Dupage Policy Journal

Erica Loiacono, director of public relations for Community Unit School District 200, said she accepts the fact that social media is the most powerful tool available when it comes to sharing and celebrating stories. At a June 15 Board of Education meeting, she reminded the school board and district community of the power and usefulness of social media.

"So what we also learned still is that social media continues to be the most powerful way for us to share our story when we celebrate our students and staff, we've seen a lot of staff posts in the past couple of days," Loiacono said. "They're doing very well on social media. We are able to keep our community connected. We've had posts recently on staff members who've retired after 30-plus years and there's, you know, people commenting on there, 'I remember I had them for my second-grade teacher 25 years ago.' And so it's just a great way to reconnect people and keep them connected. And so because we know social media gives us such a great opportunity to tell our story, we can never give up the opportunity to say something great about our schools. And you'll see in our next year's plan, social media is going to continue to be a focus area for us."

Community Unit School District 200 is located in DuPage County and currently has 12,283 enrolled students. The district has almost 2,400 followers on Instagram, over 4,400 followers on Twitter, almost 2,500 subscribers on YouTube and over 7,500 followers on Facebook.

In May, the district's Facebook account reached 32,000 individuals, which was stated to be more than any other mass email or email list in its database could reach at once. In that same month, its Instagram feed reached over 2,600 individuals. One of the new Throwback Thursday posts on Facebook in May reached over 14,000 people and had almost 650 engagements. Over a period of 90 days, the district's Twitter feed earned almost 114,000 individual impressions.

Loiacono said she encourages teachers at every new hire orientation meeting she goes to create a social media platform for the school and their classroom in order to connect, talk about students, have a relationship with parents, and create more connections with the community and the school.