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Case Study

# How a 28,000-Student School District Unified 14 Websites and Cut Parent Support Calls by 41%

A large suburban school district was spending thousands of staff hours per month answering parent enquiries about information that existed on their websites — scattered across 14 separately managed school sites. Here's how they fixed it.

10 min read
K-12 Education February 2025 Read Case Study

41%

fewer parent support enquiries in semester one

Fourteen school websites. Fourteen sets of lunch menus, sports schedules, absence policies, enrollment forms, and bell timetables — each formatted differently, each updated by a different staff member, and none of them connected by a unified search. For the parents of the district's 28,000 students, finding basic information had become a part-time job. For the district's office staff, answering the resulting flood of calls and emails was consuming hours that should have been spent on students.

## The District

The district serves approximately 28,000 students across 14 schools — eight elementary schools, four middle schools, and two high schools — in a suburban community of roughly 95,000 residents. The district employs 1,800 staff including 1,100 certified teaching staff, and operates an annual budget of approximately $340 million.

Each of the district's 14 schools maintained its own website, managed independently by a designated staff member — typically an administrative assistant or office manager with other primary responsibilities. The district maintained a central website at the district level, but it contained primarily policy, governance, and district-wide programme information rather than school-specific operational content. Parents navigating back-to-school preparation, extracurricular schedules, or enrollment processes had to identify and navigate to the correct school site, then find the relevant content within that site's idiosyncratic navigation structure.

The district used a shared CMS platform across all 14 sites, which simplified maintenance but had not been configured with any cross-site search capability. Each site had its own search box, which searched only that site's content. Parents who landed on the wrong school's site, or on the district homepage, had no way to search across all schools simultaneously.

## The Problem: What Were Parents Actually Asking?

In April 2024, the district's Director of Communications conducted an analysis of the prior six months of support ticket data from the district's parent helpline and the individual school office email inboxes. The findings were striking: of 9,400 parent contact events in that period, 3,860 — 41% — were categorised as 'information requests' rather than 'case-specific enquiries'. These were questions about information that was published on a school website.

The ten most common information request topics were: school lunch menus (monthly), sports practice and game schedules, before/after school care programme details, enrollment and re-enrollment forms, absence reporting procedures, immunisation record requirements, bell schedules and early release days, volunteer clearance procedures, school supply lists, and technology device loan policies. Every one of these was published on every relevant school website. None of them were reliably findable through the existing site search.

28,000

students across 14 schools

41%

of parent contacts were information requests

9,400

parent contact events in 6 months

14

separately managed school websites with no unified search

> "Our office staff were spending a significant part of every Monday morning answering questions about the lunch menu, the sports schedule, and when enrollment forms were due. This information was on the website. It had always been on the website. Parents just couldn't find it."

> — Director of Communications

## FERPA Compliance: The Non-Negotiable Requirement

The district's legal counsel and technology director set one condition at the outset of the search evaluation: any AI search platform deployed must respect FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) requirements with zero exceptions. FERPA prohibits the disclosure of personally identifiable information from student education records to unauthorised parties — and in a K-12 context, a unified search system that connected public-facing content with any system containing student data presented potential exposure if access controls were not implemented correctly.

How Keyspider handles FERPA in K-12 deployments

Keyspider's permission-aware indexing architecture separates content into audience-scoped indexes at the point of indexing, not retrieval. Public-facing parent content (menus, schedules, policies) lives in the public index. Staff-accessible content (student records, IEP documents, HR files) is indexed separately and requires authenticated access. The public search widget is physically incapable of returning results from the staff index — not because of a query-time filter, but because the indexes are architecturally separate. This approach satisfies FERPA requirements without relying on access control logic that could be misconfigured.

The district's legal counsel reviewed Keyspider's technical architecture documentation and the data processing agreement before the evaluation proceeded. The architecture's clear separation of public and authenticated indexes — verified by a technical walkthrough with the district's IT Security Coordinator — satisfied all FERPA-related concerns and cleared the path for a full deployment.

## CIPA Compliance

As a recipient of E-rate funding, the district is required to comply with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which mandates the use of technology protection measures to restrict minors' access to harmful content on school networks. The district's technology team confirmed that Keyspider's search deployment — which indexes only district-controlled content and does not expose students to external web content through the search interface — is consistent with CIPA requirements. The AI-generated answer layer draws exclusively from the district's indexed content; it does not query the open internet.

