Case Study: Berkshire Country Day School

Berkshire Country Day School (BCD) is an independent school for pre-kindergarten through grade twelve. Founded in 1946, BCD has been located since 1963 at Brook Farm, its beautiful 27-acre campus just south of Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts. In 2000, the school expanded through the secondary school grades and added the 62-acre Winthrop Campus, located just north of Brook Farm near the center of Lenox.

BCD is a rigorous yet caring community in which students and teachers share in the process of learning. The school is widely known for its strong focus on academic achievement, with a sophisticated traditional curriculum. Advanced Placement courses and college counseling are offered at the secondary school level.

Their Objectives

BCD wanted a website that would be the central source for distributing and sharing information to all its constituencies: current parents, students and faculty, BCD alumni and prospective new faculty as well as new students and their families.

One of the key requirements was to provide the complex calendar information in an easily accessible way. On a given day, for example, there may be 13 different sports activities alone. Parents were frustrated having to sift through a large number of activities and school events to find those that were pertinent to them.

Another goal was for the faculty to be able to easily communicate information with their students like homework assignments, links for research, etc. For teachers of younger students, the goal was to have the to ability to post photos of class activities and newsletters for parents.

Security is critically important to all websites, but of even more concern for an educational institution. BCD needed a site that allowed easy access for those posting site content, but also was completely secure.

For a substantial institution, managing accounts for all the people who have the ability to update site content can become onerous. BCD needed a simple mechanism for managing these accounts.

Their Results

The backbone of the new dynamic, database driven website is its calendar functionality. Visitors to the site have the ability to display school events by one or more categories. They can filter events to get just the information they need. Events can be filtered by event categories such as: sports, academic department, alumni, Board of Trustees, etc. Events can also be filtered by date range. As an example, if a parent wants to know all their child's upcoming soccer games for the next 2 weeks they can filter out just this information and print it out.

The Home Page of the website offers a quick view of all that is happening at the school on the current day as well as important school news items and upcoming events. These are kept current by BCD staff using siteFresh™.

Teachers can easily post information for their students to the website. Other areas of the site display student work and student publications. There are online photo galleries for classroom activities, school events and sports.

Prospective students and their parents can find out about the school's philosophy, its academic and extracurricular programs and download its admissions and financial aid applications.

BCD Alumni can login to view the complete Alumni Directory to be able to look up and stay in touch with their former classmates. They can submit an Alumni Profile Update Form online and view Alumni news and event calendar.

The site is dense with other features: a Parents Association section including PA news, a Library section featuring research tools and links and a form to contact the Librarian, the School Handbook, a list of faculty committees, a bi-weekly letter from the Head of School, information on how to support BCD, a Board of Trustees section listing its members, committees and meeting notes, and a "Bulletin Board" for posting lost and found and other school classifieds.