Akins wins $10,000 from McDonald’s in spirit contest
McDonald’s Restaurant owners present Akins Principal Brandi Hosack with a check for $10,000 on Thursday in the campus gym. The money was awarded after Akins won first place in a social media school spirit contest that took place this fall.
January 6, 2017
Showing school spirit this fall earned Akins $10,000 on Thursday January 5, 2017, when local McDonald’s restaurant owners named the campus the winner of a social media contest.
Akins competed against other Austin area schools from September 1 to Nov. 13 by posting daily tweets with hashtags #LovinSchoolSpirit and #Akins on Twitter. The school with the most tweets won the contest.
Lisa Anderson, spokesman for the Austin area McDonald’s Restaurant owners, said this was the second year they sponsored the contest. She said the contest is an exciting way to show their support for local schools.
“They’re out there tweeting their school spirit, they’re getting their friends and teachers, their community members, faculty staff to support their school so we can all come together as a school to win the contest,” Anderson said.
Akins Principal Brandi Hosack said it is a big deal for the school to win the contest because it has only been around since 2000 and has struggled to build school culture and pride.
“For the longest time we have not exactly been a school that has exhibited a lot of school pride,” she said. “So to win a contest that requires a lot of school pride, and not only that but the most school pride in Central Texas, is awesome.”
English teacher Brian Lancaster, who manages the school Twitter account, helped organize the school’s efforts to win the contest.
“I sent out lots of staff emails and I sent out lots of tweets everyday about the school spirit contest. I just wanted to see us win,” he said.
Stony Point High School in Round Rock came in second in the contest while Jarrell High School came in third. However, Hosack said the competition wasn’t close to what Akins did.
“We blew everybody else out of the water,” she said.
Hosack said the $10,000 will be spent on three different purchases: paper for teachers to make copies for students, staff polo shirts with the updated school logo, and new signage with the logo across the campus.
Hosak said the idea to buy paper started out as a joke after the administration put new rules in place to restrict how much paper teachers were given at the beginning of the school year. Each teacher has been limited to a single case of paper for each semester.
“When I sent out the original email about this contest, I made a joke and said that I would buy my staff some paper if we won this,” she said. “At the time, paper was a hot topic. It was actually a joke. But some of my teachers said they would do that for paper. So I held up my end of the bargain.”
The polo shirts to the staff are an act of kindness for what they do for the school and students each day, she said.
“I have been at Akins for a long time and I cannot remember the last time that the staff as a whole was given anything to represent their school pride or their school spirit,” she said. “I’m looking forward to being able to provide that for the teachers. They are what makes the ship run. For them to have even a simple polo shirt with a logo shirt says something. School pride is not just in our students, it’s also part of our teaching staff. It’s just a token of my appreciation so that teachers can also show their school spirit.”
Although Hosack said she couldn’t buy shirts for all of the 2,700 student at Akins with the money, the signage is meant for them.
“I can’t obviously buy a shirt for every kid. What I can do is make the school even better visually with the new logo we have,” she said. “It’s a slow process but we have to kind of put it everywhere. You should come onto our campus and have no doubt as to what our mascot is, what our logo looks like, what our colors are, etc. So what I’m doing for the students is using some of the money to start that. To really start the initiative of putting our mark everywhere. When you drive onto campus, I want avenue banners hanging from the light bulbs with our logo on it. That exhibits school pride. I want to be able to further push the school spirit so that we can continue to grow.”
Hosack said she is excited to have Dr. Charles Akins, the namesake of the campus, visit the school after the new signage is put up.
“I can’t wait for Dr. Akins to walk onto his campus again and see the updates we’ve done with the use of this money,” she said. “I want people to be proud to call themselves an Akins Eagle.”
Lancaster said he hopes the school community will keep the spirit high going forward even with the incentive of cash prizes.
“We still want to be school spirited and we still want to show up for all of our teams and we still want to have the best school spirit in central Texas. We need to keep that going,” he said.
