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What's New in TeachHero: Text Your Families, Keep More of Your Tuition, and Set Up Faster

Aug 24, 2026

We shipped a big batch of updates this summer, so here's the plain-English rundown. The short version: you can now text your families, pass card and bank processing fees on to parents at cost, sync your payments to QuickBooks and your classes to Google Classroom, publish a real school website without a designer, and get set up faster with a guided checklist and a built-in help center.

Below is what's new, grouped by what it actually does for your school rather than by feature name. I've also been honest about what each thing is and isn't for, and which plan it's on, so you can skip anything that doesn't fit how you run things.

Keep more of every tuition dollar

The biggest change to billing is that you can now pass online processing fees on to families. Turn on one switch and the cost of processing the payment is added to the family's total at checkout. That's the processing fee for that payment — Stripe's fee plus TeachHero's small platform fee. Instead of quietly losing a slice of every payment to processing, your school nets the full tuition, and families see a clear "Processing fee" line before they pay. It's itemized on their receipt too, so there are no surprises.

Two honest notes. First, you can only pass fees on where local rules allow. A few states don't allow surcharging card payments — right now that's Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico — and if your school is in one, the option isn't available to you. Rules like this change, so it's worth checking your state's requirements. Second, this is a choice, not a default. Plenty of schools prefer to absorb fees as a courtesy. If you'd rather nudge families toward the cheaper option instead, bank transfer (ACH) costs a fraction of card fees, and steering families there at enrollment saves everyone money at tuition scale.

A few smaller billing updates go alongside it:

• Per-fee due dates. Every fee can now be due when it makes sense: right away at checkout, on a specific date, or spread across the family's payment plan. A registration fee due now and a materials fee due in September no longer need a workaround.
• Fee-scoped discounts. You can apply a discount to one specific fee instead of the whole bill. Give a sibling break on tuition without discounting materials, for example.
• Cleaner records. Families now get an emailed receipt with a PDF attached the moment a payment goes through. And you (or a parent) can download a per-student statement for the school year — fees, discounts, the payment schedule, what's been paid, and what's left — in one clean PDF.

Reach every family, fast

Email is great until the message actually needs to land in the next hour. So we added Text Alerts: you can send a text broadcast to the same groups you already email — a whole segment, a single class, a program, or specific people — either right away or on a schedule. Snow day, a room change, a last-minute reminder: it goes to phones.

Text Alerts also quietly makes a few everyday things easier:

• Parents can get their sign-in code by text instead of hunting through email.
• Staff can turn on text-message two-factor sign-in for their own account.
• Volunteers get their shift details by text and can reply YES or NO to confirm, and they get a reminder the day before.

Here's the honest part. Text Alerts is a $15/month add-on on any monthly plan, and on Scale it's written into your contract. It's a flat monthly price, not a charge per message. Each school texts from its own local number after a one-time carrier registration, every text starts with your school's name, and any family can reply STOP to opt out.

We also added an Emergency Contact role. Parents can mark a family member as an emergency contact right from the portal, and because phone and email are required, you always have a reachable person on file. To be clear about what it is today: it's a reliable place to keep that contact, not an automatic alert system. It won't blast a text when something goes wrong. It just makes sure the right number is there when you need it.

A real school website, without a designer

A lot of small schools run on a Facebook page or a dated site nobody wants to touch. Now every school can turn on a public website built right into TeachHero — a home page, about, leadership and teacher pages, admissions, a class and program catalog, and a contact page — just by filling in forms. It lives on your school's own address, and it's included on every plan.

Two companions ship with it: an events calendar page you can publish for families and prospective parents to browse, and a school blog for posting news or a parent hub. It's worth setting expectations honestly: this is a set of clean, ready-made page types you fill in, not a drag-anything page builder. That's on purpose. The goal is a professional site you can stand up in an afternoon, not another project that needs a specialist.

Spend less time on setup and busywork

If you've ever opened a new tool and wondered where to even start, this one's for you. There's now a dedicated Setup page with a checklist that adapts to your plan and points you to your next best step, plus a short series of setup emails that nudge you along. If you'd rather not get them, you can stop them anytime. And when you're stuck, there's a built-in Help Center with searchable guides, articles, and short video tutorials, and the help links inside the app now take you straight to the relevant page.

A few more things that hand you time back:

• Bulk class import. Add a whole term's worth of classes at once from a spreadsheet instead of entering them one by one.
• QuickBooks Online sync. Connect QuickBooks and your settled payments flow in automatically as sales receipts, with refunds recorded too. Map your charge types once and backfill past payments from a start date. It's a one-way sync into QuickBooks — it doesn't replace your invoices or pull data back — and it's included in every plan.
• Google Classroom. Connect it to create or link a Google course for each class, add your enrolled students to the roster automatically, and pull published grades back into your TeachHero gradebook. Also included in every plan.
• Attendance in the portal. Parents and students can now see a read-only attendance summary and log for each class. One honest caveat: it makes attendance visible, but it doesn't send an automatic text or email when a student is marked absent. That's on our list, not in this release.

A fresher look, for you and your families

You'll also notice TeachHero looks different. The whole app got a cleaner, faster interface — and to be clear about what that means day to day, your navigation hasn't moved. Everything's in the same place; it's just tidier and easier on the eyes.

Your families get the same treatment. The parent portal has been redesigned for a smoother experience, so parents and students spend less time hunting for what they need. It's the part of TeachHero most of your families actually touch, so it felt like the right place to put some extra polish.

A quick word on plans

We try to be straight about what's included where, so you're not surprised later. Here's where these land:

• Every plan: your public website, the events calendar, the school blog, passing processing fees on to families (where local rules allow), per-fee due dates, fee-scoped discounts, automatic receipt emails, per-student statements, the setup checklist and Help Center, bulk class import, and the family-facing attendance view.
• Also every plan: QuickBooks and Google Classroom sync, teacher accounts, classwork and the gradebook, and Volunteers, at no extra charge on top of your plan.
• Add-on: Text Alerts, at $15/month flat on monthly plans. On Scale, it's written into your contract.

Small is $89/month for up to 75 students, Growing is $169/month for 76 to 150, and Established is $279/month for 151 to 300, with annual billing that saves two months. The details are on our pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

Does passing on processing fees cost families more?

Families pay what it actually costs your school to process the payment: the processing fee for that payment, which is Stripe's fee plus TeachHero's small platform fee. Your school nets the full tuition instead of absorbing the cost, and families see the amount before they choose how to pay, itemized on their receipt. It's only available where local rules allow — a few states don't allow card surcharging — so check your state's requirements before turning it on.

Is texting families an extra charge?

Text Alerts is a $15/month add-on on any monthly plan, and on Scale it's written into your contract. It's a flat monthly price, not a per-message charge. Families can reply STOP to opt out at any time.

Do QuickBooks and Google Classroom cost extra?

No. Both are included in every plan at no additional charge.

Will parents get a text when their child is absent?

Not yet. Attendance is now visible to parents and students in the portal, but there's no automatic absence alert in this release. It's something we plan to add.

The bottom line

The theme this summer was less busywork and more of your money and time staying where they belong — with your school. You can keep more of every payment, reach families the moment it matters, put up a website you're not embarrassed by, and get set up without a manual. Turn on the pieces that fit how you run things, and leave the rest.

TeachHero is one platform for running a small, independent school: enrollment, tuition, communication, a website with a parent portal, and classwork. Try every feature free, then pick the plan that fits. See how it works, try it free, or book a demo.