“We Are Trying to Communicate the Best We Can”: Understanding Districts’ Communication on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Social media (and social networking sites, particularly) have experienced increasing scholarly interest as teachers, administrators, students, parents, schools, and education scholars have followed broader social trends of adoption and begun using these tools to communicate and share information (Greenhow et al., 2016; Greenhow et al., 2020). Twitter has been heavily studied, as it is used by 22% of U.S. adults (Perrin & Anderson, 2019) and 39.7% of U.S. schools (Kimmons et al., 2019), making it a ripe space for analyzing communication between parents and school personnel.

Twitter is a social media platform that focuses on short (limited to 280 characters) posts that may include text as well as links, images, and hashtags. These posts are typically interacted with through a user’s feed, which consists of posts by those that a user chooses to follow. For the most part (as some users can choose to restrict their posts to be viewable only by those they approve), users can choose to follow any other user, making Twitter well-suited to individuals’ or organizations’ aim of sharing information with a wide audience. In addition to being well-suited to broadcasting information, Twitter also affords interactions: Users can “retweet”—share to their followers—and like other users’ posts, and can also reply to or mention other users to dialogue with them. Thus, Twitter is not only suited to sharing information (such as school-related updates) widely but also engaging with members of the school community and answering their questions. Though useful and widely used, Twitter is but one social media platform among many; while many use it, most U.S. adults do not use it, and its users may be politically more liberal than those of other platforms (Pew Research Center, 2019).

One reason that Twitter has been the focus of many studies is that its data are generally public, and it provides researchers with relatively easy access to large swathes of data.¹ Implicit in much of this new scholarly work is the idea that the benefits of tools like Twitter to educational institutions go far beyond traditional purviews of educational technology. Instead, these tools may also be having profound impacts as organizational, communication, community-building, and sharing tools (Daly et al., 2019; Greenhalgh et al., 2016; Kimmons et al., 2018; Kimmons et al., 2021; Rosenberg et al., 2020). For instance, before the pandemic, individuals and interest groups used social media to “frame” (Supovitz & Reinkordt, 2017) messages in such a way that may have had a substantial bearing on public support for the Common Core State Standards (Daly et al., 2019; Supovitz, 2017), with scholars noting it as a key reason for the opposition they met (Edgerton, 2020). During the pandemic, schools and districts posted the greatest number of posts of any month (since 2010) during one of the most turbulent periods of the pandemic, March 2020 (Kimmons et al., 2021). We differentiate these communicative and community building uses of social media use from sometimes controversial classroom social media use by teachers and students (e.g., Chapman & Marich, 2021; Greenhow & Gleason, 2012; Howard, 2013) as two separate uses of social media which both warrant consideration.

As another way in which social media has had an impact as communication-related tools, Kimmons et al. (2019) found that U.S. schools use Twitter to share information on a variety of topics in a primarily unidirectional manner, rather than in a way that supported or was found to be associated with two-way engagement. These and other findings suggest that educational institutions benefit from using Twitter to communicate, invite participation, and shape public discourse (Carpenter & Krutka, 2014; Greenhalgh & Koehler, 2017; Kimmons et al., 2019; Kimmons et al., 2021; Rosenberg et al., 2020; Wang, 2016; Willet, 2019). For these reasons, it is important to better understand how school districts are using these tools to engage with their communities but given the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the importance of such work seems to be elevated as districts have had to communicate even more quickly and adapt to novel situations and unforeseen circumstances, such as remote teaching phases.

Providing a range of services to students and their communities is an important part of schools and districts’ mission—including, indirectly, their academic mission (Kronick, 2002; Lucas et al., 2017; Schwartz & Rothbart, 2020). These essential services include not only meals but also include counseling and career guidance services (Falco & Steen, 2018; McKenzie et al., 2011) and community support (Hausburg, 2020), among others, which might be especially important because their functions are less-frequently studied than the instructional aspects of educational institutions. In addition to such provisions, how K–12 educational institutions communicate about and make these services known to parents and students is important. For one, such messaging framing can build or damage public and community support (Shonkoff & Bales, 2011).

