Where Did All These Websites Come From?

In the early 1990s, when I began considering my eventual career move from high tech into education, not a single school or district in the United States had a website. Now, of course, almost all do. Phrases like "You can find it on our website" or "How do I put this on the website?" or "Why don't we make a new website for that?" are almost as commonplace as "How many credits do I need to graduate?" (Answer: "You can find it on our website.")

It is now expected that every school and district will have its own site. As if there wasn't enough to do already, the Internet, and the millions of people who use it so regularly, have created the expectation that educational institutions, like their counterparts in the business world, will all have websites — and good ones, too.

Schools weren't exactly set up to handle things like this. Despite the conviction that the Internet holds great promise for education, large staffs of graphic designers, content producers, software engineers, and IT managers have yet to show up for work in our nation's schools. And I think it's safe to say they never will. If the average medium-to-large corporation in the United States spends X% of its annual budget on web development, it's safe to say that the average school district spends 100 — or even 1000 — times less.

So Tell Me Again, Why Do We Need a Website?

Budget or not, schools need websites for exactly the same reasons businesses do.

Internal Communication. Every large organization needs to share information. In the past, schools handled this entirely on paper. Now, significant amounts of incidental communication can be handled via e-mail. But substantive and enduring information like schedules, policies, and legal information needs to be posted in a more permanent way. Employee handbooks and policy manuals are hard to use, expensive, and almost always out of date. Handling this kind of communication via the web is the only manageable and truly responsible way to go about it.

Customer Service. Schools serve the needs of many different customers both internal and external. And one of the biggest of those needs is the need for information. Handling individual requests in person, by phone, fax, or even e-mail is a viable approach for only the smallest organizations, and even then it's hardly the most efficient or most appropriate approach.

Data Management. Schools deal with large amounts of data every day. How that data gets stored, manipulated, and retrieved is no small area of concern. The evolution of school data management from paper-based files to computer files on a network leads inexorably toward web-based systems that offer centrally managed publishing, accessibility, and backup.

Public Relations. If IT departments are a little thin at most school districts, PR departments are even thinner. And yet, the public seems to need a lot of relating to these days. A generation or two ago, public schools didn't need to worry about image management and community relations. But now they do. And, for good of ill, many people factor in their perceptions of a district's website into their perceptions of the district itself.