School Employee Loses Job After Going Viral on Twitter

She gently teased a student about his spelling
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 14, 2017 5:33 PM CST
School Employee Loses Job After Going Viral on Twitter
In this Feb. 2, 2013, file photo, a smartphone display shows the Twitter logo.   (AP Photo/dpa, Soeren Stache, File)

A Maryland public school district has fired one of its employees a week after one of her tweets for the district went viral. On Jan. 5, in response to a tweet from a student directed at the Frederick County Public Schools Twitter account asking for schools to close "tammarow," Katie Nash, who was in charge of running the @FCPSMaryland feed, tweeted back: "But then how would you learn how to spell ‘tomorrow?’ :)" It was retweeted and liked more than 1,000 times each, and Nash even got her own hashtag, #KatiefromFCPS. But the district soon asked her to stop tweeting from its account (leading to another hashtag, #freekatie), and ultimately terminated her. A district spokesperson confirms to WHAG that Nash is no longer employed by the school system, but he wouldn't say why.

Nash, who had just started her job as the district's web experience coordinator in November, continued to tweet with the "tamarrow" student after the initial conversation, and he later wrote that he hadn't been offended by her response. "Students have been tweeting at us, but I wasn’t really sure what I should be doing or not doing. I sort of assumed there would be a follow-up conversation" with district officials, Nash tells the Frederick News-Post. "As a new employee, I think I sort of would have expected that there would have been some counseling or some suggestions on how to improve." She's been thanking her supporters on her own personal Twitter feed, where she called what happened to her "pretty flooring." (This school district is apparently fine with its social media employees getting snarky with students.)

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