Improvements keep coming at the Indian River County School District, where test scores have skyrocketed and Dr. David Moore was singled out as the best superintendent in the state in 2025.
Now the district has launched a slick, highly functional new website and app that open the door to expanded communication between parents, students and the district, and allows the district – which has climbed from 38th to 5th best in Florida since Moore arrived five years ago – to tell its success story more effectively to the wider community
The new site, which includes pages for each school in the district, makes it easy to post photos and videos to share what’s happening in the schools, and website text can be translated into any one of a wide range of languages with a single click. A main goal of the redesign was to enable users to find what they’re looking for in three clicks or less.
“There were three non-negotiables,” said Jennifer Beagan, the district’s director of strategic initiatives and community impact. “The platform had to be user friendly, mobile-friendly, with an enhanced design with simple navigation. And that’s what we created.”
The design also had to focus on the district’s unfolding story, she said, highlighting “the experiences of our students, educators, and families through video- and photo-driven posts. We wanted to amplify those voices throughout the site.”
Beagan and a dozen other district personnel spent five months developing the website in partnership with Apptegy, an Arkansas education technology company that has created online platforms for more than 5,000 school districts across the country.
“We had heard from parents and others that information wasn’t easy to find, and the site wasn’t as streamlined as it should be. We brought Dr. Moore’s vision and our needs and ideas to Apptegy and they showed us lots of client sites for design ideas,” Beagan said.
Apptegy builds sites intended to “relay relevant, on-brand information in a timely manner; gain and maintain local support for the district; and make meaningful connections with families and the community,” according to the company website.
Since more than 70 percent of people access online information using a mobile device, the team designed the MySDIRC app first and then created the website as its colorful extension.
The platform provides robust analytics so the district can see where visitors are clicking and understand the trends, traffic, and statistics, Beagan said.
The app had a soft launch on July 15 and there have been more than 6,000 downloads so far. Anyone can use the MySDIRC app, which is available in the Apple Store and at Google Play. The website – still found at indianriverschools.org – launched at the end of August.
Apptegy’s fee for design, setup and implementation was $119,000, Beagan said. In addition, there are annual subscription fees, which vary depending on Apptegy’s ongoing level of involvement.
