If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The Saxon Scope website, updated daily with news stories, sports coverage and photos from events, is a national award-winning site. It was a runner up for the 2010-11 National Student Press Assocation’s Pacemaker award, the highest honor given to student media websites in the country. So, by any standards, The Scope site doesn’t need fixing.

However, Fairfax County Public Schools may be trying to do just that. FCPS technology specialists are looking into creating and requiring all high schools to use a standardized platform for their online news websites. Billed as a “comprehensive web solution,” the platform would most likely consist of a website template in which students simply insert news stories and pictures.

But is this a good thing? While creating a template for all schools to use might seem like a nice service, especially to schools that currently lack an online news website, it is an entirely different matter for schools–like Langley–that already have thriving websites.

In the past two years, we’ve spent untold hours working on the design, content, and organization of our site, to get it precisely the way we want it. If we must abandon our creation in favor of an FCPS template, all of our efforts and results will have been for nothing.

According to an FCPS survey asking high school journalism advisers what features they would want to see in the new standardized system, tech specialists stated that they are “not trying to ‘catch’ the creative, only trying to figure out what might work on a larger scale.” So instead of allowing each school’s journalism class the option of creating something that is customized for its own community, FCPS aims to mandate the use of an average, one-size-fits-all solution.

This runs completely contrary to FCPS’ supposed commitment to excellence. If FCPS decides to implement this new system, every high school’s website will look the same. What’s next? A “comprehensive print solution” so all newspapers appear identical? Standard formats for yearbooks so that they all look uniform?

If the Saxon Scope website looks the same as all the other websites across FCPS, it has zero chance of competing successfully in prestigious national contests, like the NSPA Pacemaker, that reward uniqueness.

In addition, the purpose of a school news publication, both print and online, is to report stories that the community may have an interest in and student journalists believe need to be told. Sometimes these stories may be favorable to FCPS and Langley, sometimes not.

As journalists, we have an obligation to let students and parents know what is going on at school, good or bad. How can we do that if all of our web stories have to be published on an FCPS-sponsored platform?

I am not proposing that the initiative be shelved completely. For schools without a news website, or schools that need help improving theirs, the FCPS-created platform would be a great place for them to start. However, use of this platform should be completely optional. It would then indicate that FCPS understands the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”