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By tomgrandy on
As an internet, technology, communications and networking service owned by a consortium of the schools we serve, Tri-County Computer Services Association in Wooster, Ohio was tasked with moving their school district's hosted sites away from a third party CMS to a Drupal environment.
In doing so, TCCSA would have the freedom to be able to choose modules to develop the school sites to meet the needs and extend the district sites as future requests came up. With a third-party developer, TCCSA was limited to whatever upgrades the vendor provided us with and as the years went on, the upgrades coming out were fewer and less frequent and our users were becoming frustrated with features that were promised and never evolved.
After doing extensive research into content management systems that were on the rise and consulting with our districts, we determined Drupal to be the most promising and partnered with Acquia to help get us started. Granted, our web team consists of one full-time developer, a part-time graphic designer, and a database administrator/programmer who was tasked with managing practically every other hosted application in-house, so we aren't a company that specializes in web hosting, but rather one that offers it as one of the many services we offer to our school districts.
Over the past two years, we have developed a long list of sites that were built on D6 while learning how to work in the Drupal environment. Now we are poised to take our sites to the next level with D7 and redesign them with new features in hopes of releasing a K12 distribution that schools across the nation could implement.
The following sites are all still D6 sites and our first attempt at Drupal:
Ashland City Schools - Ashland, OH
http://www.ashlandcityschools.org
Ashland County Community Academy - Ashland, OH
http://www.acca.cs.k12.oh.us
Ashland County-West Holmes Career Center - Ashland, OH
http://www.acwhcc-jvs.k12.oh.us
Chippewa Local Schools - Doylestown, OH
http://http://www.chippewa.k12.oh.us
Green Local Schools - Smithville, OH
http://www.green-local.k12.oh.us
Loudonville-Perrysville Exempted Village Schools - Loudonville, OH
http://www.lpschools.k12.oh.us
Mapleton Local Schools - Ashland, OH
http://www.mapleton.k12.oh.us
Norwayne Local Schools - Creston, OH
http://www.norwaynelocal.k12.oh.us
Orrville City Schools - Orrville, OH
http://www.orrville.k12.oh.us
Rittman Exempted Village Schools - Rittman, OH
http://www.rittman.k12.oh.us
Southeast Local Schools - Apple Creek, OH
http://www.southeast.k12.oh.us
Tri-County Educational Service Center - Wooster, OH
http://www.youresc.k12.oh.us
Triway Local Schools - Wooster, OH
http://www.triway.k12.oh.us
Wadsworth City School District - Wadsworth, OH
http://www.wadsworth.k12.oh.us
Wayne County Schools Career Center - Smithville, OH
http://www.wayne-jvs.k12.oh.us
Wooster City Schools - Wooster, OH
http://www.woostercityschools.org
Additionally, we have created sites for school organization to include:
Four Cities Educational Compact
http://www.fourcitiescompact.org
and
Tri-County International Academy
ib.tricountyesc.org
Granted, it was a learning experience getting these first sites moved over to Drupal from their existing third-party sites since the data was practically impossible to move, but with the help of technology coordinators, tech support people, and secretaries from the various districts we managed to get all the information ported over.
Now it is time to reconsider everything we have done and identify how we can make our first attempts better for the districts we serve.
It has truly been an experience, both rewarding and, at times frustrating. But now that we have one phase under our belt, we are ready to move into D7 and make changes that will make the school district websites a more trusted method of communicating with students, parents and community.
That is our mission. That is our goal.
Tom Grandy
