New site designed to have lots of information, easy to find

August 27, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Redmond, WA – Many Lake Washington School District parents are employed in the high tech industry, including Microsoft, which is in the district’s backyard. Parents are accustomed to using the Web to get most of their information. The district’s Web site, originally created in 1999, had not kept pace with new technological capabilities. With the launch of a new, improved Lake Washington School District Web site at www.lwsd.org, the district now provides a more sophisticated and user friendly Web environment for its parents, students, staff, and community.

“Our Web team has worked for a year to develop the new site,” noted Superintendent Chip Kimball, Ed.D. “They spent a considerable amount of time getting to know the needs of all user groups and learning how they wanted to use the site. I believe the new site answers the needs our parents, students and community articulated and even more.”

The site is organized around three major user groups: parents, students and community. Functional areas provide general information about the district, school information and links to their Web sites, news, the district calendar and an interactive map showing school locations and boundaries. Staff information has been moved to an internal staff Web site.

“Public schools have a tremendous amount of information that parents and students, in particular, need to know” noted Kathryn Reith, communications director. “It was clear from our user studies that everyone wanted the site to be full of information but they wanted to be able to find their information easily. The site architecture was carefully constructed to group together information that specific kinds of users would want. We still have more information we will be adding to the site as well as keeping it constantly updated.”

Reith pointed out such interactive items as the district map, where prospective residents can determine which school neighborhoods a specific house falls into, and the bus route finder. Parents will find an information-rich section designed for them including information ranging from registration and school transfer information to special programs and graduation requirements. A curriculum section includes the district’s power standards for specific content areas by grade. Power standards are what is most important for students to know and be able to do in the time available for teaching and learning at that grade level in one year.

The student section now includes library, research and homework information. Future plans include developing sections on current school activities as well as a “life after high school” section providing career and higher education information and links.

After considerable research the District choose Microsoft Sharepoint™ as the tool to deliver the new site. Project Manager Steve Lewey said, “Sharepoint provides ease of use, ability to provide a single sign-on solution with other applications, strong search capability, and the ability to continue to grow and improve the site." HTML knowledge is not required to make changes to the site, which will enable more staff members to help keep the site up to date.

Lake Washington School District is the sixth largest district in the state of Washington. It has over 23,000 students in 48 schools located in Kirkland, Redmond, and Sammamish, Washington.

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