The Iola school district’s endowment association wants to reach out to all living USD 257 graduates. How? Well, that’s not so simple.
At the USD 257 Endowment Association’s monthly meeting Thursday at Iola High School, members discussed the possibility of purchasing a domain name and creating its own website, independent of the school district’s site, equipped with an interactive page for IHS alumni to provide personal information about where they live, when they graduated and even career details.
“If you can get them to the website and say ‘where are you now,’ ‘what are you doing’ or ‘how many kids do you have’ … I’ll bet 80 percent of the people that come to this website will update it,” said Steve Strickler, endowment association chairman.
With all members present agreeing an interactive website would be a worthy endeavor, Brett Linn, USD 257 technology director, was instructed to research the costs associated with building the site.
“This website is an endowment association (site) and it’s not going to get hit very often,” said Tony Leavitt, association member. “If we have an alumni website and you have alumni information on there, you’re going to get a thousand times more traffic.”
Leavitt and the other members expressed concerns that if an Iola graduate were to get online and search for fellow alumni, odds are they wouldn’t be hunting for an endowment association.
“I think we need to get the word alumni in the name,” Leavitt said referring to the possibility of altering the association’s official name.
Problem is, said Laura Caillouet-Weiner, association
president and Jefferson Elementary teacher, there is already an alumni association in Iola that puts on reunions and other alumni events.
“We don’t want to step on anybody’s toes,” she said.
Without taking official action with a vote, association members agreed to invite representatives from the Iola Alumni Association to attend the next meeting, March 8, to discuss collaborative and information-sharing efforts as well as to gauge their attitudes about the endowment association using the word ‘alumni’ in its name.
