middleschool.website · The family-reach layer of the school website
A school can have a perfectly good website and still lose families to the same four gaps: the newsletter nobody bookmarked, the staff directory that lists someone who left two years ago, the closure notice a family cannot read in their own language, and the calendar that only shows the bell schedule and not the club meeting tonight. Middle School Website is the SAME typed-block site your school already runs (or would build at middleschool.site), told from those four questions instead of the authoring workflow: a newsletter feed, a staff directory, translated announcements, and a calendar with a fuller events feed as an option.
This is in active development. No school is running a live public middleschool.website build yet, and money is honest-off -- there is no live charge on this page. Translated announcements are honest-off today (no in-VPC translate engine is wired at this checkout), and a fuller events feed is a Pro add-on, off by default with no live price.
Why reach, not just another page-building pitch
Three gaps show up at almost every middle school site, independent of who built it or how many pages it has.
A PDF emailed once and never linked again is not a newsletter a family can return to. Pointing a news feed block at the edition your staff already publishes puts the same content where a family will actually look for it again -- without a second copy to keep in sync.
A phone list printed at the start of the year is wrong by October. A staff directory block reads the school's own current staff query at serve time, so a family calling the front office reaches the right person, not whoever held the job last spring.
An early-dismissal alert or a permission deadline only works if every family can read it. Translated announcements are a real, gated capability -- honest-off today -- built for exactly this: a school notice rendered in a family's own language, not a generic page translation plugin.
The four modules
Every capability below is real, shipped code on the platform’s school-website substrate -- this page describes what it does for a middle school family, it does not invent a new engine, and it says plainly when something is honest-off.
The news feed block carries an edition reference, not a copy of the content -- it resolves to your school's already-public newsroom edition at the moment the page is served. There is nothing to keep in sync by hand, and nothing baked into the page that goes stale the day after publish. It is a CORE block: free and unpaywallable, no page-count trade-off to add it.
Built & wired · free core
The staff directory block is a data pointer to the school's own staff query, resolved live -- there is no name or title hand-typed into the stored page, so a departure or a title change updates the directory the next time the page is read, not the next time someone remembers to edit the site. CORE tier: free and unpaywallable.
Built & wired · free core
The platform's in-VPC translate capability is scoped, by its own contract, to exactly this kind of content: a school notice, a newsletter blurb, a parent-facing message. Using it is gated on the ONE AI policy chokepoint the whole platform shares: a family's ai_processing consent AND a parent-notice flag must both be present before any text is even attempted. There is no external cloud-translation code path in the contract at all -- only an in-VPC transport interface exists. But at this checkout no in-VPC engine is wired, so the gate itself returns honest-off: nothing on this page is translated live today, by anything. This is a platform capability, not yet a button inside the page editor.
Real, gated capability · honest-off at this checkout
The calendar embed block (bell schedule and day pattern) and the alert banner block (an early dismissal or closure notice) are both CORE: free, unpaywallable, no gate. A separate events feed block -- a fuller upcoming-events list -- is an above-floor Pro capability, seeded OFF for every plan with no live price. It fails closed until an operator turns it on; nothing about the core calendar or the closure banner depends on it.
Core built & wired · events feed is Pro, off by default
Middle School Website is not a second page-building engine. It is the SAME typed-block school-website surface as middleschool.site, walked in from a family’s recurring questions instead of an office’s authoring workflow. middleschool.site is where a page gets built, organized, and published; middleschool.website is the four things a family comes back for once it exists -- the newsletter, the staff directory, an announcement they can read, and the calendar. Neither page re-describes the other’s core story: this page does not claim the editor, the draft-to-published lifecycle, or the page-tree cap as its own pitch.
Concretely: middleschool.software is the program front door a student and family use directly -- electives, scheduling, clubs, counselor supports. middleschool.press is the publications editor a student staff runs the yearbook and newspaper in; this page’s newsletter feed can point AT an edition .press already published, never a re-description of the editor. middleschool.technology is the roster-sync technology that keeps the directory and ID cards current as the roster turns over; this page is one family-facing USE of that sync. middleschool.center is the staff hub an adviser or counselor reads their group from. middleschool.services bundles records, a directory, publications, and communication into one front-office managed service. middleschool.today is the family’s daily-glance reader inside the platform. middleschool.site is the page-building tool itself. middleschool.website is none of those -- it is the family-reach facet of the same site: the newsletter, the staff directory, translated announcements, and the calendar.
Monday morning, a closure notice for a weather delay sits in the alert banner at the top of the page -- a core block, no gate. Wednesday, a parent checks the calendar embed for the half-day pattern and reads a play-tryouts blurb pulled live from the school’s newsletter feed, which points at the edition the newsroom staff already published on middleschool.press rather than a second copy someone retyped. Thursday, a parent new to the district looks up the front office number in the staff directory, resolved from the same roster the rest of the platform reads, not a stale card someone forgot to update. If the school has enabled the Pro events feed, Friday’s club-tryout dates show up there too; if not, the core calendar and newsletter still carry the essentials, because the free floor was never designed to be thin.
