When students go to type in Hackley into their respective browsers, they are greeted with a new website. With every scroll, a new photo pops up: physics, ambassador tours, football, the pollinator club, you name it! Hackley’s mottos, “More, together” and “United, We Help One Another,” light up the screen as various videos play in the background. A sidebar grants students and prospective families access to general information about admissions, academics, athletics, arts & technology, and community life. It has been years since Hackley last made a new website, so what prompted this change?
Students and families have been interacting with the new site for a few months now. In order to get this finished product through, the company, Interactive Schools, visited Hackley in the spring of 2025. Photographers and videographers were on campus for a few days gathering every perspective of Hackley.
Videos of students playing spikeball, chess, completing puzzles, or hanging around Akin Common were captured. The daily classroom experience was captured, too. As this took place in the spring, sports teams like football had to be recreated as they do not usually play in those months.
Hackley is not the only school that used the Interactive Schools company to reshape a website. Another popular private school, The Greenwich Country Day School, also sided with Interactive Schools. This company does not just work with independent schools in the United States, but also partners with schools in Spain, such as The American School of Madrid. When looking at these websites in comparison to Hackley’s, there are many similarities, such as a tab to inquire about the school, an area to apply, spotlights of students and teachers, and school mottos as one first enters the website.
Upper School students have strong opinions about the enhanced website.
“I find the website to be off-putting. I want to find information about sports, for example, but then I have to scroll through three different pages and click on multiple photos and phrases just to access that one simple page,” senior Rodrigo Severin said.
Rodrigo is referring to the idea that the website is hard to navigate. When Upper School students want to access the Veracross portal, there is no direct tab; instead, a sidebar opens the option to click “Parent Portal.”
“It takes so long just to get to the first page,” senior Leila Dillow said.