Avoiding Negativity in Moments of Stress

Social Media

In the movie “Anchorman,” Will Ferrell’s character Ron Burgundy famously signs off his newscast by telling his constituents, “You stay classy, San Diego.” I believe the same advice holds true for how school administrators should approach their usage of social media.

By most educators’ standards, I think I tweet a lot. Probably 99 percent of all of my content on Twitter is related to celebrating our students, our teachers and their collective accomplishments. It’s a great way to tell our district’s story, connect with each other and amplify the wonderful things happening daily throughout our classrooms, hallways, kitchens, maintenance rooms, school buses and offices.

The past two years have been incredibly difficult to be a school leader as we’ve all tried to navigate the details around running schools during a pandemic with changing rules, metrics, science and landscape. We have been frustrated, at times, by a lack of guidance at the local, state or national levels. Other times, the guidance has been in constant flux. 

We haven’t known what metrics to use to open and close our schools or move to hybrid learning. We haven’t known whether to require masks, make them optional or ban them altogether. We’ve had questions about cleaning protocols, air quality, social distancing, contact tracing and quarantining.