The new Lehighton Area School District website was unveiled at the school board meeting to excitement and long-awaited satisfaction from the board and educators in attendance.

The upgrades to the website are immediately noticeable. The new site is much cleaner and brighter than the old one, and pictures of the district schools and students fade in and out in an embedded slide show at the top of the page, giving the whole site the professional feel of a business or political website.But the aesthetic revision was just a small part of the school district's website revision, headed by Marcus Statham, director of technology.Much of the content from the original site is present, and visitors will be comfortable navigating through the new pages.Anyone with permission to add content to the site will find it an easy process, since all that is required to post to the site is word processing competency.Parents will be able to focus the information they look at to the schools of their choice. For instance, parents of middle schoolers will be able to filter out posted events and see only those calendar items that pertain to the middle school.The staff directory saw an overhaul that includes a better search engine for district and school staff. Staff will also have the ability to upload photos of themselves and link to their personal website from the school's.Parents, students, teachers and staff will find navigation through the site much more intuitive. Statham's goal was that "a parent coming to the site should be able to find everything in three clicks."Superintendent James Kraky was impressed with the revamping."We've been looking at various options and opportunities for website redesign," he said in response to to Statham's presentation. "The website we had was terrific in its time. When we started out, we were happy to have some of those basic things. But as time has evolved, everyone has greater expectations of them, and this just brings us up to the next level."Statham expects to have the site up and running this weekend.In other district business, the board approved a motion to set up a community presentation in the near future along with a feasibility study of possible building projects and recommendations from their architecture consultants. They also plan on reaching out to key constituents to participate in a community dialogue on these possible projects.School board President David Krause informed the board that enrollment to Lehigh Carbon Community College from graduating Lehighton Area High School seniors was down by 23 students from last year.The high school's guidance office is looking into the details to understand if this decline is due to a changing financial situation for students and their families, if there is a larger proportion of students matriculating to four year universities, or if there is another cause for the change.Krause expects to have a clearer picture on this subject by next month's meeting.The board also approved a motion to allow the Lehighton Athletic Booster Club to use school property for basketball practice and games, and approved a list of new substitute teacher candidates.The board expects repairs to lights in the student parking lot of the high school to begin next week.