.

They tap their name again and choose a different one. If your district prefers that changes go through a teacher, turn on tile locking: tiles then lock after placement, and a teacher unlocks them with a long press.

Their name simply stays in the list. When the teacher submits, unplaced names count toward a per-classroom Not counted total, so the kitchen knows how many students weren’t counted. MorningCount never records which student it was.

The teacher types the name into Add Student in the board header, and the tile appears. The next roster import catches up on its own.

Every pick reaches the cafeteria the moment it’s tapped, so the kitchen is never waiting on Submit to see the numbers. Submit tells the cafeteria the classroom is done and takes it off the missing list.

No. MorningCount was built for big classroom touch panels, but it works the same on a teacher’s laptop, a tablet, or a desktop with a mouse. Schools without touchscreens still skip the sticky note.

Picks appear as they’re tapped, and the page refreshes itself about every 20 seconds. No manual refresh, no stale cache.

Only if you want them to. Each school’s report can have its own password. District administrators see all schools.

For each meal, it averages your school’s totals from the last four same weekdays with data. Your Wednesday forecast comes from your Wednesdays. It appears automatically after about two weeks of history.

No. MorningCount tells the kitchen what to cook. Your POS handles the transaction at the register. They don’t need to talk to each other.

Yes. If a management company runs your kitchens, the on-site director uses MorningCount exactly the way a district-employed team would. The district still owns all the data.

It matters more. When every student eats free, participation climbs and the kitchen’s guess gets bigger and riskier. New York now requires free school meals for all students statewide, which makes an accurate count and a daily forecast the difference between cooking the right amount and throwing the rest away.

Yes. Each school sets its own options, with its own icons or photos, and there’s no fixed number of choices.

First name, last initial, classroom, and the student ID from your SIS, plus each day’s meal pick. No last names, and no payment, eligibility, health, or attendance data. See Security & Privacy for the full list.

MorningCount stores the minimum, keeps analytics aggregate-only, and uses no third-party services on any platform page. We complete your district’s data privacy agreement.

Your district. Export it anytime, and it’s returned or deleted at your direction when an agreement ends.

Yes. In transit on every connection, and at rest for site files, databases, and backups. Hosting maintains a SOC 2 report and runs in US data centers.

Nothing special. Any device with a modern browser in the classroom, and any device with a browser in the cafeteria. Nothing to install.

Boards keep taking picks and send them automatically when the connection returns.

Upload your SIS export weekly, whether that’s from PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Skyward, or anything else that exports a spreadsheet. You see a preview of every change before applying. If your export looks unusual, we build the import to fit it. Automatic roster sync is on the roadmap, and we build those connections in the order districts ask.

Most schools are live within two weeks of kickoff.

Yes. Pricing is by student with a per-school minimum, so a single school pays for a single school.

$2.00 per student, per year, with a $600 per-school minimum. The analytics add-on makes it $2.50 per student, with a $750 minimum. No per-teacher or per-device fees.