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DC Public Charter School Board
Website rebuild and Drupal-to-WordPress migration for the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board, with a new Wednesday Bulletin microsite.
LaunchedOctober 28, 2026, with a coordinated DNS cutover
BuiltOur design and a custom WordPress theme, migrated from Drupal
ConnectedSchool Profiles API, Wednesday Bulletin microsite and Mailchimp
The Problem
A charter school authorizer’s Drupal site had grown hard to navigate, and the families, school leaders and researchers who depend on it said so.
Objectives
Organize the site around how families, school leaders and the public actually use it.
Move years of news, board meetings, public comments and testimony off Drupal without losing them.
Give staff a site, school profiles and weekly bulletin they can update themselves.
Challenge
The DC Public Charter School Board (DC PCSB) authorizes and oversees the District’s public charter schools, which enroll close to half of DC’s public school students across 132 campuses. Its website is where families find and compare schools, school leaders find policies and deadlines, and the public follows board meetings and comment periods.
Before the redesign, DC PCSB gathered feedback from families, school leaders, board members and staff. The same frustrations kept coming up: key pages buried too many clicks deep, a search that came up empty, and navigation that mirrored the org chart instead of the visitor. The legacy site ran on Drupal with more than a decade of news, meeting records and documents behind it, so the rebuild had to be a migration as much as a redesign.
Strategic Approach
We designed the site in Figma, then built a custom WordPress theme on WP Engine with navigation organized by audience: Newsroom, Schools, School Leaders and Get Involved. School profiles pull directly from DC PCSB’s public School Profiles API, so leadership, grades, wards and contact details stay current without duplicate data entry, and a filterable finder lets families search by name, grade level, ward and school features. Board meetings, public comments and testimony each have their own structured content type, with open comment periods and upcoming meetings surfaced on the homepage.
The migration inventoried the Drupal newsroom, board meeting, public comment and testimony archives, cleaned and normalized the exports, and imported them with their original publish dates. Legacy URLs and documents were mapped to new destinations based on Search Console demand so inbound links keep working. The Wednesday Bulletin, previously a weekly email to school leaders, became its own microsite at bulletin.dcpcsb.org with a browsable archive and a lighter Mailchimp email that links into each issue.
Built around who is asking
Families, school leaders and the public each get their own path.
NewsroomSchoolsSchool LeadersGet InvolvedBoard MeetingsWednesday Bulletin
Outcome
The new site and the Wednesday Bulletin microsite went live on October 28, 2026, after a coordinated DNS cutover with DC PCSB’s IT team. Post-launch work continues on redirect refinements and content updates as staff settle into the new site.
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