School worker fired for correcting student's spelling on Twitter

A social-media manager for a Maryland school district,Katie Nash says she has been officially terminated for chastising of a student who misspelled the word tomorrow as “tammarow” on Twitter.

Nash, 33, said she understands the Frederick County Public School District’s decision to fire her from her $44,066 web experience coordinator job.

“I don’t want to be a distraction to the school system and the goals they have for overarching achievement,” she said in an interview with the Frederick News-Post.

The trouble began Jan. 5, when a student wrote to the Twitter account @FCPSMaryland, asking schools to close “tammarow.”

Nash responded:

“But then how would you learn how to spell ‘tomorrow’? :)”

Her response garnered more than 1,000 retweets and 1,000 likes and she became the subject of a hashtag, #KatiefromFCPS.The “tammarow/tomorrow” thread continued between Nash and the student, with the student later tweeting that he didn’t mind Nash’s original reply and didn’t take it personally.

Nash had similar exchanges with other students complaining about showing up for school.

She said school officials told her they didn’t approve of her tone with the kids and directed her to stop tweeting.

Nash — who was hired in November — admits she didn’t listen and continued to access the FCPS Twitter feed, sending out calendar updates.On Friday, she said she was given a letter that she had been terminated.

“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 said.
“Any social-media manager is looking for increasing engagement, and that’s sort of the expected parameter,” she said. “I think a conversation about how we engage with students would have been completely appropriate and I would have welcomed that.”

The New York Post