Why do we like this site?
This month we're excited to present a "first" for the Star School of the Month Award: The Panther's Den, the unofficial school site for Saucon Valley High School of Hellertown, Pennsylvania, USA. It is unendorsed, unsponsored and very publicly declares itself to be unofficial. Above and beyond the design elements which made us choose this site are the multitude of questions it also raises by virtue of its very existence.
To begin our review of the site, there's the simple fact that it makes use of the school colors (black and red) throughout while at the same time managing not to burn the viewer's retina clean off. Rather, it's visually very attractive. High-quality graphics and a stream-lined, easy-to-peruse design make this pleasant for the eyes. In a multi-media environment such as the WWW, one in which visual impressions are most common and most lasting, this is a characteristic which we cannot overemphasize as being important to a quality site.
Additionally, there's the wealth of information presented, both in terms
of quality and quantity. Topics explored in The Panther's Den include:
Beyond these characteristics, though, remains that which makes this site so unusual, and which made us especially interested in it. It is an unofficial school site, neither sponsored nor endorsed by the school whose students and community it claims to represent. On the site, students are encouraged to discuss controversial issues (such as the suspension without pay of a popular faculty member) in a "safe forum." The Panther's Den also challenges faculty and staff of the school, particularly the Guidance Office, to make themselves available via the Internet for questions, concerns and consultations (especially regarding cases in which a student might not be comfortable raising their concerns or questions in person). With the easy availability of web-publishing, and the expanding commonality among the average student, parent or educator of the knowledge of how to construct a site, this is an issue with which, we're willing to bet, more and more schools will have to deal over time. While we don't wish to comment ourselves, we must wonder, as sites such as The Panther's Den beg by their very existence, the following:
Does a school owe it to its extended school-community (staff, faculty, students, parents of students, local businesses and residents in the area from which the school takes its students, etc.) to involve them in the production of a site which claims to represent them?
How should a school deal with a member of that same community who feels unrepresented and decides to make use of the tools available to them to speak for themselves?
Should a school "deal with" them at all?
When we were in high school, there were "underground" student media -- newspapers and magazines -- which claimed to speak for a silent segment of that school-community microcosm of society. Is the World Wide Web going to be home to the "guerrilla" publications of the future? And if so, will it be right? Wrong? Is there a "right" or "wrong" when it comes to student expression?
Given that (last we knew) the Supreme Court had upheld the legal ability of a school's administration to censor the student-written publications put forth on a campus, such as the official student newspaper, does a school have the right or the ability (two very different things, potentially) to censor what a student or another member of the school-community expresses in an unofficial, non-school-based forum if it is directed to other members of that community and is explicitly about the school? Should it take legal action? Does a school have a responsibility to reach out to such members of the community and cooperate to make those views a part of "official" expressions regarding the school? Or should it reach an agreement, as happened between SVHS and The Panther's Den, to recognize one another's separateness and leave it be?
As stated above, we have no desire to state one way or the other our views. These are answers each school must find on their own, with their community. What we do know, however, is that more and more schools will be grappling with just these issues in the future, and only time will tell the outcomes. In the meantime, The Panther's Den remains a well-designed, informative site centered around the students of a school and, for October 1998, our Star School of the Month.
Who are the people behind this site?
The Panther's Den is maintained by Joe Edelman, a junior at Saucon
Valley High School, and the other
Joe
Edelman, his father.
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