Drupal for K-12 Education

Drupal is a great tool if you can afford it.  For most public K-12 school districts, however, Drupal is beyond reach. Drupal development services are typically expensive.  Knowing how to spin up and customize a Drupal environment is usually beyond the knowledge of most K-12 technology departments.  Because of these reasons, Drupal powers very few K-12 school websites.  Instead of Drupal, most K-12 schools use proprietary content management systems that provide generic templates and inexpensive corporate services.  Education in the United States is often an underfunded endeavor, and K-12 websites reflect this.

At the Manitou Springs School District in Colorado, we recently launched a program called Connect 14 that provides after-school opportunities in Arts, Sports, Outdoors, and STEM education to our students.  We ditched the CMS we use for our district site and used Drupal 8 instead, and it worked out fabulously.  Instead of a generic theme, we ended up with a customized one (though we used the Foundation Press base theme).  Instead of a bunch of pages powered by WYSIWYG, we leveraged custom content types, taxonomy, and a handful of contrib modules to tailor an experience that stands out from other K-12 websites.

What is our secret sauce?  The Drupal contrib space and a few passionate people made it happen.  With very little custom code, we were able to whip up a website that reflects the spirit of the afterschool program it was made for.  In this session, we'll use the Connect 14 website as a case study to see how it is possible to make Drupal happen on a small [K-12 education in the USA] budget.