Leavenworth School District

"to ensure high levels of learning for all students."

Profile

Leavenworth USD 453 is a unified school district that is committed to a quality education for each and every student. It is located in Leavenworth, Kansas, known as the “First City in Kansas” because of its historical nature. It consists of ten schools, six elementary, two middle, and two high schools. They are an accredited school district based on their high standards of performance. There mission is, “to use challenging academic standards to prepare our students to be successful in our culturally diverse and technologically changing society.”

In order to build on their success they have recently started developing plans to improve the already successful school district. The Board of Education is now working on renderings for what is called the “Compromise Plan.” It is proposing a new high school with a new athletic complex along with renovations to the existing high school and middle schools.

Client Requirements

School district web site structures have become more and more complex as they try to integrate their district content along with individual school sites and teacher home pages. The districts are beginning to realize the need for innovative content management systems to centralize their sites and simplify the management process. To overcome this, the Leavenworth School District will implement a new web site management system to manage their entire district’s site content. ContentM will give their district a means to design, create and maintain their district’s Web site as well as develop an efficient way of communicating more effectively with parents, staff, students, and the community.

In addition to a content management system, Leavenworth School District will also utilize Allofe's eCurriculum system in order to comply with the requirements set by the No Child Left Behind Act.  Many school districts have created district-wide curriculum management and mapping guidelines to help enforce these guidelines, the Leavenworth School District has chosen to implement our web-based system that will provide an advanced solution to their district’s curriculum management processes. The system will be able to track the alignment of Kansas curriculum standards to classroom instruction. And more importantly, they require an extremely customized, scalable, and user friendly tool that can be adopted easily and painlessly by all levels of teachers with minimal training required.

ContentM

"A Content Management system to provide them with the ability to easily and fully control their web site content.”

Our Solution

• Allows an organization to manage multiple sites from one centralized interface.
• Includes a Rich Text Editor for easy content formatting and updating with no technical or html knowledge.
• Provides “edit in place” content management through a user intuitive interface.
• Automatically generates the menu, pages, site map, and search information as content is added and updated.
• Allows school districts to manage individual school sites, teacher and classroom portals and more.
• Manages separate home pages for classes, faculty, and staff.
• Gives teachers an easy to use web site builder that integrates their site with the district and school’s site.
• Features advanced security that lets you restrict site administrative access.
• Provides a global search and replace to make site wide updates more efficient.
• Allows you to spell check your entire site at the click of a button.
• Simplifies changing the overall look and feel through a stylesheet and template editor.
• Connects menu items to pages, other Web sites, documents, collections.
• Helps users create tables and insert images and links into pages.
• Creates menu structures with infinite sub menu levels.
• Ensures that links and images across your site are working through a link validator tool.

Effects

With this new system Leavenworth School District was able to simplify their entire Web site management process. ContentM was developed in a way that grows with the organization and its content management needs. It provided total control over every aspect of the site from look and feel to menu structure and page content. Its numerous plugins such as survey and form generators to web calendars and room scheduling systems provided the district with a scalable, enterprise wide, cost efficient application that met all web content management needs. The system, ContentM, is designed to give districts complete control over their site layout, look and feel, and content. It includes all of the tools to make a professional Web site in no time at all giving the least technical users a way manage their content on their own. This system provided a consistent design across pages and sections that made navigation of the Web site simple.

eCurriculum

"A system that maps course curriculum to national, state, and district level standards and benchmarks as well as helps to identify repetition and gaps in the district’s education process.”

Our Solution

• Provides comprehensive functionality for tracking and managing state standards, benchmarks, and indicators.
• Ties course curriculum to a state’s standards that are preloaded into the system such as state Goals, Knowledge Frameworks and Grade Level Expectations.
• Manages course scope and sequence.
• Tracks student mastery of course objectives and goals.
• Provides the capability to automatically generate course guides to be published online, along with a dynamic web site based on the curriculum to share with parents and the community.
• Creates templates for the generated course guides and web site that match the district’s existing web site design.
• Generates curriculum maps and course guides in a document format that they can print and/or publish.
• Uploads lesson plans and attaches documents for each curriculum map objective.
• Tracks gaps and repetition in instruction.
• Provides links to Bloom’s Taxonomy.
• Customizes curriculum formats to individual schools or districts.

Effects

The expanded curriculum mapping application revolutionized the district’s existing processes, putting them at the forefront of cutting-edge education technology. It allowed them to tie their curriculum units to specific evaluation factors such as objectives and assessment questions, which was later used to gauge the unit’s effectiveness. This provided educators with a comprehensive view of their curriculum and its outcomes. With this curriculum mapping program, the district was able to define the What, When, and How of classroom instruction. It came preloaded with the school’s state standards which allowed teachers to create curriculum maps and align the units to one or more standards, benchmarks, and indicators. It provided teachers with a guide to what to teach, when it is taught, and how to conduct activities and assessments. The system delivered real time curriculum guidelines and course information to teachers that provided them with a road map to successful classroom instruction.