Manassas City Public Schools has launched a website and a mobile app for the start of the 2024-2025 school year.
The first day of the new year was Monday, and the launch was presented to the Manassas School Board on Tuesday at their first regular meeting of the school year. Almeta Radford, director of public communications for MCPS, showcased the new website and app to the board.
MCPS is using the same website address (mcpsva.org), but migrated to using a different website provider in July.
“We just wanted to let people know that as the new school year has kicked off, these are some of the things that they will see as we do our back-to-school nights and things like that,” Radford said. “We’ll be having people on site, helping people jump on to some of the new platforms that have been made available to them.”
Radford also cautioned parents, students and faculty that the website is not perfect yet and it may take some time to adjust.
“As we continue navigating through the things that we are building out, meaning broken links and things like that, you have to understand,” she said. “As we’ve moved from one host to another, some people may look for things that they were familiar with in other places. We want to encourage [you] to contact our offices with something specific.”
The app is the newest facet of MCPS this year. It’s available on both the Apple Store and Google Play for downloads, and Radford highlighted how this app helps MCPS build a cohesive brand.
“In the past few years, people will remember having to use things like Remind, Schoology and Power School. Those things are vendor-branded,” Radford said. “Now, the fact that we are able to have something that is branded as us, is exciting to us.”
On the app, parents are able to “subscribe” or follow the school their child attends for alerts. There’s the option to subscribe to multiple schools as well. There is an event calendar function, which enables users to see events going on within MCPS at each level.
Another component to the app is the ability for parents and teachers to communicate through it. The communication tool — known as Rooms — is connected to PowerSchool, the student information system.
“Parents are able to go in and not only chat with their student’s teachers, but also to have all of their students in one location,” Radford said. “[Parents are] able to talk one-on-one with teachers, just as they did with Remind as like a texting fashion, so you don’t really have to wait for an email.”
Radford said emails aren’t being done away with at MCPS, but it’s a system to help teachers communicate directly with students and give parents the opportunity to see their students’ information all at once.
She also said teachers provided some feedback after their training and said it would be beneficial to have all of their information in there that is easily accessible to students.
“They felt that it was very good to have everything for them in one platform, in one place, because typically you have to close apps, open other ones up and so [on] the back end it is beneficial because they don’t even have to have teacher web pages anymore,” Radford said. “That was one of the things that the communications office [was] always concerned about, with people having to feel like they had multiple pages to keep up with and maybe it had outdated information on it.”
With the new Rooms function, teachers can easily update their biographical information, tutoring hours, field trip forms and the like. Radford encouraged parents to ask questions if they have any as they get set up with the new system.
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