Newark Public Schools
The Newark School District, established in 1676, is one of the oldest school districts in New Jersey, and also one of the largest, with sixty-six schools, over 5,000 employees and over 35,000 students.
Newark Public Schools
This project was an exciting challenge for WebDevStudios! We migrated almost 80 websites from a proprietary solution (Schoolwires) into a WordPress Multisite network. Now Newark Public School District administrators and staff can update and maintain the entire network of websites from one easy-to-manage platform.
WebDevStudios created a custom mobile app with AppPresser that allows both students and parents to receive push notifications directly from the school, ensuring that whether the alert is regarding fun district-wide events or student health and safety, they’ll be instantly in the know. We also implemented a calendar solution with custom features for showing district-registered events across all school websites, making it easy for administrators to update and for families to peruse. Lastly, we created a sleek, new, responsive design that looks great on any desktop browser or mobile device.
Migration
Each school website was migrated from Schoolwires, a proprietary solution for school websites, into WordPress with a custom automated script built by WebDevStudios. This script scraped all of the content and resources from the live Schoolwires websites as Schoolwires wouldn’t provide any kind of data export or access to Newark’s content. Leveraging WordPress and Open Source saves the district money because there is no licensing of software involved; these annual savings can be used for future development of new features.
Mobile App
WebDevStudios created a basic mobile app with AppPresser that can be downloaded from iTunes and Google Play. Users of the app can view all of the same information as on the website, as well as receive push notifications on their mobile devices about important information and alerts from the schools, allowing greater communication between administrators, parents, and students across the board.
Multisite Calendar
Now administrators can post events to the district calendar and have it reflect on each school’s website while also allowing individual schools to simultaneously maintain their own calendar. The calendar page for the district and the individual schools can be filtered by sub-categories of events, which makes it super easy for everyone to know what is happening and when.