How Herbert Carter Built Student Voice with Live Broadcasts and Personality Houses
Assistant Principal Johan Gray and his team turned a K–8 magnet school into a media-savvy, personality-driven community. With daily YouTube Live announcements, a corny joke segment that costs just LiveSchool points, and a house system sorted by character traits instead of random assignment, Herbert Carter has seen discipline workloads drop dramatically while student engagement soared.
“Every kid is one adult away from a success story.”
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The Broadcast Duos and the Corny Joke Bucket
For years, Herbert Carter ran its morning announcements over the intercom. Gray admits the reality: some people heard them, many never listened. He compares the old experience to Charlie Brown’s teacher – the intercom comes on and everyone tunes out.
The school converted to daily YouTube Live broadcasts, and the transformation was immediate. Students who deliver the announcements – a rotating team of two each morning – named themselves the Broadcast Duos without any adult direction. They started developing their own unique sign-offs modeled after real news anchors, and they carry themselves like school leaders when the camera is on.
The LiveSchool integration came through the corny joke segment. Students spend LiveSchool points to submit a joke to what Gray calls the corny joke bucket, then get to tell it live on air. The first day the segment was announced, 12 students were lined up at the office door before Gray made it back from the media room. The segment runs every Friday, and the school is working to expand it to multiple days per week. The YouTube channel has grown to around 300 subscribers – a mix of students, parents, and community members – and parents have begun tuning in regularly to see what their children’s school day looks like.
Parents Funding Teacher Call-Ins
The broadcast’s reach beyond the building produced an unexpected result. On Fridays, the broadcast team runs a live trivia call-in for teachers – styled like an old-school radio show where the third caller with the right answer wins a candy bar. A few parents who had been watching on YouTube showed up at the school with $150 in cash, asking the team to keep running the teacher call-ins and offering $50 per week for three weeks as the prize.
The community investment changed the dynamic overnight. Teachers who had occasionally forgotten to tune in at 8:10 were suddenly locked in with their phones ready. The broadcasts became a shared experience that connected classrooms, administration, families, and the broader community around a single daily touchpoint. Gray and his team also use the channel to post highlight videos of every school event – pep rallies, career days, and this week’s ninja gym obstacle course – produced by a student media team of fifth and sixth graders using GoPro cameras and editing software.
The long-term vision is to loop these videos on TVs throughout the building so that visitors and students walking the halls see a constant stream of what’s happening at Herbert Carter. The media program costs almost nothing beyond the equipment the school already owns, but it has created a sense of pride and visibility that traditional communication channels never achieved.
Houses Sorted by Who You Are
Herbert Carter’s house system works differently from most schools. Instead of random assignment or grade-level sorting, students are placed into one of four houses based on their personality traits – determined through a combination of student surveys and teacher observations.
The Fitch Feathers are the outgoing, inclusive students who want everybody involved and hate seeing anyone left out. They’re orange – bright and loud, which fits. The Grizzle Dash are the natural leaders, unafraid to take chances and make decisions regardless of what others think. They’re blue and named with a nod to the nearby Memphis Grizzlies. The Ember Hearts are the deeply compassionate students who feel everything intensely – passionate about fairness and justice, which sometimes gets them into trouble precisely because they care so much. They’re red. And the Oak Rivets are the organized, honor-driven students where right and wrong matters above everything else – the type-A personalities who tend to be the quietest group at pep rallies. They’re green.
The system teaches self-awareness at an age when most students have never encountered a personality framework. Students know their house identity deeply and can identify other people’s traits within minutes. When visitors come for pep rallies, the first question from students is always the same: what house are you in? Every new person – including a visiting Santa Claus – takes the house survey and gets their house revealed to the entire school.
Cross-Grade Connections and Acceptance
At pep rallies, students don’t sit with their homerooms. They sit with their houses, which means kindergartners and sixth graders who share a house identity are side by side. The older students naturally take on mentoring roles, and the younger ones look up to their housemates in a way that grade-level separation would never allow.
The personality-based sorting creates something beyond team spirit – it builds acceptance. Students in the Fitch Feathers know they’re the louder, more energetic group, and the house system tells them that’s okay. Students in Ember Hearts who get in trouble because they care too deeply about fairness can see that their passion is a strength, not just a liability. Teachers who know a student’s house also know something about how that student processes the world, which shapes how they build relationships and address behavior.
Gray has watched the system create tangible improvements in how students handle conflict. A group of students who had been struggling with interpersonal drama chose to play basketball with him during a rewards week. The time together – 45 minutes of unstructured play in the gym – built enough trust that those same students now come to Gray proactively when issues arise instead of letting problems fester. Before the relationship-building opportunity that LiveSchool’s rewards created, those students weren’t coming to anyone.
Rewards That Build Relationships
Herbert Carter runs rewards on two tracks: weekly raffles and quarterly reward weeks. Every Thursday, the school announces one winner per grade from the top 30% of point earners, selected through LiveSchool’s randomizer. Winners choose from a prize wagon stocked with basketballs, volleyballs, school supplies, and other items students love. The consistency matters – students know it’s coming every week, and Gray hears the same question at breakfast every Thursday morning: are we calling names today?
The quarterly reward weeks offer experience-based options that rotate each time. Students can spend points to take a friend to lunch, bring a friend to PE, or spend time with a principal doing whatever that principal loves. Gray’s sessions are sports – he had 20 to 25 students playing volleyball and basketball for 45 minutes. Another principal ran a music and mingle session with snacks. A third did crafts. The Uber by a Teacher reward, borrowed from LiveSchool’s resource library, became a campus favorite – teachers make custom name placards for the back of their chairs and wheel students to their next class.
The teachers who were initially skeptical about the system became its biggest advocates after the first reward week. Kindergarten and sixth-grade teachers alike reported that the small activities they did with students during rewards – eating lunch together in the classroom, sharing a movie with popcorn – were among the best relationship-building moments of the year. Those relationships pay dividends in classroom management for months afterward.
From Reactive to Proactive
Gray is direct about the impact on his daily work: the discipline workload for himself and his fellow assistant principal is dramatically lower than it was a year ago. He attributes the shift to LiveSchool’s effect on the middle 80% of students – the ones who could go either way depending on the environment and incentives around them. With consistent positive reinforcement and rewards that students genuinely care about, more of those students are leaning toward good decisions on a daily basis.
The shift from reactive to proactive administration has freed up time for Gray and his team to spend in classrooms, work on curriculum, and invest in the initiatives that add long-term value to the school. Before LiveSchool, most of that time was consumed by discipline management.
Gray frames his philosophy with a message he’s carried on his email signature for 12 years: every kid is one adult away from a success story. It just takes one adult to make that difference – a teacher, an administrator, a coach, or even a parent in a friend group. The combination of LiveSchool’s points system, the relationship-building rewards, and the personality-based houses has given Herbert Carter’s adults more tools and more time to be that one adult for every student who needs it.
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