A New World on the Web.

School districts find many uses for their Web sites but also confront issues of content and staffing

The Web is everywhere. It is fast becoming part of our personal lives, our business transactions and our schools.

Rapid advances in technology, falling hardware prices and increasingly usable software have spurred this fantastic growth. Now educational resources on the other side of the world may be little more than a mouse-click away.

A burgeoning array of school districts are tapping into this new resource, Nearly 2,000 school districts of all sizes today operate their own Web sites on the Internet, according to the latest count of the Web66 International Schools Registry. That compares to the 1,400 districts with Web sites just last May, and more districts are joining all the time. In addition, some 14,000 elementary and secondary schools have their own Web sites as of last December.

The school districts are going on line to reach their various stakeholders: students, parents, teachers and other school staff and community members. Also, the nature of the World Wide Web enables districts to connect easily with each other, opening up unprecedented opportunities for school system leaders to learn from each other's experiences and share instructional resources and advice.

While most school district Web sites convey certain basic information such as school board minutes, lunch menus and bus schedules, many also tailor their presence on the Web to serve particular communications and instructional needs. The Auburn, Maine, School District (www.auburnschl.edu/) publishes information about upcoming high school reunions. In Moravia, N.Y., the district's Web site (www.envisagel.com/ mcs/) offers a "Gateway to Learning" designed to tie Internet content to school curricula. And if you want to work for the Rochester, N.H., school system, you can obtain an employment application from its site (www.rochesterschools.com).

"We are experimenting with registration for adult education courses," reports Rochester Superintendent Raymond Yeagley, but he adds, "We don't have many people willing to try it just yet."

If you live in the 23,000-student Kent, Wash., School District (www. kent.wednet.edu/), you can sign up to receive news via electronic mail about the district or about any school within the district,

Steven Collins, webmaster of Web66 (web66.coled.umn.edu/), believes that with increasing school and student access to the Internet, the Web is becoming an important vehicle to reach constituents. Run by the University of Minnesota, Web66 maintains a highly useful registry of schools and districts on the Web.

Web sites, Collins says, are "especially important in establishing communication with other schools on the Internet as the Web has opened the door to collaboration between students and teachers around the world."

A Pioneer's Approach

A school district Web site provides an around-the-clock means of communicating with parents, students, teachers, potential employees, real estate agents, families considering a move into the area--anyone with an interest in your schools. Communication becomes direct and instantly available.

While this benefit of immediate access seems apparent, school district leaders ought to be asking some fundamental questions about the effectiveness of their Web sites. Do the sites further the goals of the district? Do they provide appropriate content? Do staff or students maintain the sire and constantly add to the content? Should Web sites be more than billboards along the Information Superhighway?

The Bellingham, Wash., Public Schools is a pioneer in using the World Wide Web in education, due in large part to the influence of Jamieson McKenzie, who until recently was the district's director of libraries, media and technology. He launched one of the early district Web sites in 1995.

His successor, Nancy Messmer, says the school district views its Web site primarily as an instructional tool for teachers and students. This purpose drives the district's approach to the content and design of its Internet site (www.bham.wedner.edu).

Bellingham's site allows users to visit nine "virtual museums," such as the "Electronic Ellis Island," which contains photos and essays by children of immigrants; "virtual field trips" to U.S. cities and foreign nations; and "Explorers of the world," which introduces visitors to explorers of land, ideas, sky and art. Other sections include student art and writing, clip art, maps and on-line research projects.

Messmer views Bellingham's Web site as "part of our public face" because of the multiple audiences it serves, adding that external "hits" (the number of times a visitor clicks on another link) outnumber those from within the district by 3 to 1. The site "allows us to share information between many sites and to amplify the work we do," she says.

The collaborative nature is especially evident. For instance, teams of Bellingham teachers have begun to write online research projects. "These are lessons that engage students in a compelling question and guide them through a research, analysis, presentation process," Messmer says. "Teacher teams also develop on-line curriculum pages supporting the district-adopted curricula and post these for use by colleagues."

Multiple Purposes

The 1,400-student Moravia, N.Y., Central School District had four purposes in mind when it launched its Web site in 1996: communications; visibility among prospective employees and relocating families; display of student work; and a safe starting point for the Internet.

A school district Web site provides visibility among those outside the district's boundaries, who otherwise would have no access to information. Prospective employees can find job applications, while families moving into the area can inquire about the local schools. Businesses looking for information about the community are likely to want information about the local school district. The district Web site thus becomes an important window to the outside world.

