We have not yet converted to responsive design but plan to do so soon. I thought I remembered a sample email to use in notifying classmates, but am unable to find it. Thank you.

I don't recall seeing such an email. I think you'll just have to Email The Class, explaining as best you can what's different and what's better about Responsive Design (RD).

We have not converted to RD for one reason: we have many pages with large amounts of text on them. With RD, aside from the home page, the text is spread over a much wider width, making it more difficult to read, in my opinion. Before you convert, I'd look at many RD sites and their pages, if they are viewable, and see if you're comfortable with how they look.

One other thing --- when you create pages with lots of text, we've found that using the Georgia font, selectable in the Editor, makes the text more readable.

Serif Fonts vs Sans Serif being more readable depends. Examine the world of sites as examples of what is usually used. It's not just the font, but other aspects that make a page easier to read. Most sites are sans serif

https://www.dvginteractive.com/serif-vs-sans-serif-how-to-increase-your-websites-readability-by-more-than-50-2/

As far as RD being wider and thus text can result in looking a bit odd - I agree that can happen. However, that's also mostly a design layout issue that can be fixed. When fixed, the result is a cleaner looking site that is actually more readable.

Here's one RD site that is very text loaded and it looks great. She broke it up into sections, added photos, videos and so forth. It's not open, so I hope some others that have RD sites with text that can be seen post here. There's one but I can't recall ATM.

http://www.fengerjune1958.com/class_index.cfm

RD has more than one choice for how it looks. Probably a bit too many since it's not easy to figure out what does what PLUS, one can actually easily make it narrower by just changing a single CSS class. But not really required if some design elements are followed.

The advantages to an admin are great. It is much much easier to use admin tools since they are clustered on the top right and not down after all the other stuff. You can find them instantly.

The advantages to users are that on mobile devices, your web site is much friendlier and adapts to screen size and orientation. Images and such can automatically adjust to the device width presented.

It's pretty easy to flip back and forth. What I suggest is try it out on a "free with ads" site to not worry about mistakes. That's what I did, I did all my work on a "free" site and then just ported it over. I copied the pages from the regular site, edited them in RD, adjusted anything I did not like. Then the reverse when real site was made RD. Open up TWO browsers so you can stay logged into both. It's a cookie thing

Here's a page from our site that has lots of text with lots of images

http://www.bothellhigh61.com/BHS-Bothell-History.htm