I found that SchoolMax operates the entire county's 4500 teachers and 1000 counselors on what they believe is a single web server, not a cluster as is the norm for applications of this scale. Apparently either the county didn't do its appropriate due-diligence, or SchoolMax sold them a bag of lies, but apparently they thought the system would be sufficient to handle the user load. They'd been having severe problems with it all last school year as well, to the poiunt where these teachers were doubly entering all their grades, attendance, etc onto paper as well as into SchoolMax.

A school system as large as PG county has a responsibility for doing the appropriate research into what products and services it chooses to use. It's a shame that there's such poor leadership and such a knowledge vacuum.

> You should be hiding & un-hiding or inserting elements using the DOM

Absolutely! One idea I embrace when coding dynamic/AJAX pages is that of extending functionality that's already there. This means that instead of relying on javascript to generate the 'base page', I have that pre-built in html. Then I use javascript to remove elements and replace them with dynamic sections. This ensures not only that people who have javascript disabled can use the site, but also that Google and other search engines will be able to index its content.

One other item to mention: you can still use meta tags to keyword your page and provide a limited sort of access to the data that would otherwise be dynamically generated in it.