How districts communicate through technology is particularly important in the present era. In a study of districts’ activity on Twitter, Wang (2016) found that communication via Twitter on the part of large school districts was comparable to how other large institutions and organizations used social media, namely, engaging the public in two-way communication: district representatives can communicate with parents and community members, and parents and community members can communicate with or respond to communications by a district representative. Other past research has demonstrated that parents hold positive views toward their children’s K–12 institutions’ communication with them when they promote effective communication (Bordalba & Bochaca, 2019). Indeed, technology is a key part of how schools and districts communicate with parents (Beeman & Henderson, 2012; Rogers & Wright, 2008), as well as how individual teachers communicate with parents (Graham-Clay, 2005; Kraft, 2017), though there is debate over educational social media use as both a communicative and community-building tool as well as one that is used by teachers and students in classroom contexts, highlighting concerns about student privacy, safety, legality, the role of capitalism in education, and mental health (Howard, 2013; Krutka, Heath, & Willet, 2019; Krutka, Manca, et al., 2019; Rosenberg, Borchers, et al., 2021; Rosenberg, Burchfield, et al., 2021).

During periods of crisis, people rely not on information from a single source, but rather on a variety of sources including social media and traditional media (Austin et al., 2012; Briones et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2012). This research around the social media crisis communication model has elucidated who reads and potentially amplifies messages from organizations as well as what factors organizations should consider when they communicate about a crisis through social media. For previous disaster and crisis research, social media has been seen as an efficient and effective method of communication. Individuals can turn to social media to provide or find accurate, up-to-date, and personally relevant information more quickly than through traditional media sources (Palen, 2008; Palen et al., 2010; Shklovski et al., 2010).

Studies have indicated how the use of communication changes throughout a health crisis, with each of the crisis stages being associated with messages that meet their audience’s needs by varying emotional tone and content (Meadows et al., 2019). A review by Houston et al. (2014) identified how social media is used over the life cycle of a disaster or crisis. Social media is used during the “before” stage to provide or receive disaster warnings and signal or detect crises, among other purposes. During the disaster or crisis “event,” social media is used to send or receive requests for assistance, deliver and consume news coverage, coordinate volunteering, and provide and receive information. During the “post-event” phase, social media is used to reconnect communities, facilitate discussions of causes of the crisis, and discuss implications of the crisis.

In the context of this description of how social media has been and can be used during a crisis, there are also normative accounts of how social media should be used by organizations during crises. Eriksson (2018) gleaned five lessons for using social media for crisis communication from a review of published research, including the need to take advantage of the positive attributes of social media, particularly the opportunity for two-way communication, having a social media communication strategy or plan, proactively monitoring what people are saying concerning the crisis, and continuing to use traditional communications channels. This research helps us understand what organizations like districts have done and can or should do concerning crises and social media. Next, we consider K–12 institutions’ crisis communication and what the role of social media may be for these organizations.

Research on K–12 educational institution’s crisis communication has primarily emphasized their ability to manage the challenges (immediate and longer term) facing students and parents after an event such as a school shooting (Mazer et al., 2015) or a natural disaster (Kubicek et al., 2008). During such crises, communication with parents during a crisis is a major concern (Kubicek et al., 2008), necessitating preparation on the part of institutions to have a media plan to be able to respond quickly (Payne et al., 2018).

School districts are recommended to include social media in their crisis communication plans by researchers (Cox, 2012; Cox & McLeod, 2014; Locklear, 2019), and professional organizations (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2014; National Education Association, 2018; Trump, 2012). According to these entities, an established social media presence is vital to aid in communicating with stakeholders during a crisis (National Education Association, 2018), and is a way for districts to establish and control their public image (Cox, 2012; Cox & McLeod, 2014).

