Do you remember Billy Joel’s 1989 hit song “We Didn’t Start the Fire”? For nearly five minutes, the singer lists off words from newspaper headlines around the world: “Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo…” During my 22-year career as a journalist, I marveled at the way he had turned all of these into a song with such a catchy hook: “We didn’t start the fire. It was always burning since the world’s been turning!”
I later identified with this song in a very different way—as the subject of headlines. I left journalism for K-12 comms, eventually rising to the level of chief of communications. Over the course of 10 years in school PR, I put out firestorm after firestorm, so it’s with confidence that I tell you: Education has always been in the news and has always been under fire. But some might argue that the national discourse right now is worse than ever before and that the public education fire is burning out of control.
From the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education to teachers leaving the profession to battles over books and curriculum, it seems that K-12 education is constantly making headlines—and we’re not just talking about newspapers anymore. Schools now have to contend with a staggering amount of negative attention on social media. This heated media environment demands not just an aggressive communication strategy, but a new comprehensive digital engagement plan to counter negative narratives and shore up community support.
I know many district leaders want to spray their message everywhere on every channel and hope it hits all the right people. But the truth is that your school communicators already have extremely full plates—and blasting the exact same information across several different platforms may not be the most effective use of their time. We have to be more intentional in our communications and more strategic in our delivery. For that, I have what I call a firefighting three-channel digital strategy—an engagement plan utilizing your website, app and social media to their best advantage.
1. Design your homepage for enrollment.
Propelled by the adoption of universal vouchers in more and more states, many school districts are now seeing significant enrollment drops. As a result, they are facing budget shortfalls of up to $50 million—and I expect that trend will make its way to bluer states soon.
In light of this challenge, the number-one goal of your district’s homepage should be recruiting prospective students and families. After all, your website is one of the first places families will encounter your schools along their enrollment journey. Ask yourself, “Do our school and district homepages convince a family to enroll here? Do they make it easy for them to do so?”
Your homepages must be full of student and staff success stories, exciting photos of classroom activities and extracurriculars, first-person student testimonials, and videos showcasing your best programs. But it’s not enough to just convince visitors they want to be a part of your community. You also have to make it easy for them to take the next step.
According to data from Forbes Advisor, 61% of website visitors will leave a site if they don’t find what they’re looking for within five seconds. If they’re looking for information on how to enroll their kids, you’d better give it to them—fast. To that end, make sure you have an “enroll here” button featured prominently on your homepage. You might also consider putting an AI chatbot to work answering parents’ most pressing questions 24 hours a day. If your website lacks a chatbot, then your customer service is falling behind the private sector standard parents are accustomed to receiving—and may even be receiving from the district down the road.
Your website is your digital front door. If it’s a yard sale assortment of each department’s top priorities—not a coordinated effort to recruit new families—you are losing clicks and possibly enrollees.
2. Push essential communication to parents’ phones.
Many districts post important announcements like weather closures or transportation delays to social media—but in my opinion, that’s a mistake. In fact, SchoolCEO’s 2025 research “What Parents Want” found that social media was families’ least favorite avenue for receiving essential school-related information.
Instead, push any need-to-know information—and only that information—through your district’s mass communication tool. This approach comes with two major benefits. First, you avoid the public forum of social media, meaning that disgruntled parents—or even critics with no connections to your schools—can’t make their displeasure known to all in the comments. Second, parents can be assured that the truly important information will always come to them; they won’t have to go to social media to check for information they need. Set the expectation that if it’s essential information, you’ll send it right to their phones—every single time.
Of course, parents are most interested in information that concerns their own child—and that individual info can’t be sent out as a mass alert. That’s why pushing essential information to parents’ phones also means creating a single system for two-way parent engagement. Do you have a district-approved two-way communication tool for teachers and families? Or are your teachers using whatever free tool they found on their own (with no built-in protections)? Allowing dozens of different two-way tools doesn’t just present safety and privacy risks; it also creates confusion for parents and families. If parents have to check five or six different apps to keep up with conversations about their child, they’re inevitably going to fall out of the loop.
If you really want to make things easy on families—and trust me, you do—make sure your two-way parent engagement tool is embedded inside your district app. That way, instead of remembering the names of multiple apps and technology companies, parents just have to remember the name of their school district. Plus, this approach strengthens your overall brand. In short: Make it as easy as possible for parents and guardians to get essential information and have important conversations about their child’s education—all through the convenience of their smartphones.
3. Extinguish the social media fire.
If you use your alert system and district app to handle essential communications, you can now keep your social media channels clear of district announcements, school delays, late bus mentions and the dreaded repost of a news story. You know—the kind of content that leads to a ton of nasty comments and criticism.
“But Greg, don’t we have to put our news everywhere?” No, you don’t. You can be strategic about it. To slow the social media burn, I would only post student and staff success stories and trend-related content that engages your students. Show your audience a program where high school students are becoming entrepreneurs or where kindergarteners are learning STEM. Give them something to feel great about well before it’s time to vote on a bond referendum or tax hike.
You don’t have to engage your critics on social media, either. One district I work with learned this firsthand. When a local sheriff wrote an emotional Facebook post claiming the district didn’t want to pay its fair share for school resource officers, district comms fought the urge to post a factual rebuttal on social. Instead, they sent an email to all parents explaining their position and their exhaustive efforts to resolve the issue. The next day, the sheriff backed down on his demands for more money.
We must find a way to extinguish the opportunities for constant online criticism, and keeping your social media as positive as possible is one way to do so. Content that could invite any level of controversy only throws fuel on the proverbial fire. Inform your families using the tools you can control—and in public forums like social media, put only your best foot forward.
Districts that embrace this opportunity to innovate their digital communications and deploy them strategically will be better positioned not only to survive, but to thrive in the evolving education and media landscape. As Billy Joel said, “We didn’t start the fire. No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.” You can’t fight fire with fire—but you can fight it with the right tools used the right way.
Greg Turchetta is a strategic communications advisor at Apptegy and a guest writer for SchoolCEO. To share thoughts and strategies on navigating the changing K-12 landscape, email him at greg.turchetta@apptegy.com.