Managing Class Listings for Multiple K12 Schools within a District

K12 schools often face the challenge of publishing a large catalog of courses that span across different school campuses and grade levels. With such a large number of courses being offered within the district, it can quickly become overwhelming for students to sort through coursework that is inapplicable to them. For this reason, we have several options for categorizing and organizing K12 class listings within either one streamlined Program of Studies site, or separate sites entirely.

Organizing Course Listings within One Site

Depending on the needs of your school, we can categorize class offerings by school, school level, magnet program, or any other parameter your school district uses. Most commonly, school districts will opt to host course listings for all schools within one catalog site, then make them filterable by school and grade level.

For example, Virginia Beach County Public Schools published a comprehensive library of all course offerings district-wide, but their site design allows a user to easily toggle between high school, middle school, and elementary school courses. Their course offerings are standardized and do not vary greatly by individual schools, so this organization made the most sense for their district. On the other hand, Clover Park School District opted to organize their course listings by middle school and high school, and then further categorized courses by school campus. Since their course listings vary greatly by school, CPS wanted their course listings to have clear distinction while still living within the same site.

While organizing by grade level or school campus are the two most common ways to categorize course listings, there are countless possibilities here. Magnet programs within schools is another way courses may be further classified within a Program of Studies site.

Publishing Multiple PDF Catalogs

Publishing a separate PDF catalog for each school within your district is an excellent way to further organize course listings. Program of Studies PDFs can be generated on-demand, and consolidates course offerings by school. This then allows students, parents, and staff to export the full library of course listings for their specific school and print it on-demand, if desired. Prince William County Public Schools (PWCS) opted to organize their course listings in this way. On the homepage of the Program of Studies site, you can view, download, and print the Program of Studies for each school within their district. This is a streamlined way to distinguish between class listings, and can always be implemented for schools who host all of their class offerings within one site.

Publishing Separate Sites for Separate Schools

Sometimes, it makes more sense for a K12 school district to publish multiple Program of Studies sites. Most commonly, they’ll publish a separate site for each school within their district. This allows the schools’ course listings to exist independently from one another and to be hosted on unique URLs. This may be an appropriate solution when there is no overlap in courses between the schools, or the schools need to have different overarching structures, formatting, or designs. Since each catalog site must be managed separately, the admin users will be different for each school. Kingman Unified School District (KUSD) opted to publish separate Program of Studies sites for Kingman High School and Lee Williams High School, which each have unique branding and course listings.

While there are multiple options for organizing course listings in K12 districts, our Clean Catalog team is a great sounding board for determining which solution is the right fit for your district. If you’d like to learn more about K12 Program of Studies software, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.