"Today's education requires an increased level of communication between those within the school building and the school community at large," says Kraig Pritts, who chairs the district technology committee in Moravia, a small community in upstate New York's Finger Lakes region. Moravia's Web site, like a growing number of others, publishes the agenda and minutes of district meetings and advisory committees, information about curricular and extracurricular programs and calendars of upcoming events. Staff members daily check a general e-mail link to route messages to the appropriate individuals.

As families become accustomed to the World Wide Web, the district is finding greater parental use of e-mail to send feedback to school staff or to ask questions, Pritts says.

Moravia also uses its Web site as a venue for displaying student artwork and writing. Teachers submit this work on behalf of students, identifying them only by grade and first name for security reasons. In a similar security vein, says Pritts, the district views its Web site as a good place for students to begin their Internet research. The site's "Gateway for Learning" is a collection of 16 hyperlinks to useful resources in social studies, English and agriculture, among other subjects that are part of the district's K-12 curriculum. These links are intended "for teachers, parents and students of all ages and subject areas to assist with homework, research, parenting and much more."

Every direct link from the Gateway for Learning has been screened by a member of the district technology committee prior to its inclusion. Further, the links are randomly checked to verify that they are still active and appropriate sites. "We strive to provide meaningful connections that will assist our students in their use of the Internet" for their school work," Pritts says.

Resources for Relocating

Matthew Rodger, Webmaster for the Georgia Department of Education (www.doe.k12.ga.us/), notes that Realtors use on-line information to provide details about local schools to prospective home buyers, such as how forward-looking is the district, what kind of spirit do the schools have and what resources does it offer? These are questions that a Web site can answer for parents contemplating a move into your area.

Dave Gordon, superintendent of the Elk Grove, Calif., Unified School District (www.egusd.k12.ca.us/), says companies considering moving their headquarters into the area will find the district Web site a valuable source of information. Because of the fast-growing nature of the Elk Grove district, Gordon believes businesses are a primary source of visits to the Web site--more so than students conducting research.

To determine the source of their hits, Elk Grove plans to organize a group of high school students to develop and conduct a research project on the question this year. The findings likely will dictate the nature of future Web-page content, Gordon says.

Elk Grove also is tackling one of the thornier issues facing schools and districts with active Web sites: how much control to give students over publishing their work on the Internet? "For example, if the yearbook sets up a Web site how do you keep inappropriate things from being published?" Gordon asks. "If the content is truly inappropriate we're responsible for it as a school district." Because the district screens incoming content, he says, "We shouldn't be the source of inappropriate things going our." (See related story, page 27.)

In the Lawrence, N.Y., Public School District (www.lawrence.org), Communications Director Elliot Levine raises a different issue concerning student contributions. They can be a source of great creativity, but graduating seniors may leave a Web site without updating it between April and September. His solution? Involve students at every age level.

"We want to put the tools in their hands," Levine says, so that "even in kindergarten a child can make a positive contribution to the Web site."

Spreading The Word

Once a district launches a Web site, the trick is not just to attract one-time visitors but to ensure they will return for repeat visits. The key to this, according to several school district webmasters, is to offer a high-quality and easily navigable site that is kept current.

In Moravia, N.Y., the district technology committee promoted its Web site through presentations to the board and community groups and sought out local and regional newspaper coverage. The school's Web site address (known as a Uniform Resource Locator or URL) appears on almost all printed information that the district produces: building and district newsletters, committee minutes, newspaper press releases and other documents.

To address concerns that may arise about the content offerings, the district has taken the additional step of printing the entire Web site in booklet form and making it available to any parent who asks for it. The booklet shows the layout of the site and allows an outsider to preview what's available without going on line.

In Rochester, N.H., Yeagley anticipates his district receiving a dedicated channel from the local cable company. When that happens, he plans to have the URL displayed regularly during televised school board meetings. Meanwhile, the district has prepared feature articles for the local newspaper about the Web site and how to use it.

School districts, however, need to move beyond garnering local publicity. McKenzie, who publishes the on-line technology journal From Now On, believes webmasters also should list their Web sites with the various search tools, such as Lycos and Alta Vista, and with collections of school and district sites, such as the Web66 registry (web66.coled.umn.edu/).

