On October 7th, the Osceola County School District sent Technology and Resource Specialist, Chris Kocher, to see what could be done to improve OCSA’s Literary Magazine, also referred to as the OCSA Lit Mag.

The OCSA Literary Magazine has run alongside the OCSA Ledger for two years. They publish themed issues, much like other literary magazines, but feature submissions solely from the student body. To broaden the submission pool and spread art beyond the county, the Literary Magazine would like to have their own website. According to Kocher, the issue is that the Osceola County School District, has enacted regulations– as the Internet was being adopted to schools–which prevent the use of websites not directly approved by the district. Squarespace, which is used for many online literary magazines, was created after the rules were established and is part of banned sites list.

Approving web hosting was a complicated task during the rise of Internet usage in schools, but things have changed. The inclusion of Squarespace onto the list of approved websites would allow for out-of-county submissions, which would boost the quantity of submissions. Kocher stated that “This has been a fight… several of us have been looking for solutions to solve the issue. OCSA is not the first school to complain.”

The school district did not leave newspaper and literary magazines without hope, however. For such courses, district has turned to Sharepoint. The issue in the system however, is the difficulty updating sites and components tied to Sharepoint. The same goes for Sharepoint Online, which is not owned by district. “We need to allow kids to be creative, this is real-world experience,” Kocher concluded.

Justin Nazario, Editor-in-Chief of the Lit Mag , stated that the current SNO site did not give him many options for formatting. The Lit Mag has a variety of issues with the SNO site, such as having to share data pools with the OCSA Ledger, strict parameters for submission designs, and the inability to set pictures for pieces so the works submitted do not blend into the background pictures. He seeks to make the OCSA Literary Magazine look more like littledeathlit.org, with its clean design and banners for each magazine issue.

Kocher has stated he will try to speak with the school district about the issue, though we will have to wait and see.