None of this depends on a family reading English fluently. Where a school notice needs to reach a family in their own language, that is exactly the case the platform’s translate capability is built for -- but at this checkout it is honest-off, so today that family reads the same English text as everyone else. This page names that gap plainly rather than dressing it up as a feature that already works.
A school website is the one surface on the platform allowed to carry a student’s photo or name at all, and every public read runs a fail-closed consent recheck rather than trusting whatever was true when the page was authored. If a testimonial card or a gallery image on the site names or pictures a student, that item is re-gated on every single public read -- a parent’s revoked consent drops it on the very next visit, not the next time someone remembers to edit the page. A student never owns or edits the site: authoring is denied to a minor at creation and at every mutation, every time.
Facial recognition is off by default, and nothing about the staff directory, the newsletter feed, or the calendar involves scanning a face -- each is a data pointer resolved from records the school already keeps. A minor’s photo is never made public, never indexed by a search engine, and never sold; sharing it is consent-gated and can be withdrawn at any time. The translated-announcements capability carries the same discipline: it is gated on a family’s own consent and a parent-notice flag, and at this checkout it is simply off -- not a claim about what a future call would or would not touch.
What is built and what is honest-off — plainly
Built and wired today: the news feed block (a pointer to an already-published edition), the staff directory block (a live pointer to the school's staff query), the calendar embed and alert banner blocks (day pattern and closure notices), the free, unpaywallable core (a five-page cap, never gated on an existing page), the fail-closed accessibility gate that blocks publish rather than just warning, the unconditional consent recheck on every public read of a page that carries a student's photo or name, and the adult-only authoring gate that denies a minor at creation and at every edit.
Honest-off: translated announcements are a real, gated in-VPC capability with no external-provider code path in the contract, but no engine is wired at this checkout -- nothing is translated live on this page today. The Pro tier (the fuller events feed, plus pages past the core cap and the other advanced modules) is seeded OFF for every plan and carries no live price -- it fails closed until we enable it for a school. Money is honest-off across this page: no live billing, no subscription, no live payment, no live checkout. No school is running a live public middleschool.website build yet -- a conversation is the honest next step. Middle School Website is FOR-PROFIT software for middle schools; it is not itself a school, a district, or a nonprofit. Nothing here is legal advice.
FAQ
Same typed-block site surface, different first question. middleschool.site is where an office builds and publishes pages -- the editor, the nav, the draft-to-published flow. middleschool.website assumes a site exists (or points you to .site to build one first) and is told from a family's four recurring questions instead: the newsletter, the staff directory, a readable announcement, and the calendar.
No. The news feed block carries a pointer to an edition your staff already publishes -- it is resolved at the moment the page is served, not duplicated or re-authored. There is nothing to keep in sync by hand.
No. The staff directory block is a data pointer to the school's own staff query -- it reads live, so a departure or a title change shows up the next time the page is read, not the next time someone remembers to edit a page.
Not yet, and we say so plainly. A real, gated in-VPC translate capability exists in the platform -- built for exactly a school notice or a newsletter blurb, gated on a family's ai_processing consent plus a parent-notice flag -- but no translate engine is wired at this checkout. Nothing on this page is translated live today, by anything, in-house or outside.
The calendar embed (the bell schedule and day pattern) and the alert banner (a closure or early-dismissal notice) are both core, free, and unpaywallable. A separate events feed -- a fuller upcoming-events list -- is a Pro capability, seeded off for every plan with no live price today, and it fails closed until an operator enables it.
It is free and unpaywallable, not a trial: creating a site, building up to a five-page cap, and using the whole core block palette -- including the newsletter feed, the staff directory, the calendar, and the alert banner -- carry no gate at any point. Editing an existing page never gates on the cap either.
No. Creating or editing a school website is denied to a student or minor every time -- only a district or school admin, or an adviser or co-adviser, can own or author it. A student can still appear inside consent-gated content, such as a testimonial, the same way they might in any published school material, just never as the person running the authoring surface.
By a conversation, not a signup. Middle School Website is in active development, and no school is running a live public build on middleschool.website yet. A conversation walks through what is built, what is honest-off, and what Pro would add, plainly. Email [email protected].
A newsletter feed pointing at what your staff already publishes, a staff directory that reads the current roster, a calendar and closure banner in the free core, and a translated-announcements capability described honestly as honest-off today. A conversation walks through what is built, what is honest-off, and what Pro would add, honestly. Money is honest-off; there is no live charge on this page.