Lend-a-Hand and EISD Graduate Profile

Our Lend-a-Hand program is a positive character trait program which recognizes and celebrates our EE Mustang students for doing the right thing!  The program centers around five character traits - Accepting, Safe, Responsible, Respectful and Integrity. Students earn Lend-a-Hand stickers for showing these characteristics in class and around campus, and all EE staff members have stickers and slips to reinforce these expected and desirable behaviors.  When a student earns a sticker for showing one of the character traits, he/she writes his/her name on a Lend-a-Hand Slip and circles the character trait shown.  These slips are turned into the office at the end of the week, and Mrs. Ryan and Dr. Shackelford draw one slip from each grade level bucket at random to recognize students for lending a hand and for modeling behaviors we want to see our students show each day at school!  The Lend-a-Hand announcement is made each Friday at 2:00 pm over the intercom, and students whose names are drawn come to the office to receive a certificate and a gift card from a community business and to have a group photo taken.  This photo is showcased each Friday in the Mustang Memo (Mrs. Ryan’s weekly newsletter).

Our Lend-a-Hand program at Eanes Elementary started after two of our 5th-grade students, Alethia S. and Duncan G., partnered to submit their song to a writing contest in 2012. They wrote the song “Lend a Hand” and recorded the song in a recording studio.  Additionally, the students recorded our Lend-a-Hand Video (also linked below) with the entire 5th-grade class in 2012. At the time, we did not have a school wide positive character trait program. In the fall of 2013, Eanes Elementary staff worked together to use the song Alethia and Duncan wrote to create our five Lend-a-Hand character traits.  This work was done in partnership with Region 13 (our area educational service center) to develop our Positive Behavior Intervention System (PBIS) - which we coined “Lend-a-Hand”!  Stay tuned for other ways in which we positively reinforce expected and desirable behaviors that our Mustangs show at Eanes Elementary!