What Is Team Kid #savmp

The question has come up more recently in the past couple of months, what is #teamkid? It started with a Tweet from a parent at John Swett and we've had quite a few visitors over the past few weeks and #teamkid has been discussed quite extensively.

(Great blog post from @ucdjoe about #teamkid from his recent visit, and a post from @jkloczko about her recent visit as well! Great outsider looking in aspect of #teamkid )

#teamkid Stemmed from a brainchild the summer before I took over John Swett as Principal. Attending the ACSA UCLA Principal Academy we talked a lot about building culture, do this before anything at your school, or you won't be able to do anything at all.

While at UCLA I started thinking about my childhood watching the SF Giants  and Roger Craig who was the longtime manager during the Will Clark and Jeffrey Leonard days. Roger had a saying during his time with the Giants that really motivated the players/fans and I can remember having a t-shirt that had the saying as well!

"Humm-baby" was ALL over Candlestick and Roger encouraged this so people rallied around the team. Posters, banners, license plate frames, t-shirts and it could be heard throughout games from the crowd and Roger himself. Humm-baby was very influential for me during my week at UCLA thinking about a slogan for John Swett, #teamkid was about to born.

The summer I took over John Swett the Olympics were in full swing and Nike had a great add campaign called, 'Find Your Greatness.' I really felt this was a great slogan for kids, encourage/push them to Find Their Greatness in the classroom, on the field, at home and in their life!


Getting together with staff that first summer we did lots of team building, watched some educational videos and talked about 'our' slogan for the year. I had previously emailed all staff the video above and told them to think about a slogan that would help push our thinking for the year. We watched the video again and 'Finding Greatness' was born.

Throughout that day, I kept throwing out 'Team Kid' in different ways.

- "I'm part of Team Kid!"
- "This is the John Swett teaching contingent of Team Kid!"
- "My dad was a teacher for 35+ years and he would talk about kids and being positive role models, much like Team Kid!

So, we decided as a staff to throw Team Kid on, after Finding Greatness, this would be our motto for the year and moving forward.

Team Kid is now our school hashtag.....

Our rocking Kindergarten team has even made custom shirts with the saying!

For the 13-14 school year our motto is 'Make It Happen on Team Kid!' (The new banner just arrived and will be going in the cafeteria very soon!)

We hope this gives you a snapshot of John Swett Elementary and Team Kid. Yes, Team Kid is everywhere on campus, on our website, on Twitter, our Superintendent even uses it, it's contagious!

#teamkid