Opinion

Make the school website great again

Elise Johnson, Arts & Entertainment Editor • February 24, 2020

Sophomore Dana Johnson maneuvers around the new website layout.

For an educational facility, the new composure of the school website isn’t very smart.

Recently, the PV School District changed the official website again, for likely the thousandth time now. Unlike the last change, however, the most recent design is being highly ridiculed by the student body— and for good reason.

The new organization of the website is very broad, making it a puzzle to figure out which sections of the website one needs to go to find what they need. Many students are having trouble trying to maneuver through this new structure, as it’s no longer easy to tell what sections of the website they should go to in order to find the content they need.

“Everything is rearranged horribly,” sophomore Dana Johnson stated. “You can’t find anything anymore; it takes me a solid 20 minutes to find what I need on the website now. Some things I still haven’t figured out where they are.”

One thing that is specifically annoying is the removal of the “teacher pages” section of the website. In the new website arrangement, they replaced the “teacher pages” section with a directory, where students must type in the name of their teacher to access their website.

Senior Cienna Pangan was one of the students who had issues with the change. “It’s really annoying trying to find the websites of our teachers, or really any teacher for that matter,” Pangan stated. “[There have] been times where I’ve needed to find the website of a teacher last minute and couldn’t reach it because I couldn’t completely remember how to spell their last name.”

Additionally, the “teacher pages” section allowed students to visit different teacher websites of the same subject if they needed more help on a subject. With the replacement of this feature, students have a much harder time trying to find these websites. When all the websites were arranged by subjects, it made it much easier to figure out which teachers taught which subjects.

Instead of being a replacement, the directory should simply be an extra feature to the website. It’s helpful with finding contact information for a teacher, but it has greatly limited website reach for the student body.

Because of the limited helpfulness of the directory and the broad organization of the updated website, the school website should be reverted to its last version. Make the school website helpful again— not confusing.

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About the Contributors

Elise Johnson, Arts and Entertainment Editor

Elise Johnson is a senior at Pleasant Valley High School, and currently counting down the days until graduation. In her near future, she will be attending the University of Iowa as a biology and chemistry student on the pre-med track in hopes to one day reach her lifelong goal of being a dermatologist. As she waits to pursue her dream job, she focuses on her other passion in life: music. Elise has played the tenor saxophone for 7 years, and has recently become a drum major for the Spartan Marching Band. She also played the viola in 4th grade, but was forced to quit when her mother told her to choose between orchestra and band. She hopes to one day avenge that moment in her life by relearning the viola in college and becoming the violist she always dreamt of being as a 4th grader. Some of her other goals for the future are to learn fluent Japanese, join the rowing team, and one day move far into the mountains where she can fulfil a life of peace and simplicity.

Sunny Wolfe, Copy Editor

Sunny Wolfe, 18, was born and raised here in Bettendorf Iowa. Sunny has attended the Pleasant Valley Community School District since she was in Kindergarden. While attending PVHS, Sunny has played volleyball all four years and has been apart of the National Honor Society since junior year. After graduating from PV, Sunny plans on attending Augustana College to play volleyball as a Viking and wants to study kinesiology. After her four years at Augustana, Sunny wants to continue her education at chiropractic school. Sunny has 4 siblings and looks up to her mom tremendously. During the summers, Sunny works at Antique Archeology with her uncle, Mike Wolfe. Other than working, Sunny spends a lot of time focusing on her volleyball career. During the club season, Sunny spends a lot of her time traveling around the country and is going to Minnesota and Texas in the near future. Sunny’s other hobbies include hanging out with her Chinese Shar Pei, Cordi, watching her favorite movie, Perks of Being a Wallflower, watching Packers and Cubs games, and eating her favorite food, mashed potatoes.