## The Deployment: 8 Days to Unify 14 Sites

Contract execution was completed in June 2024, timed deliberately to coincide with the summer break period when website traffic was at its annual low and any transition risk was minimised. The Keyspider deployment team began indexing all 14 school sites plus the district headquarters site on the first day of implementation.

The district's CMS platform — a shared installation across all sites — allowed Keyspider's crawler to be configured once with school-specific metadata tags that identified which content belonged to which school. Search results could therefore display school attribution alongside each result, allowing a parent searching for 'lunch menu' to see results specifically labelled 'Lincoln Elementary — Lunch Menu' or 'Roosevelt High School — Cafeteria Schedule', eliminating the ambiguity that had caused confusion when parents navigated to the wrong school site.

By the end of Day 3, all 14 sites were fully indexed — approximately 6,800 pages total, including PDF documents such as enrollment forms, immunisation requirement guides, and athletic participation packets. Days 4 and 5 were spent on relevance tuning using the district's 10 most common parent query topics as a test battery. Days 6 and 7 involved testing by a representative group of school office staff across three schools. Day 8 was the public launch.

Implementation note

The deployment included a unified search widget embedded on the district homepage — the most-visited page on the network — as well as a search widget on each individual school site that searched across all 14 schools by default, with an optional filter to narrow to a single school. This design decision, arrived at after discussion with school principals and office managers, was central to the outcome: parents no longer needed to navigate to the right school site before searching.

## Results: Semester One (August–December 2024)

41%

reduction in parent information request contacts

25 min

average staff time saved per day per school office

94%

parent satisfaction with search experience

8 days

from contract to live across all 14 sites

### Parent Contact Volume

Semester one of the 2024–25 academic year was the first full semester with the unified search live. Information request contacts to school offices and the district helpline fell by 41% compared to semester one of 2023–24, from an annualised rate equivalent to approximately 9,400 contacts per six-month period to approximately 5,540. The reduction was consistent across all 14 schools, which the IT team attributed to the unified search being accessible from every school site — not just the district homepage.

### Staff Time Recovery

A survey of school office administrators conducted in November 2024 found that on average, office staff reported saving approximately 25 minutes per day in time previously spent answering information request calls and emails. Across the 14 school offices, each with at least one full-time administrative role, this represented a cumulative recovery of approximately 5.8 staff hours per day — time reallocated to student-facing administrative work, enrollment processing, and support for teachers.

### Parent Satisfaction

A parent satisfaction survey conducted in October 2024 via the district's Parent Portal — with 2,200 responses from the approximately 22,000 registered parent accounts — included a question about the new unified search experience. Ninety-four percent of parents who had used the search rated it as 'easy' or 'very easy' to find what they needed. The qualitative open-text responses most frequently cited 'I can now search across all schools at once' and 'I actually found the lunch menu for once' as specific improvements.

> "The first week back after summer break used to be pandemonium in the office. This year was different. Parents were finding the information themselves. We had time to actually prepare for the year."

> — Elementary School Principal

## Workplace Search for Staff: Phase 2

Following the success of the parent-facing deployment, the district's technology team initiated a Phase 2 evaluation of Workplace Search for internal staff use. The district's staff operate across a shared drive infrastructure, a Microsoft 365 environment for email and document collaboration, and a separate student information system (SIS). Teachers and administrators regularly spend time searching for HR policy documents, curriculum materials, professional development records, and district-wide programme guides.

The Phase 2 deployment will use Keyspider's permission-aware indexing to ensure that HR and finance documents are only accessible to authorised staff roles, while curriculum resources and general policy documents are broadly accessible to all certified staff. The FERPA-protected staff index established in Phase 1 provides the architectural foundation for this extension.

Explore further

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Keyspider AI Search — product overview

What Keyspider AI Search indexes, how it handles permissions, and how it deploys.

Keyspider Workplace Search

Permission-aware search across staff document systems, intranets, and SharePoint.

AI Search for Higher Education

How universities are reducing student service enquiries with semantic search.

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Topics

K-12 Education AI Search Workplace Search FERPA Parent Engagement

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