Neonrain
Littleton Public Schools now has a central communications platform
to keep students, parents, and community members informed.
The Client
Littleton Public Schools was established in 1889 (130+ years ago) and currently serves over 15,000 students across 25 schools and 7 alternative programs.
The Challenge
Littleton Public Schools approached Neon Rain to design and build a website that was easy to manage, integrated with their mobile app, and allowed each school to customize their school sites with school colors and logos while maintaining the structure and managing content through a central content management system.
The Solution
Neon Rain designed and developed a website on Drupal. Drupal is an open-source enterprise CMS that is flexible, secure, and scalable.
Drupal is a popular platform for schools and universities due to robust permission controls allowing easier user management and customizable authoring and content moderation workflows.
We developed a multi-site installation with templates for each school. Each school had enough autonomy to customize its school sites with colors, logos, domains, etc., while still maintaining District control to apply security updates and make configuration changes across all sites.
Neon Rain also developed a school locator tool utilizing MongoDB for geospatial data.
A parent can enter their home address, and with Google Maps integration, the tool will verify the accuracy of the address and determine the "home" schools for that address and which schools are within walking distance or has a bus route.
LPS didn't have boundary coordinates readily available outside of their GIS platform. Neon Rain had to plot each point to create the polygons for each school.
The School Locator tool was invaluable as it reduced the number of calls to LPS offices requesting lookups and allowed community members such as Realtors to quickly determine school boundaries to help buyers narrow their search to specific schools.
"We chose Neon Rain due to their previous success with school district websites. Their creativity, experience, and technical abilities put us on a platform that will serve us well for many years to come."
- Sharlyn M, LPS Web Technology Integration Specialist
