What NYC's 100 highest-earning PTAs actually run their websites on

We looked up the websites of the 100 highest-earning NYC public school PTAs — organisations with a median annual income of $269,000 — and identified what each one runs on. The short version: 47 are on a DIY builder or WordPress, 16 are on Educational Networks, 15 are on another school-CMS vendor, and 20 have no identifiable platform at all. One of them has no independent website whatsoever, just a DOE page and an Instagram account.

We could not find anyone else who had actually checked, so here is the data.

How we did this

The NYC DOE publishes PTA financial filings under Local Law 171. We ranked every public school PTA by total annual income, took the top 100, visited each PTA’s website, and identified the platform from page source and server headers. Where a PTA ran more than one property — a Squarespace site plus a Google Site, say — we recorded both.

Three honest limits. “UNKNOWN/custom” is a real category, not a failure of effort: a site with no vendor fingerprint is either genuinely bespoke or built on something that leaves no trace, and we did not guess. One site of the 100 did not respond when we checked it — it is counted below as unreachable rather than quietly dropped or assigned a platform we did not observe. And this is the top 100 by income — the best-resourced parent organisations in the city. A survey of the median NYC PTA would look considerably worse.

The first table below counts platform appearances, so it sums to more than 100: a PTA running both a Squarespace site and a Google Site is counted in both rows. The second table assigns each PTA to exactly one bucket and sums to 100.

The results

Counted by how often each platform appears (a PTA running two properties appears twice):

Grouped into the ways a PTA can actually end up with a website. This column sums to 100:

Four things worth noticing

1. Nearly half of the best-funded PTAs in New York are running on volunteer labor

Forty-seven of 100 are on Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Google Sites, or WordPress. Those are perfectly good tools. The issue is not the software — it is that each of those sites has a person behind it, and that person’s child graduates.

This is the single most predictable failure in school web: the site does not break, it just stops being updated. Events from last spring stay pinned to the homepage. The donate button quietly breaks. Nobody neglected it on purpose; the parent who knew how it worked left, and the knowledge left with them. We wrote about why PTA sites die at volunteer turnover separately, because it is the failure we are called about most.

A PTA with a $269,000 budget is running a real organisation. Its public face should not depend on one family’s enrollment status.

2. Budget does not predict platform

This surprised us. The highest-earning PTA in the survey — over $3 million a year — runs on WordPress. Several PTAs well above the median are on free Google Sites. There is no correlation worth reporting between how much money a PTA raises and how deliberately it chose its website.

The reasonable conclusion is that these decisions are not being made by the finance committee. They are being made by whoever raised their hand, using whatever they already knew, in a year nobody now remembers. That is not a criticism of the volunteers. It is an argument for making the choice deliberately once, rather than inheriting it indefinitely.

3. Sixteen schools are collectively spending about $57,600 a year on Educational Networks

Sixteen of the top 100 are on Educational Networks. We know what that vendor charges a NYC PTA because we have the paid invoices from one: $3,600 a year, billed as two half-year invoices of $1,800, with the renewal quote holding at the same number.

At that rate, those 16 PTAs are spending roughly $57,600 a year between them. The same 16 schools at $900 a year would spend $14,400 — a difference of about $43,200 annually, which is a full-time staff position, or a lot of books.

We are obviously not disinterested here. But the figure is worth stating plainly because most boards have never compared their line item to anything. See the full platform comparison for what that money buys at each tier, and the Educational Networks breakdown for the specific case.

4. Twenty have no identifiable platform, and one has no website

“UNKNOWN/custom” covers two very different situations: a genuinely custom site somebody built well, and a site so old or so odd that nothing identifies it. In practice, when we open them, most are the second kind.

And one PTA in the top 100 by income — a group raising six figures a year — has no independent website at all. DOE page and Instagram. That is a real strategy in 2026, and it is not obviously wrong for a small group, but at that budget it means every parent who wants a form, a calendar, or a way to give is going through a platform the PTA does not control.

What we would actually tell a board looking at this

Three things, in the order that matters.

Ask who runs it in three years. Not who runs it now — in three years, after your board, your parent coordinator, and your most capable volunteer have all turned over. If the honest answer is “whoever we can find,” that is the problem to solve, and it is not solved by changing platforms.

Ask who owns the domain. Not the site — the domain. If a past volunteer registered it on a personal account, you have a problem that is invisible until the renewal lapses or that person stops answering email. Check this today; it takes five minutes and it is the highest-value thing on this page.

Check your accessibility score before you check your price. Platform choice moves a site’s NYC DOE accessibility score by several bands before anyone writes a word of content, and the obligation sits with the school regardless of who built the site. You can run your current site through our free checker in about five seconds.

Price is the fourth question, not the first. It is the one boards start with and the one that decides the fewest cases.

Written by Full Stack Tech NYC. We build and host custom school and PTA websites for $900 a year flat — migration included, accessibility checked on every deploy, and you own the domain, content, and code outright. Title I and high-need public schools can apply for a free build. See pricing and process →