Fauquier County Public Schools

Fauquier County Public Schools News Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Feb. 13, 2017 Karen Parkinson, Coordinator of Information Phone (540) 422-7031 [email protected] FCPS UPDATING WEBSITE TO ENSURE ACCESSIBILITY

Fauquier County Public Schools is currently updating its website at www.fcps1.org in order to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Essentially the update means content on the site will be more limited. For approximately three months the school division has been making changes to the site in response to an out-of-state complaint filed with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) saying the FCPS site is not compliant with ADA. FCPS is far from being alone in making the required changes. Hundreds of school divisions across the country are responding to OCR requirements to eliminate any existing barriers among students with impairments and/or disabilities, ensuring compliance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the ADA. In September 2016 FCPS received a letter from OCR stating that certain pages of the school division’s website were not accessible to people with disabilities, especially the visually impaired. Less than six months prior to the complaint, the FCPS website had undergone sweeping changes, unveiled in August 2016, in an effort to modernize the site with a fresh, new look. Louis McDonald, director of technology for FCPS, who oversaw the modernization update, is overseeing the compliance update as well. McDonald said the accessibility complaint did not come from anyone in Fauquier County, but from one individual in Michigan who is filing hundreds of such complaints with school divisions across the country. Nonetheless, he said, ADA compliance is the law, and he and his staff are working hard to meet the March 12, 2017, deadline handed down by OCR. “Through discussions with a representative from OCR and the school division attorney, we’ve been identifying features that are not compliant and need to be fixed,” McDonald said. “This includes not just the main web page, but all the individual schools’ websites as well. All of it has to be brought into compliance, and it’s a massive undertaking. Of course, there is no question that we want our site to be equally accessible to any student, parent or citizen who might want to access it, so we want to cooperate in every way possible.” Doing so means that some content can be modified to be made compliant, but some content will have to be removed either permanently or until it can be made compliant. Among the more challenging content are videos that are not closed captioned, photos that will need captions so they can be read by specific kinds of electronic readers owned by people with disabilities, and PDF documents that currently cannot be read by specific kinds of electronic readers. The school division does not currently have the capability of adding closed captions to videos nor additional personnel/resources to add captions to the hundreds of photos and PDFs that are currently available on the FCPS website. Another challenge, McDonald said, is that there is no OCR document that identifies the non-compliance issues with the FCPS website. Even so, the school division will continue to make a good-faith effort, he said. Dr. David Jeck, division superintendent, said he had a message for the Fauquier community as the school division wrestles with this challenging and unexpected issue. “As we work our way through ensuring that our website is ADA compliant, I want to ask the public for patience and understanding,” said Dr. Jeck. “The goal for our website will continue to be providing the public with as much useful information as we can, but within the legal parameters that are set before us. I am grateful to Mr. McDonald and his staff for all the time they have spent taking a closer look at all of our website content and then working hard to make our site compliant. To the public, I would say, ‘If you can’t find information you need on our website, don’t hesitate to contact us – by phone, email, or whatever method you prefer – to get that information.’ We’re just asking for patience going forward.”