While there is much research and many resources on short-term crisis response for school personnel, extended school closure due to community contagions is not included in all crisis planning resources (Steeves et al., 2017; Virginia Department of Education, 2002). Therefore, any crisis management response to this long-lasting viral pandemic would likely rely on recommendations and planning for other types of crises and in all reviewed literature, there was no direct guidance about what to post specifically on social media, only that it should be used (Cox & McLeod, 2014). In summary, social media use in school communication is always recommended, including during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. But, whether and how social media has been used—and to what ends—has not been explored in past research.

We utilized the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) to collect all tweets and metadata from a preexisting list of 7,744 school-related accounts (Kimmons et al., 2018), limiting the analysis to only the 1,103 accounts that had the word “district” in their description, name, or screen name. We further limited our sample of tweets to only those that were created over 8 weeks between March 1, 2020 and April 25, 2020 to focus our efforts on the height of educational changes associated with the pandemic in the United States. Our further sampling process resulted in an analytic sample of 1,357 tweets from 492 districts from 44 states and the District of Columbia.³ See Figure 1 for a map representing the locations for 403 of the districts that we could identify.⁴ We also performed descriptive statistics on the activity of districts included in our sample.⁵

The creation of fourteen thematic codes (and three groups) comprised our primary answer to the question of how districts communicated during COVID-19 to Research Question 1. To present these themes, we described each coded theme in-depth, using our understanding of the theme that developed through the coding process to describe what the messages were about, as well as the most frequent subjects included in tweets of each theme. We also included an example message for each theme. We then aggregated quantitative descriptive results of all 1,357 tweets to understand the relative frequency and representation of different types of tweets.

We first present an overview of the themes and then describe each in-depth. Throughout the coding process, we found that themes fell into three overarching groups, which we used to structure this article:

As can be seen, our coding process resulted in the identification of 15 distinct themes, which ranged in frequency from comprising just more than one quarter of the tweets (for tweets unrelated to COVID-19, the theme of 365—around 27%—of all posts) to less common themes, such as community highlights (the theme for just 36, or 3%, of posts). After tweets unrelated to COVID, the next most frequently messaged themes were for three kinds of announcements, followed by three types of posts that served to build community and spread positive messages.

Next, we present the themes by group, describing each in greater detail. We anonymized the content of the example tweets.¹⁰

In this section, we present findings for patterns of change in messages over time across the three groups through a descriptive analysis of the frequency of the themes by week. For the figures portraying these frequencies over time, we identified the median date on which U.S. districts closed (Education Week, 2020).

The first group we present is for the themes we considered to be announcements. As presented in Figure 3, messages about school closures, remote learning, and meals, as well as the more generic universal announcements peaked in frequency on or within 1 week of the week that state-wide closures were announced. The nature of these themes reflected the use of messaging in a crisis communication manner, whereby districts shared posts that were of importance and urgency to those receiving them. Health resources and requests were posted more frequently later, suggesting that these were less urgent (or were not as salient) than the announcements that were more common around the time schools were closing. While these posts continued after closures were announced, they were rarely posted before closures, and they slowly tapered in frequency beginning around 2 weeks after most schools first closed.

The frequencies for the second group, community-building posts, are presented in Figure 4. The three themes within this group that highlighted key individuals—staff, students, and community members—increased in frequency after the majority of school closures. This pattern was also observed for posts about events and those spreading positive messages. We found the themes of these posts (e.g., highlighting students) to be associated with less urgency than those that peaked around closures (e.g., announcements about school closures). These posts broadly serve the purpose of engaging the community to direct support and encouragement to those involved with the district and community.

The final group was for posts that were unrelated to COVID-19. As presented in Supplementary Material 1 (available in the online version of this article), messages that were unrelated to COVID-19 were posted very frequently prior to when closures began. This is unsurprising; while COVID-19 was a part of the national discourse prior to the beginning and middle of March 2020, schools’ daily operations were not yet affected by it—and their social media use reflected this reality. Posts with the Ambiguous theme were not included as there were only four in the data set.

