School bathrooms are brighten up by parents to encourage students
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Posted on March 1, 2018
At a Texas elementary school can inspiration be found everywhere.
Parents at Mary Moore Elementary School in Arlington, Texas, worked in the Presidents Day weekend for over 37 hours to transform some of the bathrooms from the school with inspirational messages.
“We’ve been talking to teachers in our school and heard that kids aren’t getting the support they need at home or are having a hard time at school,” said Tammy Duhon. She is one of the school’s parents who came up with the effort. “We as parents wanted to do something, but because we’re such a large school we couldn’t reach everyone individually.”
She continued, “This was a way we could touch every single student and make sure they knew that someone was thinking of them.”
To transform the fifth-grade bathrooms at the school first, Duhon and her team of parent volunteers used six gallons of paint.
Since then they have received a $1,500 donation from a local business and a $500 donation from a parent to allow them to decorate all the sixteen bathrooms the 900-student public school is rich.
The 3 to 12 ages served school picked happiness as this year's team, according to the to the principal, Tyson Jones.
With the book “The Happiness Advantage”, the faculty is doing a yearlong book study and the students participate too, with Challenges like “random acts of kindness week,” Jones said.
“It’s cool that the parents have added another element for the kids to be part of it too,” Jones said, adding that the parents chose the motivational messages, like “bloom where you are planted,” themselves.
“We will be meeting with parents and thinking about what it needs to look like, for instance in kindergarten bathrooms, where words like joy and happiness will be more appropriate,” he said. “I can’t wait to get started on the rest of it.”
The bathroom renovations from the fifth-grade were revealed as a surprise to students when they returned from the Presidents Day holiday. Just a few days after the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting, the surprise reveal happened to come. 14 students left and three educators dead.
“Schools everywhere are kind of grieving together right now so it’s been special to have messages of kindness and hope and love,” Jones said. “Our students have really taken ownership of it and been proud of it.”