Registration on paper
Enrolling a child meant printed forms, signatures and a trip to the school office.
Days, not minutes
Case study · Upper Canada District School Board
Upper Canada District School Board ran school life on legacy tools. Chapeau! reimagined the parent experience and delivered My Family Room, an all‑new portal on web and native iOS and Android: registration, absences, forms, consent, digital report cards and payments.
Legacy tools made the ordinary business of school life slow and disconnected. Registration, absence reporting, forms and school communication each ran through their own process, most of them paper or phone based. At 77 schools and 27,000 students, a small friction repeated thousands of times a week.
Legacy operations meant
Enrolling a child meant printed forms, signatures and a trip to the school office.
Reporting a late or absent child depended on a phone line and someone free to answer it.
Trip permissions and payments travelled home with the student, then back again.
Report cards, PD days and exam dates lived apart from every other school touchpoint.
Another feature bolted onto the legacy tools would have been the quick answer, and the wrong one. Chapeau! brought creative, design and full‑stack development into one delivery team and rebuilt the product front to back on a radically improved architecture. The experience was reimagined around a minimalist design language, held together by a custom icon library and a scalable design system.
Four pillars
Online registration, late and absence reporting, event consent and payment approval in one place.
Report cards, PD days and exam dates land in the calendar a family already keeps.
A minimalist language, a custom icon library and a system that holds across web and native.
Creative, design and development in a single team, rebuilding front‑end, back‑end and architecture together.
My Family Room launched in August 2023 and has not stopped improving since. Parents and guardians handle school life in real time, and Chapeau! keeps releasing on a steady cadence, from usability work to security hardening.
What it unlocked
The app is rated by the people who use it every week, and the ratings say it lands.
Registration, absence, consent, payment and calendar replaced separate paper and phone processes.
The icon library and design system keep each new feature consistent across web and native.
Faster report card access, and third‑party sign‑in retired ahead of multi‑factor authentication.
“We didn’t just need a launch, we needed a partner who’d stick around. Chapeau! delivered ‘My Family Room’ in 2023 and has kept improving it ever since, adding features, hardening security, staying ahead of what our families and schools need. That ongoing commitment is what sets them apart.”