Photos of students across AISD posing with Alex Sanchez known as AISD_Alex blew up twitter in February as Sanchez made his rounds to each area high school.

 
After the Austin Independent School District’s Executive Director of Communications posted a snow day tweet back in January announcing school closing for bad weather on twitter Sanchez rapidly became “twitter famous” across the district.
“I believe that student empowerment is very important in a K-12 organization and I believe that the conversations and the dialogue that typically happens at central office rarely trickles down to the student body, and so I’m excited to and optimistic that this encounter with bad weather days, could become something new and that we can take a crisis, which is school closures and cancellations, and turn that into an opportunity to really start to get more student voice,” Sanchez said.

 
Sanchez has the responsibility of ensuring that all district information is reaching to all key audiences. He does not have the responsibility to give “#heatersforbowie,” change the toilet paper, or change the food as his tweets make it seem like he might be able to.

 
“I do not, for example, I do not even close schools,” Sanchez. “It’s the Superintendent. The Superintendent is the only person who can cancel school for the school district. Same thing with toilet paper, same thing with food. My job becomes providing and giving advice on the perceptions and opinions I am collecting through various forums to other administrators who do make decisions.”
Although the IT department, not Sanchez, makes the decisions regarding social media on school WiFi, he believes that there should be a change in policies because they are outdated.

 
“I do believe as a professional that they are outdated and that we haven’t kept up with the pace of access and different outlets that are available,” Sanchez said.

 
He believes that students and teachers could use the resources to teach and learn instead of using it for things that are inappropriate for school.

 
“I tend to agree with you all and I think the trends and I think the research and I think the practices will tell you that there is a lot of content, you as young people, should not be expose to and I think all of you understand that is the spirit of why we eventually have rules around social media,” Sanchez said.

 
While Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media might help teachers and students in the classroom, there are also rules regarding it. According to the AISD Board Policy Manual “all communications with students via electronic media must be appropriate in content and must provide a clear benefit to the students.”

 
“So what I believe is that I use twitter as a communication tool only,” Sanchez said. “It is to disseminate information broken down in nuggets that are relevant to the audience. That’s what twitter is.”

 
Principal Stephen Kane strongly suggests that teachers and staff be careful when communicating with students via social media.
“I just don’t like putting myself in situations like that because you never know what can happen on the other side,” Kane said. “Then it becomes your word against my word, my message against your message. Or what did I mean by that message or what did you not mean by that message? In the position that I am in, I don’t believe in doing it. At the start of every year I caution the staff on doing that, but I do know that there is an educational place for it.”