Wis. Districts Collaborate on Web Development (2004)

Even in the face of increasing budgetary pressures, school districts are compelled to make more information available to parents and regulators. That's why seven school districts in Southeast Wisconsin have worked together on a Web development project that helped combine resources and meet state requirements by putting information at the disposal of parents and students. The seven districts worked with Northwoods Software Development Inc. (www.northwoodsoft.com) to implement the Northwoods Content Management System (CMS),which empowers nontechnical personnel to create and maintain Web sites. Individual school sites have been going live with the newly developed CMS-driven system since January. Getting Started When the first teacher and school Web pages expanded quickly in the 1990s, the energy and talents of many of our Wauwatosa School District teachers led the way. As recognition of the Internet's power as a communication tool grew, the demand for teacher Web pages with more information also increased. Thus, we determined that a uniform navigational system would contribute to our Web-communication efforts. We also came to realize that instructing and supporting the nearly 600 members of the Wauwatosa teaching staff in HTML would prove problematic. It wasn't long before coming to the conclusion that we needed a system to manage our growing Web presence and provide a means by which nontechnical staff could create Web pages. Content management systems were just then entering the lexicon of the World Wide Web community. We were fortunate to have an excellent partnership with Northwoods Software. They had previously assisted us in developing our district's intranet, a primitive kind of CMS. This intranet proved to be so successful for improving our business practices that we again turned to Northwoods Software with our teacher Web page management dilemma: How to manage a potential Web site of thousands of pages created by hundreds of different authors. Tosa Teacher Web (online at http:// tw.wauwatosa.k12.wi.us) was born from this collaboration. It is a Web portal aimed at the whole Wauwatosa community, including parents and students. Tosa Teacher Web delivered an important new method of communication for teachers and parents. Publishing with a CMS was so low-tech that within one year an estimated 85% of our staff had individual Web pages published. But by 2002, two years after Tosa Teacher Web was launched, a technology-charged pilot group of teachers, including myself, had determined that new features which Northwoods Software had built into its CMS framework were greatly desirable. In addition, the No Child Left Behind Act and the accompanying state regulations required school districts to provide public access to district data and teachers' credentials, among other things. The Web seemed like the perfect medium to meet those requirements. Unable to obtain funds for a full-blown development project, I went to my peers at other districts to explore the idea of sharing the cost. Wauwatosa demonstrated its intranet and Tosa Teacher Web to other area districts to great reviews. So, together with the technology coordinator of the Greenfield School District, Cherie Finnie, we recruited six other districts--Arrowhead, Hartland-Lakeside, Merton,Whitefish Bay and New Berlin, together with Greenfield and Wauwatosa--to share the cost of CMS development. The initial plan was to form a consortium of as many districts as possible, but with seven participants the cost of CMS development came down to about $8,000 per district. This included development costs and three years of hosting. Seven-Headed Monster While the initial goal was 10 districts, working with seven was enough of a challenge for developers from Northwoods Software. …