School district launches new website, app

The Tea Area School District launched a new website and app in mid-March to improve communication with the community.

“Part of our strategic plan is communications. We did parent feedback surveys and the feedback from there, communication and digital opportunities and streamlining our calendar,” said superintendent Jennifer Lowery.

Besides updating the look of the website, the name has changed as well. The new website - teaarea.k12.sd.us - replaces teaschools.k12.sd.us.

“Tea Area is the staple of what the district is and making sure that we very much acknowledge that we support the entire area. We need to make sure that even the little tiny dotting our I’s was accurate,” Lowery said. “Now it’s causing a few hiccups, but it was important to get it right and this was the right time to make sure that we are Tea Area, we are not just the city limits of Tea.”

The Tea school’s website is no longer working so people trying to access the website need to type in the new address for Tea Area.

Technology director Chris Friedrich and executive administrative assistant Audrey Arndt put a lot of work into the website and app. They began working on them in November or December.

“It was a long time. It takes a lot to migrate that data over,” Friedrich said.

The new design is similar to other school district websites in the area. However, they worked with the website company to individualize and set them apart from the area schools.

“It’s definitely more modern and has the social media twist to it where it’s the live feed portion if you look at the site is more of your social media posting. It just caters to our younger community,” Friedrich said.

The app and website complement each other. Anything that is live posted on social media and events post through the app. The app is geared toward notifications and social media. The website can be accessed through the app.

Lowery noted anyone can set their phone to whatever language that they want to utilize and the app functions in that phone’s capability.

“This site and capability increases our functionality in meeting ADA compliance and the multi-language needs of our families to reach everybody that we can,” Lowery said.