CareMonkey, the edtech parents use to keep track of school tasks, rebrands and expands as Operoo

CareMonkey – the management system for school and parents to deal with online forms, medical data and excursions and other school adventures – has rebranded as Operoo.

While parents deal with email requests, the system is designed for schools and other organisations to cut slow, time-consuming and repetitive paper-based tasks.

Operoo CEO and co-founder Troy Westley said the new name reflected how the edtech startup had evolved for the global K-12 education sector.

“The ‘Oper’ part of Operoo is short for ‘operations’, while the ‘roo’ is a reminder of our Australian origins – even though we’re now truly an international company with offices in the USA, UK and Australia,” he said.

“When we began CareMonkey in 2013, the product was all about care – hence the name. The focus was on collecting child medical and emergency information from parents, then making that data securely available to schools and supervisors at other organizations with a duty-of-care.”

Westley said the feedback from customers about how they use the product had driven its evolution. 

“The daily operational and administrative demand placed on schools and their staff is growing fast,” he said.

“As a result, schools are looking for solutions to reduce the resources required to complete those recurring tasks so that they can focus on what really matters; educating young people. Operoo empowers schools to achieve that goal.”

As a result of the new focus Westley said the  US and UK client bases had grown by more than 1100% and 260%, respectively, since early 2019.

Company President Peter Bencivenga said Operoo addressed  “a huge gap in the education technology market”  between school administration systems and single use case products such as parent communication.

“While we had already been working to address this need leading up to the launch of Operoo, that gap became glaringly obvious when COVID-19 started impacting the global education sector,” he said. 

“Not only did the number of operational tasks schools had to manage soar, they simply had to be managed digitally in order to adhere to social distancing requirements and government health guidelines.”

Bencivenga led a consortium of investors that included New Ground Ventures and ReThink Education, who backed the startup in 2019.

The new cloud-based Operoo platform enables schools to automate, manage and track operational tasks with digital workflows for a range of routine school processes, from parental consent,to  payments, medical and emergency information, staff approvals, incident reporting, and school trips and more.

The Principal at New York City’s Staten Island Technical High School, Mark Erlenwein, said the use of Operoo had reduced the physical demands on staff by required by 75%.

The company’s School Productivity and Operations Platform will be available under the Operoo name from August 14.