D214 twitter breaks down, students riot
January 29, 2015
I’ve never seen people turn their backs on somebody faster than the day District 214’s twitter account announced that school was going to be open the next day.
It’s a prime example of someone being lauded one day and loathed the next. On the night of Jan. 7th, with the weather being the big topic of the day, the district’s twitter account got involved with students begging for a snow day, joking around with them and even putting together memes.
Everyone seemed to love it, and we all loved it more when they announced what we had been expecting all night; school was off for the next day!
I honestly thought that would be the end of it, but things turned around quickly. It was pretty much instantaneous; students started mouthing off at the account the moment the announcement was made that school would be on for Jan. 9.
This pretty much lasted the whole night, and eventually the account just stopped replying.
There was a method to the madness, though, according to Media Manager Jennifer Delgado.
“A lot of [students] were asking [if we would have school] in clever ways, trying to just get information,” Delgado said. “We thought we would respond and also be playful back.”
While she expected to get angry tweets after announcing school for Thursday, she was still caught off guard.
“What surprised us was the sheer volume of negative angry tweets that we saw,” Delgado said. “It seemed we were getting about 100 every second. We couldn’t keep up with all the tweets that we were getting.”
Delgado takes her responsibility seriously.
“Later in the evening, we had posted a message saying something along the lines of ‘we love the banter, but we take this decision seriously,’” Delgado said. “We wanted students to know that we weren’t trying to upset them.”
The thing is that the way the district was running the account had a major influence on how students acted towards the district on Tuesday night and Wednesday. The openness and joking around on Tuesday night may have given a false impression that students’ tweets had an impact on the decision to cancel school on Wednesday. When they announced school was still on for Thursday, students figured “hey, maybe we can change this!” Hence, the outrage towards the account going into Wednesday night.
At the same time, though, some of the students tweeting at the account weren’t exactly using their heads. The kids who were saying “oh no, we don’t need to go to school” were EXACTLY the kids that needed to go to school. I won’t name names (and I really shouldn’t), but some of the students who were tweeting on Wednesday night really need to have a word with their English teachers.
In hindsight, none of this really ended up mattering anyways. With finals right around the corner, missing one day threw us off enough. Missing another would’ve been absolute chaos.
Did we want to be here on Thursday? Not really. Were we better off for being here on Thursday? You bet we were.