Our group considered putting our directory in a password protected area of our website, but (as someone noted) putting personal info on the website was risky and was vetoed by the school principal. We didn't want to go back to our paper directory though, so we decided to put our directory in a spreadsheet file and send it by e-mail to those who request it.
Solved 3 problems: 1. we didn't publish anything outside of our school community; 2. we saved money and paper; and 3. we can update it periodically (as people move in and out, ask to be included, etc.) and send it out again.
For people who don't have access to e-mail, we will print the initial directory for a $3 fee to cover printing costs.
We're in an area of high government workers, FBI, DEA, Military etc and frankly it just got too hard to coordinate who did want to be in the directory and who didn't. So we stopped....but i think if we do again I'll follow JHBs roadmap...
Our directory was published in the fall. I think we usually tried for mid-October. We had a lot of turnover of students, so it took a bit after school started for everything to settle.
We didn't key in the information; we got the data from the school. But even when the parents provided it (like new families), there was the danger of typos or difficult to read handwriting.
We limited our information to the child's name, parent's name, address, and home phone number as we didn't want to get into publishing e-mail addresses.
As far as proofing it - I know a lot of people aren't comfortable with the merge feature in Word. But it's actually pretty easy. Printing the final form letter to each family was a piece of cake. Far, far easier than posting the master and asking for changes. We had about 600 kids, but it was a pretty short piece of info (not much ink). Probably paper and ink costs were less than $10. Merging/printing took about 10-15 minutes. We had it sorted so the pages printed out in order by grade, class, last name. So separating the stacks into classes was easy. It really was a very simple task and gave us the comfort of having correct info AND a defense for those parents who STILL didn't proof their information.
In all my time working on PTO projects, dealing with parents on directory information was one of the most bizarre. People are protective of information but sometimes not logical. We had parents who would only allow their child's first name published. I had one tell us we could publish the phone number, but nothing else, not even the child's name. I had to explain to her there really wouldn't be much point in that so she reluctantly allowed her child's name to be included. Then there are the divorced families and blended families. I sympathize with their situations, but some of them were so complex just to settle on a phone number. Sometimes even the name was in question. We had one child whose legal last name was hyphenated dad'sname-mom'sname. But mom only used the MomName. So if dad signed up for stuff, the child was was listed with one name; if mom, it was another.
Directories are wonderful and well worth the effort. But people are very particular about their name and information.
Good Lord JHB! Sounds like a nightmare. Did you send this home in September or at the end of the school year for the following September? Last year in June (2007) I sent home a paper getting EVERYONE's information. This year, I sent home a paper saying that if your information had changed from what was published in the previous year's directory, you had better contact me. We put the onus on the parents to make sure their info is correct. We did have to send out a correction or two last year, but it was probably 75/25 the fault of the parents. When does your directory usually come out? The parents are usually clamoring for ours as soon as school starts. Of course we have to enter all of the new information for the kindergarten families coming in so that takes a couple of weeks. We do our best to make sure everything is correct, but that would take until December to get it perfect. I work in publishing and know that nothing can EVER really be final because you have new families coming in mid year and people moving/changing phone #s, etc. We haven't had too many parents get upset about info being incorrect. Also, we limit the information to one phone number and one e-mail (unless the child's parents don't live together). The first year we did it, we had cell phones, home phones...it was a mess! I do like your idea about posting a master list though. We could easily have a draft done by back to school night. I may have to try that. Anyway, we try to get it done as soon as possible, but it's usually the last week in September when it actually gets distributed.
One other note - one of the biggest headaches of printing a directory is proofing. No matter what, there seem to be a few mistakes. And some folks can get quite angry about it. Especially if there was any mistake about restricted information being included.
We found it well worth the effort to use a simple merge into Word where the contact information for each entry was printed on a separate page which was sent home with each student, very clearly saying "THIS is the information we are publishing - if you have changes, let us know by ____".
Yes, it means you print a piece of paper for every student, but it's very simple. A ream (or two) or paper is a small cost. You can set up the merge to sort by teacher so it's very easy to divide the pages into classes to be distributed.
We tried many ways to proof the directory - including posting a master at school with a few evenings where folks could check info. This (sending home the individual form letter) was by far the easiest.
