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At the beginning of the school year, teachers are naturally excited. My job as a principal is to channel that excitement into collaboration with their colleagues and to create an atmosphere where every one of us is giving as much as we can to our students. Like many schools, Brookwood Elementary starts the year with a big kick-off lunch or breakfast -- but that’s just the beginning. Here are four ways we inspire teachers during the early days of school and set a positive tone for the year to come.

1) Pick a mindset for the year.

We have a mindset for every year, and everything the school does is tied to it. Next year our mindset is “Live to Give,” so before school even starts, we’re doing a huge kick-off and inviting all our families to the school. We’re going to have food trucks, and we're going to invite all the nonprofits here in Forsyth County, Georgia. Each family will be able to select different nonprofits to visit and learn how they can help.

We’ll also do a backpack drive with our staff. We give groups of teachers a list and some cash, then send them out to shop for a kid in need. We donate the backpacks to CASA, which is an organization that supports kids in the foster care program. It's amazing to see what doing something like that does for our teachers’ morale, because when you serve others, it just automatically connects to your heart.

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