How Moses McKissick Middle School Built a Tiger-Themed House System from Scratch
When gifted-and-talented teacher Sabrina Hughes Tate proposed a house system to her principal in May, she had a PowerPoint, a plan, and a summer timeline. By August, all 200 students were inducted into four tiger-themed houses with their own colors, chants, handshakes, and a fully stocked reward store called Tiger Pride.
“We have one scholar who found out we were in the same house and he has become like my best friend. It is the sweetest thing to see that connection that I would not have with him because he's not in my class.”
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A Proposal Built on Purpose
Sabrina Hughes Tate is a gifted-and-talented teacher in her eighth year at Moses McKissick Middle School. She only teaches three days a week, but her role reaches far beyond her classroom. She coaches chess, leads social studies initiatives, and is deeply invested in keeping students engaged at a school that has watched its surrounding community transform through gentrification, charter school competition, and the aftershocks of a 2020 tornado followed by COVID.
In May, she approached her principal, Dr. Houston, with a full PowerPoint presentation making the case for a house system. She had researched the British boarding school origins, studied how Ron Clark Academy popularized houses in Atlanta, and mapped out exactly how the system could address McKissick's priorities: attendance, behavior, scholar-to-scholar relationships, and a sense of belonging. The data was clear to her. Only 48 percent of scholars reported feeling a sense of belonging, and the team knew that number needed to climb if they wanted to keep students in the building.
Dr. Houston gave the green light immediately. From that moment, Sabrina had roughly three months to stand up a house system before August.
Teachers First, Then Scholars
Sabrina knew that a house system would fail without genuine staff investment, so she recruited a small planning panel: a few teachers from every grade, the lead teachers, the guidance counselor, the librarian, the music teacher, and the office staff. She sent a Google Form to the entire staff asking what values they wanted the houses to embody and how they envisioned the system working. Nearly every teacher responded.
The teachers were inducted first, during in-service before school started. They were sorted into houses, competed in a tower-building challenge using only paper and tape, and developed their own house chants. Sabrina even secured gift card donations from a local pizzeria for the winning teachers. The staff competition set the tone: this would be fun and communal, not another mandate piled onto an already full plate.
One of the most important decisions the team made during those planning meetings was to remove all negative consequences from the house system. LiveSchool allows point deductions, but the McKissick staff voted unanimously to keep everything positive. Once a scholar earns points, those points stay. The red categories visible in LiveSchool are there only as teacher-facing markers for areas of concern, never as penalties that erase student progress.
Four Tigers, One School
McKissick's mascot is the tiger, and Sabrina made that identity the foundation of the entire house system. The four houses are named after real tiger species: Malayan, Siberian, Sumatran, and Bengal. She deliberately avoided any extinct species. Each house has its own color drawn from a palette that extends the school's maroon and gold: maroon, gold, black, and gray. Each house has a loud greeting, a silent greeting, a chant, and a dance, all created by the students themselves.
Students are sorted across grade levels so that every house includes sixth, seventh, and eighth graders with approximately 50 students each. Siblings are kept together, and the special education and English learner departments requested that certain students be paired with peer partners who could support them. Those adjustments were small in number but significant in impact.
The whole-school induction took place in the gym. Teachers sat at stations for each house. Students were called by name, assigned to their house, and immediately began recording t-shirt sizes, meeting their housemates, and competing in relay races, hula hoop contests, and jump rope challenges. To maintain school unity across the four houses, every meeting ends with a call and response: a teacher shouts “We are” and all 200 students yell back “Tigers.”
Points for Everything That Matters
The point categories at McKissick are tied directly to the data the planning team identified as priorities. Social-emotional learning components, attendance, and classroom behavior all have dedicated categories in LiveSchool. Students earn points for showing up on time, staying the full day, demonstrating acts of kindness, keeping their AVID notebooks organized, participating in sports teams, and attending activity nights.
The school uses an acronym called TIGERS that is posted in every classroom and hallway: Talk Time, Interaction, Guidance, Engagement, Ready to Go, and Successful Scholar. If a class follows the TIGERS framework, every student in that class earns three points. Teachers who are short on time can use LiveSchool's all-in-one button to award the entire class at once, while those with more time can recognize individual contributions.
Points operate on two tracks. Individual students accumulate personal points they can spend in the reward store. Those same points also count toward their house total, which is tracked on a rolling board displayed in the school and announced weekly. The first milestone the team set was 325 individual points to qualify for a house pizza party, which encouraged saving over impulse spending during the early weeks of the system.
Tiger Pride Store
The Tiger Pride Store opened in August, stocked with items purchased in July through a combination of school funds and staff contributions. The bookkeeper, principal, cafeteria workers, office staff, community partners, and individual teachers all donated inventory. Croc charms, sodas, chips, socks, pencils, slime, Rubik's cubes, Bazooka bubble gum, and even specialty items like tennis shoes rotate through the store's shelves.
The store shares physical space with the school's computer room, but its walls are covered in house colors and branding. A rolling display board travels to the gym during house meetings, showing live standings. At the store entrance a sign reads "You can't hide that MMS Tiger Pride," reinforcing the identity students carry throughout the building.
Parents are part of the system too. LiveSchool parent accounts were sent home with instructions so families can track their child's points. Pencil Partners, a community organization that spends time in the building, were inducted into houses alongside staff. Cafeteria workers have houses. Every adult who walks into Moses McKissick Middle School is expected to belong to the community, not just visit it.
Connections That Cross Every Line
The house system has created relationships that the traditional class schedule never would. Sabrina tells the story of one student in her house, the Malayans, whom she had never met before because he was not in any of her classes. He was known around the building for being rambunctious. But after discovering they shared a house, he became one of her closest connections. Every time he sees her in the hallway, he flashes the Malayan silent greeting, an M made with his hands. She flashes the sign back. That bond exists purely because the house system put them together.
The bingo activity from the second house meeting deepened those cross-grade connections further. Students had to find a housemate who speaks another language, one who wears the same shoe size, one who wears glasses, one who is left-handed. One student ran up to Sabrina and said she had found someone who speaks Spanish. The activity forced 50 students who shared nothing but a house name to learn something real about each other.
Students stay in their house for their entire time at McKissick, sixth grade through eighth. The system is designed to grow with them. When new students enroll mid-year, the school schedules dedicated induction events in January and April so that every newcomer gets the same full ceremony the original cohort received. Student leaders from each house teach the handshakes, chants, and traditions to the new members. The culture is not preserved in a handbook. It is passed from scholar to scholar.
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