GALION, Ohio – The Galion School Board found out Tuesday night that the district could save a significant of money by switching to a new website provider.
Chris Stone, who is the communications liaison for the district, was on-hand at the Galion School Board meeting Tuesday night to discuss the possibility of moving to a new website provider. Stone, who has been working with the Galion district since October, recommended that the district move to Sharp School for their web site provider. If they make the move, Stone said they will save upwards of $10,000 a year which could go to other things the school may need. Stone said the school is currently paying over $13,000 for their web provider services.
He said there have been complaints from users of the current system which range from it being too busy to having to make too many clicks to get to where they want to get go. Stone assured everyone that the Sharp School system would take care of these issues.
Stone said that the Sharp School system would to be easier to use, provide a mobile app, provide online learning and training tools, and would also have the option of online registration forms. He said this feature is a feature included the platinum package which would cost an additional $2,275 a year.
One feature of the basic package that Stone said would be useful is the resource reservations feature. This would allow people to go onto the site and reserve rooms in the schools for private and public functions.
Another strong feature of the basic package Stone said would be the unlimited data storage and data transfer. According to Sharp School’s website, Sharp School provides maximum bandwidth and transfer capacity to ensure sites are always fast loading, available and stable. The cloud-based platform also provides limitless storage for web pages, and blended classroom data.
Another feature that Stone mentione was the notifications and press releases feature. In the event the school has to send out notifications and press releases to the public, this feature would allow the school to do so easily and would go out to a variety of platforms including social media. An example of this would be if there was an early release. Instead of having to go the website to look for it, the notification would be sent out to the various Galion School based platforms and inform parents in a timely manner.
Along with all these features, Stone said that the website would have a design that the school could customize themselves and the teachers would also be able to create individual websites for their classes. Stone said they could also use the system to update the school’s calendar as well.
In addition to helping Galion, Stone has also helped to lower the cost of website hosting for the Bucyrus City Schools. He has been working in this field for six years and urged Galion to move to the new system.
Currently Galion is using eSchoolView as their provider and is under contract with them until June of 2016. They have been with them since 2011 and they are considering looking for an out clause in the contract. If they are not able to get out of the contract they may have to wait until next summer to start implementing changes.
Hires and promotions
In other news the school board accepted the resignation of Kyle Baughn as middle school 7th grade math teacher and freshman football coach in order to become the new Athletic Director and high school assistant principal starting this upcoming school year. They also approved the employment of Angela DeGray as high school math teacher. Superintendent Mark Stefanik said this is a great hire for the school because DeGray is certified to teach dual credit math classes so students can take math classes that will count as college credit courses. A few other teachers will be moving up in the upcoming school year as the board voted to promote long term middle school sub Laura Gibson to 7th grade Science teacher and Janice Tuscan as High School Library Educational Assistant from her previous job of Study Hall Educational Assistant.
The next meeting of the Galion School Board will be July 16 at 6:30 p.m. in the Galion Middle School Computer Lab.
