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When people hear “Wake County Twitter page”, it may mean nothing to them, unless they are a part of the Wake County Public School System or have seen the various retweets of their “snarky” tweets between the school system and students. The popular Twitter page has been both applauded and criticized on the responses they have given to the students who tweeted them.

One notable tweet reads as follows:  “We’re guessing, at this point, many parents will trade a little mud for a little peace.”  Wake County Twitter posted this on January 22, 2016.  One of the various voices behind the popular Twitter pages belongs to Matt Dees, a member of the Wake County Public Schools communications team. Dees has offered a live voice to the page that many know little about.

“We do try to be responsive, but it usually doesn’t happen around snow days when students are getting ‘feisty’,” said Dees. “We try to take it on the tone of what’s being tweeted at us when we respond. If someone is, for lack of a better word, kind of getting an attitude with us we kind of give that attitude back, but we try to do it in a friendly and humorous way.”

Other students, such as junior, Haylie Reed, view the page as a form of entertainment. The page has gained most of its popularity on the hilariously sarcastic posts in response to students.

“They’re sarcastic and funny,” said Reed. “The way they tweet to students, makes me laugh all the time.”

The popularity of the page and its tweets have raised a lot of opinions from many, calling the page “unprofessional” for being a social media account of a public school system.

“Obviously some of the personal interactions get more of the attention,” said Dees. “Again we may crack a joke, we may tease, we may correct someone’s grammar, but we don’t feel that it is unprofessional in any way,” Dees continued. “We do feel like it’s a form of engagement with our students. If we do correct your grammar, you may not like it, but hopefully you will learn something from that.”

The Wake County communications team deals with thousands of people contacting them, ranging from students to faculty.

“We do have some general guidelines that we follow in terms of making sure that our tweets are in some way (even if they are “sassy”) encouraging students to focus on their studies and love school,” said Dees.

Many students have questions about how they govern as a team and if they just sit on Twitter all day to respond to tweets from students.

“The Twitter page is a very tiny part of what we do on a day to day basis. Our [communications] team also produce videos that are viewed for both internal and external purposes,” said Dees. “I think there may be a perception that we sit on Twitter all day, but that is not even close to the case.”

Overall, the Wake County Public Schools communications team take their job on a personal level, loving every part of it.