The Georgia Principal Who Replaced Morning Announcements With Student-Written and Student-Performed Creative Short Plays

No one really paid attention to the morning announcements. There’s something slightly silly about the usual school morning announcement. A voice crackles through an old speaker that is mounted high on the wall of a classroom.

There are still notebooks being taken out of bags by half of the students. Some people are looking at their phones on the desks below them. Reminders about club meetings, changes to the lunch menu, and changes to athletic schedules are all words that blend into the background noise before they even land. This has been going on in American schools for decades, and most teachers have just accepted it as the way things are instead of seeing it as a problem that needs to be fixed.

So what one principal in Georgia chose to do is all the more interesting.

At his school, the morning announcement time has been given to students to do whatever they want. They don’t just have to read from a prepared sheet; they can also write and perform their own short plays. Every morning, instead of a disembodied voice listing cafeteria specials, students watch or listen to a brief piece of student-created theater. What’s written changes.

The performers switch up. The tone changes every day based on the person who wrote the script and what they were thinking when they did it. There are funny parts. The sincerity of some is a surprise. Some of them have really caught students off guard in ways that an announcement about the lunch menu could never do. There’s something odd about how simple the idea is but how rarely anyone thinks to try it.

From what has been said, it sounds like the principal’s reasoning isn’t based on a big idea about how to change education. It seems more like a real-world observation: kids watch out for each other. They’ve always done that. Adults reading from a clipboard don’t get the same amount of attention as kids performing in front of the school or whose voice is coming through the speaker with something they wrote. People have a stake in it. A little pride. A little risk. That’s right, those two things are what make people tune in instead of tune out.

This time, it’s different for the students who write the plays. Going through the trouble of writing a short piece that will be performed in front of everyone at school, not just for your own grade, gives the work real weight. The words you use matter. Pacing is important. Almost right away, something is tested to see if it’s actually funny, sad, or interesting. That kind of feedback loop is rare in a classroom setting. A lot of student writing ends up in the teacher’s folder. That doesn’t work.

It seems that projects like these also say something about what the people in charge of a school really value. Principals who go viral for reading student-written scripts in tour videos — like East Forsyth’s Kacey Martin, who made headlines in 2025 for doing exactly that — tend to share a certain quality. Their natural tendency to work together with students instead of being separate from the process makes them seem genuine. It might not matter if that comfort comes naturally or was carefully grown. The effect on school culture is probably similar either way.

It’s still not clear if this method can be easily expanded or if it works as well in a bigger, busier school as it would in a smaller one. Logistics are important. Someone has to coordinate the schedule, review scripts, ensure performances are ready each morning without the whole thing collapsing into last-minute scrambles. That’s real work, and it falls on already stretched staff.

But something worth sitting with is this: in a period when school leaders are constantly searching for ways to make students feel genuinely seen and heard inside the institution, one principal in Georgia found an answer that didn’t require a new budget line or a consultant. He just moved the microphone a little closer to the people who actually had something to say.