The bell rings for second period. Walking into the classroom, the teacher hands a student a stack of cards with the same phrase: “Happy Birthday!” The student’s face lights up with a bright smile.

With everyone putting in a bit of effort, the students at Texas High start to feel a sense of love from the teachers within the campus.

“In the teacher-student relationship, there is a lot of assigning homework, maybe some disappointing grades and even boring classroom activities, but this is just a way to let the students know that we appreciate them and enjoy having them in our class,” history teacher Lance Kyles said.

The culture team consists of 90 teachers, and the goal of the team is to make the students feel seen and cared about by the adult figures that teach them every day. Kyles leads the team by getting the birthday list to the culture team every month.

“I send out a list of students with upcoming birthdays to those teachers. Then the teachers pick students who they want to write a card for,” Kyles said. “So if you get a birthday card it means that the teacher chose you, no one is assigned a student. The teacher can put a personal note or mention a funny memory from class.”

The fact that the teachers get to choose to write a birthday card for a student can make the students feel even more cared for. 

“I felt that the card was so cool because I have never seen someone do that, and it was so sweet,” sophomore Aniyah Johnson said. “It was nice to know that the teachers actually cared about me.”

Many teachers love the thoughtful birthday card initiative, and they believe that it really helps the students feel more wanted and accepted at school.

“I like doing it, and the students seem to like it because they have a great big smile on their face when they get handed a big stack of birthday cards,” science teacher Jessica Sharp said. “Teachers try to personalize the cards to make the students feel recognized and seen on their big day.”

The amount of preparation the teachers put into making sure each student gets a card with a personal connection between teacher and student is tremendous. The teachers spend their planning time on making birthday cards.

“On the days that teachers have to come to school for professional development, we write cards to give the students, and then we sort them by birthday date [to be delivered],” Kyles said. “We have delivered to over 600 students so far.”

The Leader-in-Me kids constantly work behind the scenes. The students spend their enrichment time delivering the birthday cards to the students whose special day it is.

“It makes me feel so good that we get to give people birthday cards,” sophomore Christian Mack said. “Always getting to make people happy, makes me feel happy.”