District website salary cut to $500

The Paso Robles High School’s website, largely viewed by students and parents as substandard, has paid a curriculum rate of $33 an hour for general upkeep. Now, a board-approved salary has decreased to $500 a year, creating doubt that the amount will be enough to bring the website up to a standard that pleases teachers, students, and parents.

The good news is that the district website is evolving to become more user friendly with new templates and leadership positions for all school websites.

The PRHS site “is definitely not user-friendly in its current state,” said Martha Clayton, the PRJUSD Public Information Officer. She does believe the new version of the website, available in about eight weeks, will be very user friendly.

With eleven different sites for each elementary, middle, and high school, there is little consolidation for information, forcing parents to visit multiple sites if their students attend different schools and the significant upkeep of information and photos.  

The websites between each school lack consistency, and often do not contain recent information. For example, parents must visit each page of the different schools to find the general calendar of events, according to Clayton.

Laurie Zenobio, who was previously administrator on the PRHS site from October to December knows that the site is not up to date.

“The homepage no longer reflects what’s happening at school,” she said. Zenobio is now a substitute teacher and school librarian. She continues to run the drama website.

Prior to Zenobio’s management, the PRHS site was managed in HTML, which presented difficulties in ease of use and personnel who knew code. Zenobio explained that small code errors would cause problems with navigation. She converted the site to Google sites, which provided an easier website dashboard.

But since Zenobio has stepped away, the website is not easy to navigate.The district site updates are ready to address the concerns.

“The major goal of any website to to distribute information. We want to make sure that parents, students, staff, and community have access to a site that keeps them informed about what is going on in our schools,” said Clayton, who now is in charge of overseeing all school websites, while the different site leaders are in charge of updating their specific page.

The website started in 2000 with the Web Design class. In 2009, teacher Bartt Frey took over the position, leading the class to control 90 percent of the website for six years. The site was originally created with the intent of helping students learn how to build and control websites, and create a place to post high school information.

“The difficulty will arise in maintaining the site to a level that is beyond just basic,” said Frey, who teaches ROP Web Design, Computer Service and Repair, and Internetworking.

Frey believes a professionally run website would cost over $10,000.