For this analysis, we explored engagement with messages about different themes. In Table 2, we present the mean as well as the standard deviation of the number of three types of interactions—likes, quote tweets and retweets, and replies—as well as their sum (the total number of interactions). Online Supplementary Material 2 presents the means and standard deviations by the groups of themes (announcements, community, and unrelated) for each of the types of interactions. To interpret this table, consider the first row for school closings. Each of these posts was interacted with, on average, nearly 50 times. These interactions were mostly likes (around 28 on average), indicating that information shared by districts was acknowledged, and retweets and quote tweets (around 9), indicating a degree of collaboration in the sharing of information as well as a few replies, indicating two-way engagement (Mergel, 2013). For all three interaction types, there was substantial variation in the estimates (indicated by the standard deviations).

Overall, these patterns show that a number of themes within the announcements group were interacted with very frequently, specifically school closings, meals, remote learning, and universal announcements, each of which were interacted with, on average, more than 20 times. Following announcements in the number of interactions were community-building posts, including staff, student, and community highlights, and spreading positive messages; these were also interacted with around 20 times each. There were, furthermore, differences in the specific types of interactions. Our hypothesis testing approach showed that community-building posts received more likes than announcements (p = .013), but that announcements were quoted/retweeted and replied to more (p < .001 for both types of interactions; see Note 9 for more detail). The coefficient estimates and standard errors for the Generalized Linear Models predicting the number of interactions with posts are presented in the online Supplementary Material 3.

Our findings suggest that districts are purposeful and responsive in their use of social media messages during a time of emotional and societal upheaval, adjusting to the changing circumstances and prioritizing the focus of their communications with staff, students, and families. Given that the period of our data collection covered just the early stages of the shut-down, we argue that our themes represent early district communication priorities, those things that were most urgent and important to make known to the school community at a time of change and confusion. As one district (that we quoted in the title of this article) posted, “This is a situation that is evolving rapidly and we will keep everyone updated as much as possible.” With the future still uncertain, districts shared what was known and temporally pertinent, following crisis communication guidelines of being open and candid. Thus, we interpret their priorities to include continuing to provide essential services and sharing crucial information directly with the community at large.

Districts prioritized communication about the services they were still able to provide from a distance, particularly remote learning opportunities (8%) and meals (6%). Thus, districts prioritized services that are widely used and that have benefits above and beyond the immediate problems they solved; for example, districts continued to provide meals, which over 26 million students across the United States were eligible for in the 2019–2020 academic year (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2020). Even during an unprecedented disruption, when districts had to obtain waivers to modify how they distributed meals (Kinsey et al., 2020; McLoughlin, McCarthy, et al., 2020), districts communicated about meals to maximize their use, sharing widely and publicly the vital details for eligibility and distribution procedures on the web (McLoughlin, Fleischhacker, et al., 2020).

Districts shared many timely announcements (accounting for 42% of all posts) about their updated day-to-day procedures. Districts also used Twitter to perform administrative functions by communicating about their policies during the lockdown through general announcements, comprising 12% of all messages. It is also worth noting that districts continued necessary operations, posting messages about job openings, board meetings, and new hires, all of which were coded as unrelated. This suggests that districts have information sharing as a long-standing priority with their constituents, though still, as past research has shown, in a primarily unidirectional way (Kimmons et al., 2018; Wang, 2016).

Districts used messaging in a way that could build community engagement and therefore public support for education, especially through events, requests, and direct replies (discussed in the following section). Through event-themed messages, districts focused on maintaining a sense of normalcy by sponsoring virtual Spirit Weeks, contests, and other initiatives. Many requests solicited sharable content from parents (e.g., pictures of student participation in remote learning, senior pictures, or other participation challenges). However, these types of requests constituted the third lowest category, comprising only 30 messages (2%). Districts’ posts may represent an appropriate balance between sharing information and two-way communication, especially during a time in which reliable information is highly valued. Districts’ uses of Twitter may mirror educators’, who use this single tool for several different functions, including socializing, sharing one’s work (and about one’s classroom), building a professional network, and crafting a professional identity (Aguilar et al., 2021; Carpenter et al., 2019; Carpenter & Krutka, 2014; Greenhalgh et al., 2020; Kimmons & Veletsianos, 2014; Rosenberg et al., 2020; Trust et al., 2016; Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2016).

