We rebuilt
our own school.
The Neighborhood School (PS 363, East Village) paid Educational Networks $3,600 a year — invoice-verified — for a website its board couldn't edit without filing a ticket. As parents on the PTA, we rebuilt it: a custom site the board runs itself, hosted on Cloudflare, owned by the school outright. It's live at tnsny.org, and the same build is $900 a year for any NYC school.
The before, in the committee's own words
6 findingsThis isn't a vendor pitch about a competitor — it's what the school's own website committee wrote while living with the platform. Quotes are real; names withheld because the source documents are internal PTA material.
| # | Finding | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Nobody on the board could edit the site | Every change was a ticket: request → parent-coordinator approval → vendor support. The committee wrote a process document just to manage the queue. |
| 02 | Accessibility was quoted as a paid add-on | The committee wanted accessibility done in the page itself — semantic HTML and CSS, no overlay widget — and the platform's answer was an upsell. |
| 03 | The stock template read as clutter | “Too busy.” “Looks messy.” “Graphics floating around … not sure of their purpose.” Direct committee feedback on the template. |
| 04 | No real multilingual pages | The committee asked for actual Spanish pages (/es/), not a translate widget bolted on top. |
| 05 | Slow, and unfriendly to keyboards and screen readers | PageSpeed reports circulated in committee email. Members asked for semantic HTML and mouse-free navigation. |
| 06 | Ownership was murky | The board had to explicitly reclaim admin access to its own domain, hosting, and workspace. Who-owns-what was unclear by default. |
The rebuild
before · after
| What changed | Detail |
|---|---|
| Custom design in the school's own identity | Not a template. Reviewed by the committee, revision by revision. |
| A CMS any board member can run | Edited like a document. No tickets, no vendor queue, changes live in seconds. |
| Accessibility in the page, not on it | Semantic HTML, keyboard and screen-reader support, reduced-motion. No overlay widget, no add-on fee. |
| Cloudflare edge hosting | Static-fast worldwide, and the PageSpeed complaints ended. |
| Ownership, documented | The board holds the domain registrar, the hosting account, and the code. In writing. |
The numbers
invoice-verifiedThe school's website budget line was already $3,600 — a rebuild at $900 fits under the existing line with $2,700 of headroom. For most PTAs that means no new vote, just a smaller number.
Where it stands
owned, running, boringThe PTA has migrated off Educational Networks entirely. The board edits its own pages, the site loads fast on every phone, and the school holds the domain, the hosting, and the code. The most important property of the new site is that it no longer needs anyone's permission — including ours.
Your school's version of this story starts with a 20-minute call.