I’m absolutely baffled why this could possibly be a reason for firing someone. What is wrong with gently chiding someone about spelling?
Half the people on this board could get fired.
OK, let’s assume it wasn’t this employee’s job. Then wouldn’t a quick word from from her supervisor be enough? She’s a new employee learning her job. Make it clear what’s expected of her.
I don’t see this being serious enough to even warrant a note in her personnel file. It’s too trivial.
Sometimes I just don’t get this world. Are we really this over sensitive?
There’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with chiding somebody about spelling. When a school employee is using the school’s twitter feed to communicate with individual students regarding the student’s actions or statements outside of school hours, that’s a little troubling, though, because it seems unprofessional and overly intrusive to the student, who, I assume, wants to be free to communicate with his or her own friends on his or her own time without the school looking over his or her shoulder.
Based on the statement “After the “tamarrow/tomorrow” thread, Nash and the student exchanged other tweets. The student later wrote that he didn’t mind Nash’s original reply and didn’t take it personally.” and the fact that she had only been working there less than 2 months, I’m guessing it has little to do with this (specific incident) and there’s another part of the story we’re being not getting.
Nash wasn’t just “a school employee”. She was the school’s “web experience coordinator”, and had no other function than to represent and reflect the school board’s interests with respect to it’s “web experience”. Apparently, it was felt that they were not getting their money’s worth ($44,000 a year).
I guess the real question here is, exactly what does a school board expect to get out of a $44,000 web experience coordinator?
You have a decent point, but then you ruin it by jumping to the “oversensitive” crap that has nothing to do with it.
The point is that we are just quick to fire people now. Sure, this is almost certainly a low skill, low pay job that pretty much anyone can do. And apparently this became a minor issue in the area, getting 1000 likes and retweets. But I agree that the correct way to handle this is to pull her aside and ask her not to make said jokes, and then make an announcement that they have done so. Something like “We apologize for the unprofessional nature of the comment. Our web coordinator was trying to create a jovial atmosphere with the students, like many other Twitter campaigns. We have asked her not to do so in the future. We apologize to anyone who may have been offended.”
Schools have government employees. They’re supposed to be not nearly as shitty as other “right to work” places.
That said, if it turns out this was a last straw with an employee with whom they had had other problems, then I would not object as much.
I’m puzzled by what her job was. Was she building web sites for the various schools in that district?
Babysitting the Twitter and other social media accounts doesn’t seem like a real job.
We have a couple employees that build web sites. They also make sure every Dept’s web site follows the same design standards and complies with required disability standards.
I agree there may be others factors that led to her dismissal.
This county should check out my county’s school twitter feed (@wcpss)…it’s hilarious! There’s tons of gentle chiding of students who make spelling errors (including a whole thread the other day on whether it should be bussing or busing). The students love it, the parents love it. On snow days, especially. Most importantly, it generates tons of followers, which makes it an effective communication tool for the county.
There may well be more to this than meets the eye: if, for example, the person concerned was spending more time noodling around on the social media accounts than actually doing whatever they expected her to do (redesign interfaces and systems?). Plus, if that was the only response to the original message, it’s a bit personally dismissive rather than engaging (not that we know what sort of thing they were asking her to do or how to do it - this might be a case of a poorly-defined job in the first place).
(Why were the pupils asking for the school to be closed anyway?)
In my state it is public record. There is a website where you can plug in a name and get the salary of any state, county or municipal employee. Whenever there is an article about a cop, teacher or garbage man they always publishe the salary.
I have to assume this is the case. This just smells too much of recreational outrage type journalism that is missing or overly simplifying some part of the story. It’s there to provoke angry comments about how dumb and lazy the younger generation is and how coddling we are and all the usual crap.
Add me to the chorus of, “there was something else going on that they’re not telling the media.” Either that or they have one of those stupid zero-tolerance policies, where any action that might get you a slap on the wrist as a full employee is a terminal offense during your 90 day probationary period.
A whole week of tweeting intervened between the spelling comment and the dismissal. Most likely it was just too much direct interaction with the students, and for whatever reason they didn’t want that.