Districts prioritized messages about essential services, important announcements, and building a community presence. Taken together, these priorities suggest that districts used social media for several purposes, with one overarching potential purpose being to craft a positive presence. Among our themes, 6% of messages were noticeably focused solely on the positive, and none were negative or pessimistic in content or tone, though several acknowledged the obviously stressful and chaotic period. This is directly in contrast with Twitter accounts from other leaders who showed high levels of fear and sadness in their pandemic tweets (Goel & Sharma, 2021). In this way, districts may have been framing messages (Supovitz & Reinkordt, 2017) in such a way as to bolster the positive public perception of and support for their efforts during the crisis.

The focus and content of district messages changed over the course of the pandemic, similarly to how the communication of other institutions can change across different periods of a crisis (Meadows et al., 2019). Once states began mandating school closures, districts’ Twitter messages understandably began referencing the pandemic at high rates. That messages with announcements about policies and procedures for remote learning and meal distribution peaked soon after schools shut down indicates that districts were communicating important and likely new information during the initial stages of the crisis. Having established new procedures and expectations, these types of messages declined in the next few weeks as teachers, parents, and students adjusted to the new system. The higher volume of messages about the new procedures and policies indicates that districts had to talk more about what closing school meant than announcing that fact of the closure itself.

District messages focused more on community building after the initial stage of the pandemic. As suggested by Mazer et al. (2015), districts provided support in dealing with traumatic events. The shift to higher rates of positive and uplifting messages highlighting students, staff, and community members indicates motivation to accentuate the successes and build a sense of normalcy. Announcements sharing health resources, both physical and mental, peaked later in the collection period than other types of announcements, indicating the potential role of district communication approaches in dealing with future public health crises—particularly as large-scale (and, arguably unethical) experimental research studies have shown that others’ emotions expressed via social media can influence individuals’ emotions (Kramer et al., 2014). We also saw districts, in a small measure, reaching out to their several communities through recognition of diverse religious holidays and posting announcements in multiple languages. If districts are seen as trusted sources of information, their communication and policies could be leveraged to influence communities at a local level.

Twitter is typically used as a primarily one-way communication tool during a crisis (Eriksson & Olsson, 2016) and we saw that the vast majority of tweets were treated as unidirectional, though some districts encouraged two-way communication through direct replies to queries, as seen next.

In this way, districts evidenced some (two-way) community engagement, a strategy past research has recommended organizations use during crises (Houston et al., 2014; Seeger, 2006), though these make up a very small percentage (2.87%) of the total number of tweets.

Members of the public engaged with district Twitter one-way information through liking messages, as well as engaging in bidirectional communication through retweets, quote tweets, and replies. We found relatively high (for our sample) levels of overall engagement with messages announcing closing dates and meal information, though, in terms of general Twitter engagement where a tweet might receive thousands of likes, engagement with district tweets was comparatively low. This engagement points to the information priorities of the wider school community, and the number of followers—around 2,000 per district account—suggests that many more individuals may have seen (but did not like) these posts. Taking quote tweets and retweets (together) and replies as indicators of collaboration and two-way engagement, respectively (Mergel, 2013), we saw less, but still notable engagement in these forms with tweets across both the announcement and community groups.

We found uneven patterns of engagement by message group. Leaving out the messages about school closings and meals as unique high-flyers and comparing the groups of themes in announcements and community, we saw that in general, community-focused messages had higher passive engagement and lower interactive engagement, while announcements generally had higher rates of retweets and quote tweets and replies. This may indicate that communities approved of community-building efforts by the districts—even though such posts did not represent actionable information. Informational tweets, on the other hand, represented an opportunity to amplify district messages, which viewers did through their sharing.

