Jonathan Johnson had a hypothesis. Give high school students $50 a month — no strings attached — and see what happens to their outcomes. Grades, attendance, wellbeing. He called it The $50 Study, and it had the makings of something genuinely important.

The problem wasn't the idea. It was the data.

Rooted School was running the program across multiple schools and states, which meant hundreds of students, monthly disbursements, and a growing pile of CSV exports from their bank. Talia, the program manager, was spending more time wrangling spreadsheets than understanding what the data was actually saying.

"We had CSV files everywhere," she told us. "It was getting hard to make sense of it all."

They needed to track who was enrolled, confirm payments went out, see how students were spending, and — critically — prove to funders and researchers that the program was working. Without that, they couldn't scale. And scaling mattered, because the early results were promising.

What we built

We partnered with Freedom to Launch, a venture studio, to bring this one to life. Together, we built Rooted School a custom full-stack financial dashboard — complete with a real backend — using AI-powered development in Replit. Two months, start to finish.

The platform could:

• Manage students across multiple schools and program cohorts

• Ingest and reconcile bank transaction data automatically

• Calculate distribution vs. spending at the student and program level

• Flag duplicate transactions and handle mid-program dropouts cleanly

• Generate funder-ready reports with a few clicks

When Talia saw the finished product, she said exactly what you hope to hear: "This is exactly what we needed."

That's the goal. Not impressive — useful.

The part that matters

The dashboard didn't just save them time. It changed what they could do with their story.

Jonathan could now answer a funder's question — "How much did you distribute last quarter?" or "Which schools are seeing the most engagement?" — in real time, with real data. That kind of credibility is hard to put a dollar value on when you're trying to grow a social impact program.

They could also see patterns in how students were spending, which opened up new conversations about which students might need additional support.

"Now we can focus on what we do best — helping students succeed," Jonathan said. "We have the tools to track our progress and show the world this kind of support really makes a difference."

What's next

They're already thinking about phase two: uploading monthly student surveys, connecting academic data, and tracking wellbeing patterns over time alongside the financial data.

The dashboard was built to grow with them. That was the point.

Built with: Replit (AI-powered full-stack development), in collaboration with Freedom to Launch