The more content a Web site has, McKenzie notes, the more likely the site is to surface in a Web search of schools. He contends that many district sites are little more than "billboards," and these will be lost among growing numbers of Internet sites.

He also takes issue with the idea that currency is everything. "I think value is the issue," he says, where one example of value may be good writing that has lasting interest. "What brings people back is the opportunity to learn, and if there were remarkable student art from five years ago, that would be worth visiting." Or, he suggests, children might put up a virtual museum to tell the story of their town in 1900: Currency would hardly be an issue there. A successful site brings people back because it has a "depth that encourages exploration and return visits," says McKenzie.

Keeping the content updated and fresh can be a challenge because the job of maintaining the school district Web site usually is an added responsibility for a staff member with an already full load. For this reason, many school districts have turned over some of this task to enthusiastic students, some of whom are more sophisticated navigators of the Internet at this point than the professional staff.

The Frontier School District in Red Rock, Okla., has assigned its Web site (www.pc65.frontier.osrhe.edu/) upkeep to the students and teacher of its Computer Projects I class, under the supervision of the district's director of technology. The Wolfe County, Ky., Public Schools' Web site (www.wolfe.k12.ky.us) was created by a Tuesday afternoon club at Campton Elementary School calling itself the "TechnoSurfers." They work under the eye of a Web-savvy teacher at the school.

Both the Frontier and Wolfe County Web sites were given the distinction of "Cool School of the Week" in 1997 by Education World, a comprehensive education site (www.education-world.com) on the Internet sponsored by the American Fidelity Assurance Co.

A survey conducted by the National School Public Relations Association last August indicated that 62.9 percent of its member districts had Web sites. Almost all of these sites are part-time endeavors for staff, but the Kent, Wash., district is an exception. Managing their multifaceted Web site is a full-time occupation for Derry Lyons, who is part of the district's large information technology staff.

Early on, the district saw the Web as "the medium that ties our teachers together and gives students new resources," Lyons says, adding that the Internet has helped unlock a lot of data in areas such as student information, human resources and payroll.

From the beginning in 1995, the district knew it was taking on a huge task. Lyons set about planning and designing the site, then "training and evangelizing" to get the district's schools to build their own Web pages. Today he sees himself as a coordinator, helping schools with the support, tools and training they need to get on-line.

"We're one of the few districts where all of our schools have Web pages, and I haven't created any of them," he says. "It's mainly left up to the schools as an extension of their persona."

Lyons shies away from the designation of webmaster, preferring "Web maestro, which he defines as someone who composes, conducts and teaches.

An Uncommon Interest

Rochester, N.H., Superintendent Yeagley is anxious to continue developing his district's Web site. Yeagley, a self-taught technology enthusiast, is wholeheartedly committed to this new form of communication.

"As we expand the site," he says, "we hope to provide more and more meaningful information so people with the access will look to the Web page before calling us. ... We are trying to get our teachers and students to think of the Internet as a place to do focused research, not as a place for aimless surfing."

Yeagley complains that too many organizations' Web sites--not just those run by education agencies--are simply collections of links to other Internet sites. "The question we constantly ask is whether the information we are putting on the Web site is useful to the people who will visit it. We don't want our Web site to whet the appetite for more information. We want our site to be the source of that information."

Rochester's two-way communications allows electronic submission of employment applications, which are available in Adobe Acrobat format for downloading. In time, the site will allow electronic registration for adult education courses and on-line homework help.

"Prior to initiation of the Web site," Yeagley says, "almost nobody read our school board minutes. Now I hear from people that they check them out to see what is really happening. This helps with rumor control and gives a balance to the sensationalism that sometimes finds its way into the local press."

Among superintendents, Yeagley has taken uncommon interest in the operations of his district's Web site. "Deciding whether to set up a Web site should no longer be an issue," he says. "The decisions that require a lot of thought are those surrounding how to develop the site. Who should be the webmaster-someone already on staff or a computer specialist who can provide a more professional look to the site? What will be the focus of the site? What district resources should be devoted to the Web site? How will content be controlled? What information will go on the site? These questions need to be addressed by the school board, superintendent and appropriate staff and community members. Who is or is not an appropriate member is a local decision."

Yeagley created his district's Web site but has since trained a secretary to maintain most of the pages and is teaching some high school students and their teacher to maintain the school district calendar page. Soon he expects to be out of any direct involvement in the Web site.

