How Vickery Elementary Built Five Constellations, One Voyager Family

Five Constellations, One Voyager Family

Vickery’s mascot is the Voyager, so the team named their five houses after constellations: Delfinas, Draco, Leo, Pegasus, and Phoenix. Each house carries its own colors and a character trait that students and teachers reference throughout the year. A school mascot named Astro – who belongs to no single house – serves as the universal friend across all five.

In that first year, students were placed by homeroom – the entire class sorted into the same house so that the teacher was that house and those students were that house. It created an initial bond, almost like a team feel. As students moved to different classrooms in later years, they naturally dispersed, mixing houses across every setting in the building.

Every year, incoming kindergartners and new students go through an annual sorting ceremony – not with a sorting hat, but with a space helmet, keeping things on theme. Students pull their house name out of the helmet while returning students in full house gear cheer on their newest members. A master spreadsheet tracks every placement, sorted by house with tabs by grade, so no one gets left out by mistake.

Gray offers one piece of advice for transient campuses: don’t delete a student who leaves, because they will be back – and they’ll want to rejoin their house when they do.

Rocket Rallies and House Meetings

Vickery’s school has grown too large for everyone to attend a single pep rally, so the team divides them by grade – Rocket Rallies every six weeks for students, which means the staff runs them every three weeks on alternating schedules. Students don’t sit with their homerooms. They sit by house. They dress up, make signs, wear costumes, and shout house chants projected on the screen.

The PE teacher and specialist team design minute-to-win-it games where houses compete against each other. Spirit cones are awarded to students, teachers, or parents who showed the most spirit that day. And older students serve as leaders – they come in to lead cheers for the younger grades, standing up and being loud so the little ones follow.

When one set of grades is at the Rocket Rally, the others meet in house meetings. These have taken different forms over the years – practicing chants, doing origami of house animals, or running activities planned by the house committee. The meetings are designed for relationship-building, not instruction.

When the mixing works – older kids and younger kids in the same house session – the cross-grade connections become one of the system’s strongest benefits. A fifth grader and a kindergartner who might never interact suddenly have something in common.

Seeing Everything Through the House Filter

Gray describes the mindset as seeing everything through the house filter. Field day, the Fun Run, annual t-shirts, nine-week awards – the team always asks: is there something we’re already doing that could be incorporated into our house system? Not everything has to involve houses, but the consideration is constant.

Every nine weeks, the house with the most points wins the House Cup – and the prize is hard to beat: extra recess and Chick-fil-A. An assistant principal runs a weekly wheel spin where teachers nominate students who have demonstrated house character traits. Those students get recognized during lunch and spin the wheel to earn extra points for their house.

LiveSchool makes the tracking work. The platform lets Vickery customize a rubric aligned to what the school values most – categories for respect, school rules, etiquette, and the house character traits themselves. Teachers can pull out their phone and instantaneously give a point when they see a student demonstrating a valued behavior. A live display in the cafeteria shows house standings in real time, and students watch the numbers change as they walk in.

LiveSchool’s parent letters let families track how many house points their child has earned and what they earned them for – connecting the house system to home in a way that reinforces the culture beyond the building.

The Missteps That Made It Better

Gray is candid about the things that didn’t work. Early on, the team tried using house points as a schoolwide currency with a school store. Some teachers were generous with points, others were more conservative, and the disparity made the economy feel unfair. They shifted to using house points purely as a group goal – individual students are recognized at pep rallies and in announcements, but the points themselves drive house competition, not individual spending.

One year, they organized specials rotations – PE, music, art – by house instead of by classroom. The problem: those students were locked into the same group year after year, and teachers started dreading certain rotation days. Reshuffling annually kept things fresh.

Inspired by a visit to the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, the team tried live streaming events so every classroom could watch simultaneously. But the logistics didn’t hold up at Vickery’s scale – a substitute wouldn’t stream it, a classroom’s Wi-Fi would drop, teachers were pulled in too many directions. They switched to recording events and letting people watch at their leisure.

Gray also spent a long time trying to ensure every grade level had at least one teacher from each house to serve as a leader. Eventually, he let it go. If one grade level has three teachers from one house and none from another, that’s fine – they’re still great teachers, and they can set aside their house loyalties for five minutes to lead a meeting for a different house.

Then came COVID. The house system was easy to drop when students were home. But the team kept it alive through virtual wheel spins, teacher video calls in house colors, and recorded messages featuring Astro the mascot checking in on the empty building. It was, as Gray puts it, something that was able to unite them even though they were apart.

Front-Loading with Kindness

Five years in, the house system has become inseparable from Vickery’s broader approach to culture. The school pairs it with restorative practices – circles and sparks in the first fifteen minutes of the day, a dedicated committee ensuring the work happens widely across campus. The combination of house identity and restorative relationships means students who have been at Vickery for years have internalized a different way of handling conflict.

Gray’s discipline philosophy is direct: front-load with kindness, with problem-solving, with conflict management, with team-building activities where students really know each other. When students have that buy-in – when they understand how their behavior affects others – the referrals go down. Not to zero, and not perfectly, but consistently over time.

The recruitment benefit was unexpected. Gray didn’t launch the house system to attract teachers, but in a competitive job market, candidates who do their homework show up to interviews already excited about the culture. They’ve seen the Facebook page, the videos, the energy – and for many of them, that’s what tips the decision. It’s a genuine signal of a school that celebrates its people.

The system creates connections that wouldn’t otherwise exist – students bonded to staff and peers in other homerooms through shared house identity. It creates leadership opportunities for older students who lead cheers, run activities, and model what belonging looks like for kindergartners walking in for the first time.

Gray’s advice for anyone considering a house system is simple: start with the people who are excited, give them real time to build it, and then see everything through the house filter. Not everything will connect. But the ones that do will change the way your building feels.