Students often line up at bookstores at Thornton Fractional North and Thornton Fractional South high schools to pay for books, fees or other supplies.

District 215 Superintendent Creg Williams sees it as an example of inefficiency that could be resolved by allowing students to pay such fees online, and he used a School Board technology committee meeting this week to plead with district officials to make whatever changes are required to allow online payments to be accepted.

"I want to get this done. I don't want to go into another school year without this," Williams said at Tuesday's meeting. "And that doesn't mean I'm giving you a whole year to figure this out. I'd like it to be resolved as soon as possible."

Williams said he thinks students would prefer to pay for such expenses online, noting that many of them are using debit or credit cards to pay their bills so they are capable of using a computer to connect to the district to pay the bills.

"If we can eliminate those lines of students, many of them who are holding 'cash station' cards waiting to pay the bills, that would be good," he said.

Currently, neither TF South in Lansing nor TF North in Calumet City are equipped to accommodate online payments for student fees.

Adel Haddad, the school district's chief information officer, has been experimenting with programs in recent weeks that would allow the bookstores at the two high schools to accept payments online.

Haddad could not say when the kinks would be worked out of the system so that they could be implemented. But he said similar programs, called MyLunchMoney, have been used by the district to allow students to create accounts that enable them to pay for food in the school cafeterias without having to bring cash.

Williams said he would want to see a new system for the books and fees implemented soon. "This has to be done," he said.