by Bill Rogers
Middletown City Schools are way ahead of the curve when it comes to web savvy and incoporating the internet into the day to day operations of the school district. Parents of students in the district can login to the school's website where they have access to many and varied features such as a photo database for each building, a school staff email database, lunch menus and prices, account information for a 'lunch card' and the ability to fund the card, and more.
The Middletown School District pays $79,000 a year for hosting and associated fees for http://www.middletowncityschools.com/ and other individual school websites. Through a federal program that discounts telecommunications and Internet services for schools the district is reimbursed about 60% of the cost, though. Middletown also pays to develop internal applications for their intranet that cut down on large amounts of paperwork in the district.
Middletown's expenditures in this area are over 3 times that of any other local school district. The website was one of the expenditures slated to be cut from the budget pending the passage of the school levy renewal in November. Discuss Middletown Schools' website on the MiddletownUSA Blog Forum.