Big changes have come to the Vicksburg Warren School District’s website to make it more accessible and user-friendly.

The school district updated its site to make it compliant with guidelines required for sites to be accessible by people with disabilities and also in order to help give a unified web presence for each of the district’s 16 schools.

The schools previously had a motley collection of websites, if the school had one at all, and now each of the district’s schools have a similar site with the goal of better serving the community.

“Communication is important for any school district,” district communication directior Christi Kilroy said.  “There are certain requirements for accessibility to a website, particularly for a school district or government organization, because if there is someone with a disability that is using particular software there has to be a color scheme and other things you put on your website have to be at a certain level. We were not in compliance.”

The district also worked to make the items parents use the most easily accessible such as lunch menus, bus routes and the active parent system that allows parents to monitor their students’ grades.

“We took the old site and we tried to find what people went to the most and we tried to make those really bold,” Kilroy said. “You’ll see the search bar on the bottom, but you will see those big buttons. Just bigger, easier to get to the places people want to get to the most. Hopefully it will be easier to find what they need and what they want on the site.”

The website also gives a prominent location to the Let’s Talk feature, which allows people to easily ask questions of the departments they are looking for. By clicking the Let’s Talk link, you will be taken to a menu listing different departments including nutrition and transportation.

You choose the department your question is for and can send a message directly to that department.

“On the backside, we get a notification that this person reached out and they have an issue,” Kilroy said.  “We can also track it and make sure all our inquires are attended to. If somebody doesn’t respond we will get an alert.”

The sites for the individual schools can be managed by the school to highlight what is happening on campus. There is also a function that allows alerts to be posted districtwide or specifically on the site for the impacted school.

“We have 16 schools and we had lots of different sites so we didn’t have any uniformity to them,” Kilroy said. “We also had some volunteers that were doing sites and their kids might move to the next school and then we had nobody to keep that site together. Plus, some of those sites we had no oversight on if they were compliant. This is a solution that allows every school to have their site, but still allows somebody internally to have access to that site.”

The district’s website can be accessed at www.vwsd.org.