District social media use aligned with the three crisis stages as identified by Houston et al. (2014). In the earliest stages of the pandemic, before any shutdowns had occurred, districts tweeted about their preparations and precautions for dealing with the imminent health threat. These preparatory tweets, such as the announcement example below, fell mostly into our themes of health resources and announcements:

#[school district] COVID-19 Update: State/local agencies say no action is required at this time. Continue to use illness-prevention tactics. Soap/sanitizer are available as well as a review of excused absences/exemptions. More info: [Link]

Sharing information before a crisis fully unfolded aligns with prior research that organizations should foster partnerships with the public through information sharing in an ongoing manner to build credibility (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018; Seeger, 2006). We also saw many posts of this kind in our meals, remote learning, and events themes in later stages.

After the shut-down, arguably during the COVID-19 crisis “event” (Houston et al., 2014), districts encouraged volunteering through posts in the direct reply theme, facilitated donations in posts coded with the events theme, expressed emotions through spreading positive messages, and shared resources on mental and emotional health in our health resources theme. For example, the following theme shows a district expressing emotions.

Though, as of the writing of this article, we are still in the throes of the pandemic and cannot technically say that we are in a fully postevent phase, we see this expression of emotion and other similar posts as examples of efforts to reconnect and build community—typically a postcrisis activity (Houston et al., 2014), as seen in the themes of making requests, highlighting students, staff, and members of the community. Community building in schools is an important element of consideration for every school leader (Sergiovanni, 1994). It makes sense that districts would consider community building a focus of their approach throughout every stage of a crisis since emotional safety and relationships are vital to any effective learning environment (Darling-Hammond & Cook-Harvey, 2018).

While we saw districts communicating about their preparations and building community during the crisis, the crisis communication literature also has found and recommends that organizations facilitate ongoing interaction with the public, outside of any crisis event (Eriksson, 2018; Houston et al., 2014; Seeger, 2006). While we do not have direct evidence of districts having an advance plan for how they would use social media during a crisis—a recommendation made by Eriksson (2018) on the basis of a systematic review of the literature—the districts we studied did have a Twitter account in use such that when the COVID-19 crisis began, they could leverage this communication channel to share timely information—which may be especially important when other means of communication were either unavailable or not rapid enough to be effective.

In sum, during this lengthy, unusual crisis, districts used social media strategically in ways that aligned with research-based practices. Though our themes did not match exactly with the social media uses, we did find uses spread across themes, over time. Specifically, the K–12 school districts we studied used Twitter to build community after the immediate crisis of transitioning to remote learning had taken place (Houston et al., 2014) and to support students through regular communication across the stages of the temporal stages of the crisis (Eriksson, 2018; Seeger 2006).

Little past research has focused on districts’ general communication on social media. This may be important given the widespread use of social media and districts’ apparent response to the widespread use of social media by extensively utilizing these platforms. Moreover, as this study showed, districts use social media for a variety of purposes. This study suggests that researchers can and should consider social media to be a context through which not only communication but also perhaps efforts to shape public perception and support for schooling, are taking place, which is notable given how public support can influence (or direct) education and educational improvement efforts (Cohen & Mehta, 2017). In this study, we used a particular public data mining approach, enabled by access to data on Twitter. Comparable programs are now available to access data from Facebook (CrowdTangle, 2021), and this study shows one example of how this data can be informative for research purposes. Particularly, this data allowed us to examine unfolding patterns in the themes of posts over time and in an in-situ way—in a way that may provide a different account than if representatives of districts were asked following the period of crisis or in the present about what they prioritized in their work and communication.

Our account of districts’ posts is largely a positive one, in that districts were responsive and communicative amid the uncertainty they faced. Nevertheless, this study raises questions that are less positive, or at least are more critical in nature: How do these communications affect the services that students receive—particularly the students who are the most underserved in their communities and in our country? What difference does it make for districts that do or do not engage with their community through Twitter and other social media? What are districts not communicating about, including other noteworthy events of the moment? How do districts attend to their diverse audiences through social media? What role can and should two-way communication play in district social media use?¹¹ And, how effective were the changes districts and schools made during an emergency period over the coming year?