The Portland Public School system is Maine’s largest and most diverse school district – ranging from a one-room schoolhouse to state-of-the-art facilities and offering quality education for its 6,900 K-12 students and 4,500 adult education learners.

The team at Portland Public Schools wanted an updated and modernized site to provide online tools and resources to support their mission and provide communication between administrators, teachers, parents and students. They also needed to facilitate easy web publishing for departments, programs and operations.

Drupal’s flexibility makes it the natural choice for school districts, where multiple people need to be able to update various aspects of the site. We started with basic information architecture, making sure the flow of information was user-centric and intuitive. We redesigned the entire site and then developed it in Drupal, adding features such as webforms, event calendars, polls, news archives and staff/department listings. Per section access control enables the administrators to give access to particular areas of the site to those responsible for keeping it up-to-date. As well, each school has its own page which can be maintained by the school itself without needing to go through one central webmaster.