Superintendent Oversight

Superintendents may become involved in Web site development and maintenance, Matthew Rodger says, but that is only a function of their personal skill, interest and time. More likely, especially in larger districts, superintendents will delegate this function to a staff member.

The magnitude of the task depends on the size of the district. In Rodger's case at the Georgia Department of Education, this translates into a full-time job, but in most instances the webmaster duties are an add-on. The Elk Grove Web site is set up and maintained by a volunteer who recently graduated from the school system.

Doug Otto, superintendent of the Piano, Texas, Independent School District (www.pisd.edu/), thinks top school system leaders ought to be at least somewhat involved in the startup. "The initial planning and storyboarding are most important from a design and content standpoint," he says.

Piano's instructional technology department publishes an excellent "Home Page Idea Workbook" that offers a mixture of policy ("All official school Internet pages must be hosted on district servers"), detailed guidelines for content and structure, checklists and examples taken from a variety of Texas schools.

Otto says his role is to guide policy development and to ensure that staff members are in place to design and maintain the site. Overall, he is concerned that the site maintain the appropriate character or tone to reflect the goals and spirit of the district.

Some districts, such as Bellingham, Wash., maintain a separate intranet to exchange in-district information among staff members. (An intranet is similar to the Internet, except that access is limited to those working for an organization such as a school district or business.)

An intranet is used typically for administrative functions. Central-office staff in Elk Grove, Calif., use their intranet for electronic purchasing. "We no longer use paper for purchase orders," says Gordon, the superintendent. As the last third of the district's schools become wired, he expects to eliminate a lot of paper shuffling and put some classes on line for subjects in which finding qualified teachers is difficult.

For a glimpse inside a well-developed intranet, take the "Kent Schools Web Tour," which shows among other things how part-time student employees' time is tracked. The guided tour does not give the visitor access to the intranet (actual access requires a password), but demonstrates what the intranet looks like.

But an intranet can and does have less mundane purposes, according to McKenzie. He cites the Grand Prairie, Texas, District (www.gpisd.org/), which uses the intranet mainly for research tasks using information the district has paid for and that students must access through school computers.

Also, it is possible to download pages from the Internet to a local intranet (with permission). This practice will become important for two reasons, he says. First, the access is much faster on a local site. Second, the content is pre-screened. "The Internet is grossly exaggerated in terms of the quality issues," McKenzie adds, so the selection and downloading onto the local intranet becomes a guarantor of quality.

Levine foresees growth of the intranet as an educational tool in the classrooms, while the Internet will become "an ideal low-cost and quick method" to reach the public. For both teachers and students, developing Web sites, he says, "is a skill that in a couple of years we will think of as writing a letter or using a microwave. It's simply a skill we haven't learned yet, but we re going to learn it together."

Robert Sanchez is a free-lance writer based in North Billerica, Mass. E-mail: [e-mail]

Launching Your District on the Web

If you are thinking about setting up a school district Web site, learn from the experience of others. Districts such as Bellingham, Wash., and Plano, Texas, have done a good deal of groundwork in terms of thinking through the process.

Their pioneering work yields useful suggestions for other school districts looking to build or improve their homes on the Internet.

* Agree on the goals.

Before you begin creating your site, you need agreement on its main purposes. Do you want to establish a "billboard" presence for now and build on it later? Do you want to convey only school-specific information, or do you want the Web site to be an important resource to supplement the curriculum?

* Do your homework.

Research the content and design features that you want in part by looking at many other existing school sites. No harm exists in borrowing ideas and drawing inspiration from the great work that is already out. Then ask yourself: Are our proposed content and design features practical given our district's resources? Do they serve the goals of our district?

* Brainstorm for new ideas.

Though people have put lots of creativity into Web sites, they still are inventing the wheel when it comes to schools on the Internet. You want your site to have its own unique character.

* Identify your audience.

You may want to gear the page only to students and parents within your district or you may want to include the family who is contemplating a move into your district from the other coast. You may even want your school to be noticed around the world.

* Appoint a final arbiter.

Establish one person to be the final arbiter/editor of the Web site and set up the equivalent of an editorial board to help make content decisions.

It takes a substantial investment of time to create and maintain an active Web site. Invest in staff time and training. Then once the site is launched, keep it up to date. Keep looking for ways to add depth and utility. Remember that you don't have to do it all at once. A good Web site is always under construction.