2026 School Usage: Banzai's New Initiatives
We know how important school usage is to your Banzai partnership. We're committed to growing Banzai's program in your exclusive area, and today, we're giving you an insider's look into Banzai's new, 2026 initiatives for expanding teacher and student usage in K-12 schools.
Buckle up... the list is long!
We formed a new school district outreach division.
We're excited to share that, earlier this year, we formed a new division of Banzai dedicated to creating and maintaining relationships with over 13,000 school districts in the U.S.
As you may know, the majority of Banzai's outreach efforts have concentrated on clearing red tape to reach teachers directly. Those outreach efforts have been successful—and we're keeping them going!—but the education landscape has changed drastically in recent years: today, teachers face administrative overhead, increased privacy rules for digital curriculum, and less time for lesson preparation.
As a response, we've chosen to invest heavily in bringing Banzai directly to district leaders: to curriculum directors, principals, and other stakeholders who can streamline Banzai's adoption within the district.
Since May, we've met individually with nearly 100 districts across the U.S. Winning over an entire district does more than just remove barriers for one or two teachers: it creates buy-in with every financial literacy, family and consumer science, math, business, and other teacher in the district.
For example, Banzai recently conducted trainings for district leaders at Houston Independent School District, one of the nation's largest school districts, with over 270 schools. This relationship alone may lead to thousands of students learning the value of a dollar through Banzai every year.
We're dramatically scaling this effort up. If you're concerned about school usage in your area, please let us know! Email your customer relationship specialist at Banzai, and we'll prioritize outreach to your districts.
We're launching a financial literacy fair.
Soon, you, as a Banzai partner, will be able to host your own in-person Financial Literacy Fair, where students experience the realities of life’s expenses firsthand using prebuilt materials and signage. Each packet includes everything you—and your teachers—need to run a fun, successful event.
The fair begins by students generating a personal life roadmap. At the event, students rotate through different booths, covering essentials like insurance, debt payments, housing, transportation, and more, while building a working budget based on their assigned scenario.
Our goal is to release the fair before the end of the 2026 school year; we're testing it now, so expect more details soon!
We aligned Banzai's curriculum with every state standard in the U.S.
To help curriculum directors make a quicker decision to use Banzai, we created a comprehensive curriculum alignment website, showing how Banzai's more than 120 activities align with all state standards. This remarkable feat, comprising hundreds of dynamic web pages, involved hundreds of employee manhours and state-of-the-art AI supplementation.
In addition to helping districts overcome regulatory hurdles, curriculum alignment is now a built-in feature of Banzai's grading interface, helping teachers understand which SOLs they've completed in every assignment.
Banzai is going... accountless!
Starting early 2026, students will have the option to access Banzai without accounts. Creating student accounts remains the single biggest source of friction for teachers getting students into Banzai.
No doubt, you're asking: How will my financial institution's brand remain prominent in the software? How will you track usage? How will teachers grade?
We've developed solutions for all of these questions. First, open access, as we call it, will require students to select their school from a list, which is tied to your exclusive partnership. Second, we're creating unique sessions for each student to help us track and report their usage and even upgrade into full-fledged accounts later.
Besides reducing teacher friction, open access helps Banzai better align with states and districts who mandate no-sign-in educational software. This is a major step toward making the program simpler, faster, and more inclusive, and we're confident it will improve student usage nationwide.
Banzai will begin offering state-specific data privacy agreements (DAPs).
Today's education regulations are far more complicated than they used to be. In 2026, Banzai will be proactively offering Data Privacy Agreements (DPAs) to districts, tailor-made to their state regulations.
FERPA is federal legislation that regulates student access for online resources like Banzai. Banzai is, of course, fully FERPA (and COPPA, and SOPIPA, and...) compliant, but FERPA’s unique language recommends that districts strike agreements with vendors individually. This is a major source of friction for teachers trying to use online curriculum in some districts. We've helped teachers, IT specialists, and districts, reach these signed agreements, and stay compliant, for years; now, we'll be proactively promoting pre-signed DPAs, to help stakeholders get compliant faster.
We've expanded support for more languages!
To make it easier to teach foundational financial literacy in a student's preferred language, this semester (Fall 2025/26), we made all of Banzai's resources—across both the school and community products—available in 20 different languages.
Here's the new list:
- English (US)
- Español
- Français
- 简体中文 - 普通话
- Tagalog
- Tiếng Việt
- Kreyòl Ayisyen
- Português (Brasil)
- العربية
- Hmoob
- 한국어
- Русский
- Italiano
- Soomaaliga
- Kiswahili
- नेपाली
- Lingála
- မြန်မာစာ
- 日本語
- Deutsch
- Українська
We're excited to make Banzai more accessible for every student, family, and community we serve. 
We're producing video content... Finally!
In 2026, we'll be producing our first video content aimed at curriculum. The videos will be educational, funny, matched to a modern audience, and complement Banzai's many games. Expect more details soon!
We're adding courses for taxes & media literacy.
We're expanding the Digital Citizenship library with new interactive games focused on News Literacy, giving middle and high school students what they need to navigate today’s information landscape.
We’re also expanding tax curriculum, one of the most challenging areas of financial literacy, which will mean breaking down complex tax subjects into simple, approachable learning experiences.
We're adding school usage reports to the Manager!
Long awaited, in 2026, we’ll be adding the ability to track teacher and student signups, assessment scores, game and activity usage, and hopefully even workbook, worksheet and lesson plan engagement. You will be able to filter the data by date, school, district, and other ways.
We've made it easier to create student accounts and rosters with Clever and Classlink.
Although we're creating ways for teachers to give Banzai to students without accounts, we're still committed to making Banzai great for districts using single-sign on (SSO). As of the Fall 2025/26 school semester, Clever and ClassLink SSO (and Google SSO) is now available to teachers and students.
Over 3,000 teachers have already joined Banzai via Clever and another 400 have joined via ClassLink. We expect those numbers to scale dramatically as more districts and teachers become aware of the new options.
We're reengaging teachers who signed up but didn't use Banzai.
In January 2026 we're launching a reengagement campaign focused on teachers who sign up but do not immediately use Banzai. They'll be invited to get a personalized Banzai training, order printed workbooks, request a classroom presentation from you, their community partner, and other ways to speed up their adoption of the program.
We're attending and sponsoring more educator conferences than ever.
We've long believed that meeting teachers in-person is incredibly valuable. To support our efforts promoting Banzai directly to districts, we're attending more conferences in 2025 than ever. This year we have or will be attending Jump$tart's national conference, ISTE, 1EdTech, CTE, and many more state-focused conferences.
Conference attendance not only boosts overall teacher signups, but it also helps us better understand teachers' needs.
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