BY: Dan Sokil

The last time he was involved in a teachers strike in the Souderton Area School District, Bill Lukridge remembers getting the word out was a little harder.

"It's really a different world today than the way it was back in 1986. Whether that's good or bad, who's to judge, but the pace of communication is just so much faster today," said Lukridge, head of the teachers union, the Souderton Area Education Association.

Today, in a world where everybody has a cellphone and can post or comment on a Web site, getting the word out about each side's position requires using all of the tools at one's disposal, especially the Internet.

"We started our Web site just as the strike began. In the beginning, we were working with a very skeleton force on it, but now we have a core of teachers willing to put their time into working on it while other teachers are out on strike," Lukridge said.

The union's Web site, www.SAEA.info, has had more than 90,000 hits since the strike began, and now features a "Q&A" section and a plethora of news updates regarding the current contract dispute.

Teachers went back to school today, but without a contract.

Following a vote by the teachers union on Thursday, both

sides have agreed to enter an arbitration process, but they're both still trying to get their side of the story out to the public.

"Of course, we're finding it hard to compete with the school district's Web site," Lukridge said. "People automatically know to turn to the school district's Web site because they've done that before to find out about the weather, school closings, and things like that."

The district's Web site, www.SoudertonSD.org, also features a section of news updates, the district's strike contingency plans, and a FAQ section to address parents concerns, all linked from the SASD homepage.

"We want to make it as easy and as quick as possible for users to get that information," said Brigitte Bagocius, the district's full-time Web development specialist.

"We realize how important it is to have all of that information available to the community; essentially we're just making it a shortcut for them, by going to the homepage to get to this information," she said.

In addition to the news posted on the main page, the "Contract Negotiations" header links the reader to a section with more information available, as far back as the district's first contract negotiation update on June 5. The Web site itself has been in operation since 1998.

"We often get positive comments on the ease of use of our site, and that people find the information that they wanted, so I don't know if we're just beating people to the punch and putting things up before they can ask for them," said Bagocius.

School board information can be found beneath the page's "District" tab, and under "Community" you can put yourself on up to 15 mailing lists for e-mail updates from the district, a capability Lukridge says is a big advantage in getting the word out.

"As far as the Web site goes, ours matches up with theirs as far as communicating info, but we can't get things to parents the way they can with their TV channel and e-mail list," Lukridge said.

"They can send an e-mail every single day to every single home of every single student, and we do not have that capability," he said.

Bagocius estimated each of the district's e-mails go out to between 4,000 and 6,000 people, and nearly all of the negotiation updates have been sent out in e-mail form.

"I don't decide the content that is posted; the Cabinet decides what goes up," she said. "I definitely think it's helped make people more informed though."

"At last Thursday's (Sept. 11) school board meeting, there were several community members there who specifically made mention of information they'd obtained from the Web site, so I think we're doing our job there," Bagocius said.

Meanwhile, the SAEA has a settlement task force that decides what to post and when, and the blistering pace they set amazes even Lukridge.

"It's just amazing to me that we can have a bargaining session, it'll end, and in a hour it's already out there on Web pages," Lukridge said.

"We can talk about things that happened at a board meeting and the very next day, it's on a Web page, almost word for word. It's just truly amazing the amount of mass media out there, and the speed at which it takes place," he said.