Several questions...

I was just wondering how many of you from the PTO/PTA's, etc. have your own group website?

If so, is it attached/linked to the school's main site or is it completely your own?

If you have one, does it contain classroom info or other such categories as library, lunchroom, athletics, etc?

I ask b/c our school didn't offer those on their main site. There were requests for it to be put up, and the reply was it couldn't be done. So I created a site for our Parent-Teacher Society which also features brief info of the above mentioned categories. The reason I did this was b/c the PTS helps to supplement them and I saw the need for parents to have another means of communication.


Let me also mention that I am the PTS president. If you'd like to view our site its: St. Mark Parent-Teacher Society

**UPDATED: I have purchased a premade template and graphics and did the rest of the work on my own. I maintain updates, hosting, etc. The school nor PTS pays for nothing, as I am doing this as a volunteer.

Thanks for any input you can provide!

I think you will see a mixed reaction with some schools that allow it; some don't. The reasons NOT to allow it can be pretty compelling:

1) If the PTO is an independent group and the school provides webspace, then they should do so for every other group that asks

2) The school may have some liability over the content of the PTO's pages.

3) How do the pages get updated? If they give a PTO person access, it might compromise their network security. If not, school resources must be used (and there are never enough resources available to meet the schools needs).

4) Public schools - being a part of the public sector/government world, must comply with a lot of rules that independent groups do not. One of these is that websites must be accessible (i.e., designed so that users with visual, hearing, or cognitive impairments can use the site). There are also privacy rules, open records, and a ton of other things. PTO pages may not conform to these rules.

5) Every webpage costs the institution money - staff time, server space, records retention, answering inquiries that result, etc.

These are just a few that spring to mind. Other organizations may happily provide for the parent group as an extension of school activities.

However, it truly is the school's decision.

We have an area on our school's web page, as do all the other schools in our district.

We also had a separate web site for the playground renovation project, but we let the registration for that lapse after the project was done.

The school admin maintains the classroom and school info; the librarian does her pages; and the district also has pages with district-wide policies, etc. We only have PTO info in our section.

Sorry - I believe I misunderstood your question. But I'll leave my post in case the information is useful as related info.

In the PTOs with which I've been involved, the schools were pretty responsive to adding information of interest to the parents. So the PTO/PTA focused exclusively on paretnt group information - whether it was on a school page or separate. Whichever way it was set up, we had links back and forth to each other's info.

Your page is very nice. I like the clean lines of it and it seems to have a lot of good information. You might consider these two tips:

1) On websites, it's generally best not to use underlining as a format tool. Underlines on webpages usually indicate hyperlinks, so it will look like a broken link. If anything needed, use bold, caps, or italics (limit use of italics).
2) All graphics should have ALT TAGS. These are the little text descriptions that show up when your mouse hovers and are critical to anyone using a screen reader. They are typically very easy to add. So for your section areas (INFORMATION) that are really graphics, you might want to add the tags.

Your stakeholders are lucky to have you! It's so important to have good information available via the web these days.